Careers in Product Management - Hard Skills of a Product Manager

Hard Skills of a Product Manager

 

As a product manager, the ultimate responsibility for the product’s launch and success rests on your shoulders. You need to collaborate with various departments, such as design and engineering, to get the job done. For this, you need to inculcate a number of hard skills that help you understand your product better and manage it in an efficient manner.

A product manager has to be a cross-functional leader who has to involve himself/herself in all aspects of the product — from operations and analytics, engineering and design, to legal and other departments of the company. Your role involves making data-driven decisions, user-behaviour driven decisions, as well as marketing-driven decisions.

The most important hard skills you need as a PM are:

1. User experience design: A knowledge of user experience design ensures that you visualise a unique and usable product that fulfils the expectations of the user.
2. Technology: An understanding of the technical aspects of your product will enable you to leverage technology to solve any problem that may arise.
3. Data understanding: If your company doesn’t rely on data, you need to introduce a data-driven culture as it can help you understand many aspects of your product’s performance, as well as validate any instincts you may have in this regard.
4. Business sense: You need to decide where to invest your team’s time and resources and accordingly build a product roadmap that leads to success and profitability.