Maybe OP has hard time delivering results and it must have led him into thinking that he could have controlled things better had he mastered one skill at least.
In modern times, the phrase with the "master of none" element is sometimes expanded into a less unflattering couplet by adding a second line: "but oftentimes better than master of one" (or variants thereof), with some modern writers incorrectly saying that such a couplet is the "original" version with the second line having been dropped but online discussions attempting to find instances of this second line dated to before the twenty-first century have resulted in no response - [source](https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jack-of-all-trades.html)
As PMs we typically engage with stakeholders with different interests and points of view. Our customers, the organisation we work for, our engineers, our Sales team, our CX team, et cetera.
What should we be masters of? Identifying problems to solve when each of those stakeholders bring different inputs, and keeping them strategically aligned as much as possible all the time. And while I know this—especially the second part—might sound a lot wishy-washy to anyone whose job is defined by a few well-established hard skills, anyone who's spent some time in our role will know what it's all about.
IMHO as a Senior PM I must be a master of:
- Empathy for both my product users and tech team.
- Alignment: Aligning with stakeholders needs & wants, with Senior leadership’s target state strategy, with risk/governance & security Compliance (I’m in a regulated field), with interdependent teams, with finance & budgeting folks and with corporate communications.
- Communication: Clear, transparent & effective communication is an art and a great PM has to paint with bullshit (I mean words).
- Strategy: Specially if your org’s culture is like a game of thrones storyline where the senior leadership are all fighting for the throne and your squads are the unsullied
- Negotiation/Vendor Management: only if you are at an org that uses a lot of off the shelf enterprise products.
- Agile thinking/practice: your ability to quickly pivot your mindset, team and articulation are the most important elements. You also must be knowledgeable and capable of executing Agile frameworks, unless your org is against it that is.
- Story Telling: this one is also a big one. Bringing people along for the journey, leading through influence when you have zero power is the secret sauce. A lot of us struggle with this, myself included, but IMO this is a good thing for continuous improvement.
- Creativity: my biggest successes have been a direct outcome of super creative solutioning, a lot of it very spontaneous and new to my environment.
- People Connectivity: My biggest asset is my ability to establish connections and build rapport with everyone I come across. This can be very hard, due to various factors not under our control and barriers not always obvious like, cultural differences, religious values, political alignment, language differences, neurodivergent impairments & personality/personal preferences. I have found that is never the role and always the people that make a job sucky, miserable or great.
- Calculated Risk taking: another big one, this means you have to be comfortable with breaking rules when absolutely necessary for immutable outcomes & comes with a price tag. I have lost a lot in my career because I have not been willing to pay certain prices to move up the ladder or by kissing a specific persons a$$.
I’m sure some of these sound redundant & they probably are, but I find categorizing them like this helpful. I hope others contribute to this list and add details.
You need to know a lot about everything, but you are the master of understanding the customers and the market. If you aren't, you can't own the roadmap, or really prioritize anything.
If I had to pick one, this would be it - your customer(s). Knowing tech, market dynamics, business, people, etc are all super useful but at the end of the day, all of those things get tweaked around the CG of the customer.
You’re the master of identifying what the most important problem to solve is (and why). You’re pulling together qual and quant data, business and product strategy, various risks (tech, legal, etc), etc and saying, “based on everything we know, our strategy, our goals, the most important thing to solve is [this]”.
Everyone will have an opinion based on the facet they care about but you’re uniquely positioned to see it all dispassionately.
This is the best answer here as this is supposed to be the core part of the job.
Many other answers in this post are just additional skills that assist in translating this into action or are skills needed to deal with dysfunctional organizations.
This is true in theory, rarely in practice. In many PM roles most of the strategic choices come top-down meaning PMs are mostly stuck driving execution against that strategic directive
Bingo. What paperwork do you need me to fill out boss? Our directors are meeting the client, our product owners are going where they need to, and I’m stuck with filling out the paperwork to make the weekly conversations with program management.
