Careers in Product Management - Soft Skills of a Product Manager

Soft Skills of a Product Manager

Along with the hard skills, you also need to foster in yourself a number of soft skills. This helps you manage all the teams well and, in the end, ensure that utmost attention and effort is paid towards building and improving the product.

The following soft skills help you perform your role as a PM to the best of your ability:

1. Leading without authority: In order to collaborate with various departments, you need to build credibility to earn the respect and confidence of the internal stakeholders, without being domineering.
2. Communicating effectively: Clarity of thought enables you to communicate with different stakeholders like internal departments, senior management, as well as the users of your product.
3. Negotiating: Balancing the needs of the product with the schedules and priorities of different teams requires carefully honed negotiation skills. You also need to keep in mind that the success of the product is shared with all the team members, while you alone need to accept its failure.
4. Pushing back requirements: Developing a product means prioritising certain ideas and tasks above others — this means saying no to a lot of good ideas that may not fit into your vision. You need to establish a framework to ensure that time and resources are spent on building a product that users actually want.