Everyday Reflections

Product Managers are increasingly gaining ground in an era where shipping software to shipping the right software for customers is becoming important. With new approach of customer driven development , it will become increasingly imperative that the product managers have a strategic bend to make the cut.

The role is a complex jack-of-all-trades persona that requires mastery of a diverse range of skills from programming, engineering, and user experience design to legal, PR, and marketing. Product managers serve as the communication hub between the engineers and designers and everyone else in the organization. It’s a strategic, decision-making role that touches on just about everything at a technology company.

Some of the following traits can help products managers to be the brain behind the approach in product , platform or the ultimate solution:

• Be a future visionary and product evangelist

Anticipating the what is coming by talking and analyzing stories around you is an important aspect of being a strategic thinker as a product manager. One needs to look inward as well outward , separate the philosophy from tools to create a meta layer of information that will allow to frame the vision. Socializing and presenting what is being build and encouraging people to play with the tooling allows you to create a community driven approach for bettering the product vision.

• Master technical know-how

Developing a T-shape profile is very important aspect of product management , know enough to visualize , postulate and present various options.Understanding of technical concepts is very important to create a relationship with the technology team and then be able to communicate what the technology team might say , or refer to as challenges.

• Master the art and science of syncing across multiple platforms

Product managers need the experience and know-how to manage one product and features across all platforms. There’s whole art and science of keeping your product aligned and synced across diverse platforms. One needs to organize the development of the product to match the way users consume it split up across different experiences.

• A knack for communication

Communication is very important to keep stakeholders updated across the across multiple views. In modern day distributed set-up it becomes imperative to use multitude of tool-kits (slack , zoom ) to support effective communication and publish short-term road-maps with quick iterative execution. They should ideally be excellent presenters, skillful diplomats, and good listeners

• Know their way around metrics

It goes without saying that all product managers must know their way around metrics. They should understand what’s behind a meaningful metric. Product Managers should be well versed in analytics and methods of extracting the proper data.