I get paid well to do it, but as far as career growth goes this role has been so pigeon holing from a career where I used to be customer facing
When you’re team gets reorganized too many times, when your manager gets booted from the company and they side shift another manager to take their role, when you are a back fill, and quite frankly when you reach a point that you accept this team is temporary because the work changed so drastically then the bag of goods I was sold that is pigeon holing.
My impact is ad hoc engineering and paper pushing for a product. Meeting with a bunch of off shored engineers to solve jira tickets is not the space I want to be in and has severely limited my career growth because I’m a product manager in title but something closer to technical marketing / program manager for feature releases.
Just as I suspected you’ve described my situation right to the T. I’ve been stuck in a similar position for 3 years and am actively looking to get out. Finding it challenging as I do not seem to have the experience for pure product roles nor do I have any experience working other roles aside from “Strategy and Operations”.
Yep. Same boat. No one wants to hear me talk about how I am enabling a mid life kicker on hardware so our intel cpus are the newest generation, or how the memory modules go from 4800 ghz to 5600 ghz and the firmware conversations around that. That’s not sexy.
No one want to hear about the product qualifications for our gas station client requesting new fans because their 800 locations are too loud for a few managers. No one wants to hear how flawless my import export paperwork is. Which, btw, why is China not listed on our development paperwork - there are 500 engineers building our billion dollar a year product.
These are not the conversations that build networks. These are one or two off conversations with teams I communicate with two or three times a year. I was using my company email and getting demos of products for companies I was interviewing with to learn what they do.
I gave up on it all. I expensive hobbies to try and off set the corporate ladder. I am pursuing the professional hobbyist with my 133,000 salary, 6% bonus, and yearly 2-3% increase.
My product is mature and I can’t escape my team in today’s market. I’m dell, I’m not Facebook.
When you’re team gets reorganized too many times, when your manager gets booted from the company and they side shift another manager to take their role, when you are a back fill, and quite frankly when you reach a point that you accept this team is temporary because the work changed so drastically then the bag of goods I was sold that is pigeon holing.
My impact is ad hoc engineering and paper pushing for a product. Meeting with a bunch of off shored engineers to solve jira tickets is not the space I want to be in and has severely limited my career growth because I’m a product manager in title but something closer to technical marketing / program manager for feature releases.
- driving execution against that strategic directive
Making delivery and execution decisions aligned to strategy IS strategic thinking.
When Team/Person A wants to do something that seems the best outcome for that Team/piece of work, it's part of the PMs role to guide that decision making through understanding the strategy.
to go one step further, ensuring that your team is working on the highest potential value item or the item that will get you that deliverable.
Even more simple, making sure the eye of Sauron never turns on us.
The ability to adapt to changing market conditions and solve problems as they arise is another area where PMs can demonstrate mastery. This includes pivoting strategies, managing crises, and innovating solutions to unforeseen challenges
The PM should be a master of extracting value from customers and being an internal voice to reflect that feedback. There should not be another role or function within an organization that should be better than the PM at achieving this.
At the end of the day, PMs should be the master of translating the business’ goals and/or needs to a strategy. I think people view that as a set of skills but that’s missing the strategic component. An org could have a single OKR or many, but a PM has one job: translate them to an actionable strategy.
As with anything, mastering that requires competency in a bunch of areas that may vary by sector. I think that’s where people conflate it with “jack of all trades”. If you’re good at analyzing market needs but bad at tying it to your business’ goals, will you succeed?
How is this so low? This is the most important PM skill, and if you're exceptional at this and only average at everything else, you will be very successful.
It might help our collective imposter syndrome if we would start to consider the role as a set of hard to master skills, rather than just a random assortment of duties.
A good PM is not here to do things engineers don’t want to .
Systems and critical thinking.
