The 5 Cs of Product Management
Timeless skills to excel in any product management role
Product management roles vary dramatically with the industry you are in, technology era and the career stage. A recent speaking engagement inspired me to dig into the fundamental and timeless skills essential for product management success. This post is an excerpt from the session where I share my take on these critical skills that anyone can start building or elevating regardless of where they are in their career journey.
To synthesize the essential skills, let’s get to the essence of product management. The core job of a PM is to create value for the target customers at scale while driving business impact. So, driving business impact through value creation is the ultimate outcome for every product function. What makes product management unique is, you can’t directly generate these outcomes. You need to meticulously identify the leverages that drive these results. These concept applies in real life as well. If you want to improve health, then a regular exercise is one of the inputs. If you want to generate wealth, then saving and investing diligently are your inputs.
So, the entire success of your product, and in turn your career in general, banks on your ability to determine and invest in these inputs. And that’s what brings us to the key habits that we need to develop that will have a lasting impact for the customers, business, and our careers.
The five skills to rule them all
1. Curiosity
2. Customer-centricity
3. Collaboration
4. Critical thinking
5. Courage
Let’s unpack each of these in the following sections.
1. Curiosity
All great products started with a “what if…” question. But curiosity goes beyond that. Curiosity, in the product management context, is devoting our lives to continuously learn, connect dots and elevate our world perspective. Curiosity is a habit-led meta skill that should be a second nature to PMs. The best way to infuse curiosity is to become master learners. Learning happens in different modalities depending on your style and situation. Most of us learn through reading, listening, observing, and applying. Find your niche but don’t limit to one. Reading and listening trigger learning and observing and doing cement it.
A curious PM entering a new job is more likely to succeed than a non-curious one. The former will not only ask the right questions, but will play with the incumbent and adjacent products, connect with different functions, and synthesize and share the observations so she can validate and elevate the share context.
2. Customer-centricity
Yes, life is too short to build products no one uses. Yet, it’s incredibly hard to build products that truly add value to the customers. You need to systematically fall in love with the problem space. A framework I use extensively is a product canvas. The canvas starts with 4 questions:
1. who’s the customer
2. what are their problems
3. how do they solve today
4. what are the gaps.
This framing instantly puts you and your team in the problem space. There are several other frameworks that help ground you with customer empathy. But frameworks are only help you get started, building a habit is the real goal.
Customer centricity doesn’t stop in the specification phase. As you externalize your hypothesis through mockups, prototypes, or real products you need to continuously validate if the product solves the intended problems.
3. Collaboration
When your entire role is premised on influencing without authority, building a collaborative muscle is a prerequisite for PMs. Collaborating effectively with engineers and designers is the absolute least but most PMs need to collaborate with partner teams to bring their product to life.
A successful collaboration hinges on finding a common ground that cultivates a win-win environment for everyone involved. PMs need to continuously leverage their curiosity and customer-centricity to explore synergies across and outside of the organization. OKRs is an effective framework to map common objectives and build a shared alignment. But you also need to build empathy, be inclusive of their inputs and be willing to negotiate until you find a happy medium.
4. Critical thinking
Critical thinking entails making the right decision based on facts, judgement, and intuition. This skill only comes through practice. And the input here is to expose yourself to situations that force you to make critical product decisions. Curiously observe leaders that you admire make decisions. Seek opportunities that spotlight your decision-making skills. Cultivate a network of individuals who are familiar with your work and ask guidance before and after critical decisions. Most importantly, retrospect past decisions so you can cash in on that learning.
5. Courage
If you must choose just skill, choose this. Successful product managers have battle scars. They ship real products. Build courage to ship something as early as you can in your career. If your current role doesn’t offer that avenue, then switch to one that enables you to do it. If a job switch doesn’t suit your situation, build a low/no code product and launch it to your early adopters.
Courage is also about thinking big and making bold decisions. Courage is saying no to seemingly compelling opportunities so you can focus on your committed north star. Last, courage is being resilient during roadblocks and failures.
Honing these skills ensures success in your current position, paving the way for more significant opportunities. These advancements will necessitate elevated proficiency, propelling further skill enhancement. Consequently, this initiates a cycle of career progression and satisfaction. Let the flywheel accelerate your career growth.