Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century

You must lead through influence, not authority, which requires developing an entirely different set of skills and approaches.

a product manager must be able to effectively communicate between stakeholders and users, organize the product team for successful collaboration, research new ideas and perspectives, and execute whatever day-to-day tasks are required for their specific role and team.

The best product managers, regardless of their hard skills, are able to take a genuine interest in the technical work of their colleagues and draw compelling connections between technical work, user needs, and business goals.

organizing “demo days” and other opportunities for product teams to present their work to the organization at large is an incredibly valuable way to spread curiosity far and wide. I’ve been truly amazed to see how a team’s work transforms when they are tasked with presenting to their colleagues once a week

In Agile parlance, a finite amount of time devoted to learning, researching, and/or experimenting (as opposed to building or coding) is often called a “spike.”

Instead, you must do whatever you can to make sure that your organization’s goals are as clear and actionable as possible.

The more you can take the time to learn about the specific people on your team and appreciate their individual communication styles, the better you can facilitate communication for your team and your organization.

When these product managers evaluate a competitor’s product, they ask, “What might this product mean to our users,” not “How can we achieve feature parity?” By taking an open and holistic view, these product managers are able to identify previously unexplored solutions to fast-changing user needs.

“I’m curious to learn more about the work that you do” is the most powerful sentence at your disposal as a product manager,