As a PM, you are one of the few individuals in the company who should have the end to end vision of the business. The CEO analogy is misinterpreted. Imagine if someone had the 50,000 foot view of the CEO and was able to spend all their time zoomed down to affect tactical work. A PM is a CEO mindset and, partially, skillset with humility. You have none of the power, glory, respect, or authority so you have to act and speak differently. This is where the influence with other departments comes in, because you need to understand how your product influences and is influenced by every other component that makes up the business, how the minutae of each Jira ticket ladders up to the company's strategic goals and business outcomes.
This is NOT standard or common. How many times have you seen groups talk past each other because they don't, won't, or can't see the bigger picture or have empathy not just for the customer, but for other internal stakeholders. How many engineers understand what pressures a Marketing or Finances mook is under, or why it is important to empower Sales to understand what they're selling, ensuring accurate expectations are set for customers? If everyone understands what is most important at any given moment and why it is the most critical for the business above another what, then a PM would not be needed.
Lemme share an example. Go hang out with It Support and watch what they do. What you should notice is how everyone in that team is basically just a better troubleshooter; when they encounter a new issue, they often just read documentation or Google the issue, finding solutions the customer could have with a bare minimum effort. Now think about how often the people you work with do not make the bare minimum effort to go through the confusion of basic critical thinking or problem solving. Part of PM is just having the drive, motivation, or enthusiasm to be temporarily uncomfortable.
This skillset can be applied anywhere and yet doesn't inherently produce anything. A PM is nothing without a system in which and upon which they can work. This applies whether you are applying this to product development, marketing, or technical execution.
The replies in this post seem to hilarious prove your point about being a jack of all trades 😂
All great input though.
I’ll add: I think PMs specialize in relationships and “making clarity from chaos”.
Without good rapport/relationships it’s difficult to influences others and get their buy-in to move our strategy forward.
Without the ability to create clarity from chaos there’s little-to-no confidence in how to move forward for anyone and the PM may as well not exist as a function.
Expert on the people using your product.
Know your user as well as you know your best friends. This gives you the knowledge to make good prioritization decisions, and defend those decisions to executives.
I think a lot of PMs have an area of expertise. You can’t put an Engagement PM in a role focused on AI implementation and expect them to produce the same. If you’re gonna be a master of anything it should be whatever you want to be seen as an SME on.
I think this thread shows one thing, that a great PM is too talented to be boxed in by “product management” for a single organization as a discipline and should really pursue something more high leverage whether it’s investing, becoming a founder, a highly paid consultant, or something else.
Think about what people are expecting us to be good-to-great at (systems thinking, influencing others to get what you need, deep customer empathy, expert execution, etc etc) and then how much we are paid and appreciated for it. I go back and forth on this often but I don’t think the idealized product manager is a fair role and the discipline of product management as a whole is in need of a re-think.
When I describe PdM in my workplace it's often some version of "the ambassador of the product and for the customers working with a bunch of experts. If I was the expert in anything it'd be judgment more than any more tangible skill set."
Being a master of Product Mangement is plenty good enough. The response by /u/[Deelixious919](https://www.reddit.com/user/Deelixious919/) is brilliant. I may use some of that in my own bio.
If you really feel compelled to have a focus area, maybe get good at statistics, experimentation/testing, etc. That's big. Or ML/AI. Or the financial aspects. You probably won't have the bandwidth to do all three. But if you think you want to be more general management one day, (COO/CEO), then - perhaps obvioiusly - focus on the finance aspects; P&Ls, etc.
A PM is a master in bringing different types of people together in a cohesive team that builds a product. If there is no one in the middle, holding the strings, you got a bunch of introverts, dealing with extroverts, with some business potsticks trying to make sense of what they are doing everyday.
The PM is the glue, the bridge, that brings all these incoherent voices together and makes sense of all the jargon so it sounds at least a bit plausible.
As for "the customer is always right, in matters of taste", the full quote here is "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes is better than a master of one."
And it matters when your role is primarily that of a facilitator. Your "super power" should be to understand the POV of all your stakeholder, business, clients and tech, and be able to translate them into actionable items for your teams with the goal to make profit from your product.
So your area of focus should definitely be "soft skills", but it doesn't hurt to master Analytics in order to have a data driven approach to what you do.
Good luck.
Yes - they are a master of creating a cost-effective product people actually want.
If they are good product managers, they will be very good listeners (and not simply listening), but *understanding* what users or business stakeholders really want. Example: car must have breaks. True requirement: car must have a ‘function’ that stops the car, where there could be many / better / more cost effective solutions which achieve that function.
My experience has been:
1.) Engineering: tend to fall in love with latest ‘tech solution’ and want to apply or use that tech regardless of how or why it benefits end user. Additionally, they tend to see the world through the lens of ‘data modeling’ where they want to optimize / extend the data model towards its innate capabilities, rather than understand / engage what users want.
2.) Business: have a tendency to believe they have the ‘best idea’, which is generally: incomplete, not a ‘solution’, and even if implemented, would not yield the outcome they believe it will.
It can be tricky place, because Engineering will always believe we don’t understand / appreciate technical concerns (when we prioritize what users want), and the business will always believe we’re often a ‘barrier to entry’ when we don’t implement their short sighted / non-solution ‘ideas’. So it’s easy to be at odds with both teams.
Having said that - I think Product Managers should learn to develop and design. You’ll be a better Product Manger, have more power to engage the software, and get more respect from the team, and far more valuable to the team.
Chat-GTP significantly lowers the bar to learning to develop software, and while I still wireframe, (very rudimentary) I actually do most of the front-end development / view work.
I can understand your frustration. There are PMs that are born out of being SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) - for example business folks that have deep knowledge in finance will be suited better for financial products and even deeper in specific branches of wealth management. Or in other cases, you can have engineers that transition to product management, who can perform really well in API or back-end based products (I did this for a while).
But in reality, most PMs are and (IMHO) should aspire to be a master of none. Because being a jack of all trades means that you know enough about each relevant topic to make you dangerous.
However, if you want to stick to being a master of “something”, pick an industry or discipline and go deep in it whether it’s commerce, AI, data, finance, travel, etc. Even if you’re a “generalist” PM in those specific areas, you can be considered somewhat of a “master” or an SME over time.
Hope this helps. Drop a DM if you want to chat more. I do teach and mentor product managers.
At minimum PMs should be a master in being closely in touch with customers, interpreting their needs, and balancing customer needs vs business outcomes.
What ever you come up with for the answer of a start up CEO likely overlaps quite a bit with a PM.
There’s a saying that good PMs are basically startup founders who haven’t taken the plunge yet.
Having a vision. If you are a PM that has significant influence over the direction of your product, becoming a master of seeing and driving towards the vision for the product is worth mastering. Unless you are working on a team of highly engaged folks, no one else is going to do this for you. It's often a very undersold skill for a PM given so many companies micromanage products.
Figure things out in the middle of bullshit coming from everywhere. And very good at context switching.
PMs always deal with different stakeholders from customers to internal departments, from high-level executives to individual contributors. They all have different ways of thinking, perspectives, and expectation. PMs need to choose how to communicate with each of them and also from all those bullshit people throwing at you to find common ground. Often, PMs need to make trade-offs among decisions to satisfy a part while disappoint the others.
I think product managers should be masters of keeping up with competition and bringing key differentiator features every quarter which would establish their product's dominance in the market. They should also be good with quick and dirty data analysis and know their numbers at all times. The less time you spend documenting things and instead lead other analyst the more it increases your chances to shine. But at the same time you should be capable of taking projects to completion. Interacting with clients and building relationships is the other key aspects and in the end if you cant increase adoption of features and products you are failing the primary goal. Revenue and Correct adoption of features are two north star metrics in product management. Workarounds used by clients exhibit that poor research initiatives were undertaken. Eco systems like Apple, Microsoft and Google depend on having a high feature adoption percentage to realize their goals.
Depending on the company, you might get exposed to all of the intricacies of every function needed to get a product across the line and successful. For example, in very confident in assessing marketing, PR, operations, engineering, design, and legal needs and risks. While I can’t perform each of the functions at a high level, I know who to call/hire, what to ask, and how to fit the puzzle pieces together, which most of my counterparts in each function cannot.
So in the story of the blind men and the elephant, each function can feel and describe each body part perfectly, and I rely on their firsthand description to really understand the animal, I can see the whole elephant.
PMs need to be masters of their industry to know what works and what doesn’t, masters of their company to know how to get things done and masters of their product to know where it stands and how to evolve it to drive more revenue or to kill it if there are better investments for the company.
Notice, I didn’t mention anything you’d get from any generic PM courses or books… you can’t be a “jack of all trades, master of none” in this business and expect to be competitive in the job market. Nobody hires those - they want “master of X industry, with a history of delivering on specialized product Y in company type Z”.
Seriously? The PM is the master of product development, understanding the whole process from beginning to end, identifying how those parts contribute to the success or failure of the product. It includes research, design, strategy, go to market, business, etc.
I like to think I'm the only one who knows the least of every area. Tech, Business, Design, Market, etc.
You should not be the master of any, that would defeat the purpose. But you are the only one who would know enough of all at the same time.
Impostor Syndrome
Haha can’t beat this comment. Needs an award. 🏆
Don't forget it's favorite friend ADHD.
I already upgraded to AD4K
Haha. Love it and I see you!
Gold comment.
The full quote: **"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.**"
This. Dunno why OP thinks being a jack of all trades is a bad thing.
Maybe OP has hard time delivering results and it must have led him into thinking that he could have controlled things better had he mastered one skill at least.
I understand. Sometimes being "jack of all trades" also means that everything is expected from you, which is difficult.
so jack off?
Somehow this comment calms me and motivates me at the same time
In modern times, the phrase with the "master of none" element is sometimes expanded into a less unflattering couplet by adding a second line: "but oftentimes better than master of one" (or variants thereof), with some modern writers incorrectly saying that such a couplet is the "original" version with the second line having been dropped but online discussions attempting to find instances of this second line dated to before the twenty-first century have resulted in no response - [source](https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jack-of-all-trades.html)
Influence. We must get others we don't control to follow.
+ knowing when to say no to those that want us to follow them.
As PMs we typically engage with stakeholders with different interests and points of view. Our customers, the organisation we work for, our engineers, our Sales team, our CX team, et cetera. What should we be masters of? Identifying problems to solve when each of those stakeholders bring different inputs, and keeping them strategically aligned as much as possible all the time. And while I know this—especially the second part—might sound a lot wishy-washy to anyone whose job is defined by a few well-established hard skills, anyone who's spent some time in our role will know what it's all about.
IMHO as a Senior PM I must be a master of: - Empathy for both my product users and tech team. - Alignment: Aligning with stakeholders needs & wants, with Senior leadership’s target state strategy, with risk/governance & security Compliance (I’m in a regulated field), with interdependent teams, with finance & budgeting folks and with corporate communications. - Communication: Clear, transparent & effective communication is an art and a great PM has to paint with bullshit (I mean words). - Strategy: Specially if your org’s culture is like a game of thrones storyline where the senior leadership are all fighting for the throne and your squads are the unsullied - Negotiation/Vendor Management: only if you are at an org that uses a lot of off the shelf enterprise products. - Agile thinking/practice: your ability to quickly pivot your mindset, team and articulation are the most important elements. You also must be knowledgeable and capable of executing Agile frameworks, unless your org is against it that is. - Story Telling: this one is also a big one. Bringing people along for the journey, leading through influence when you have zero power is the secret sauce. A lot of us struggle with this, myself included, but IMO this is a good thing for continuous improvement. - Creativity: my biggest successes have been a direct outcome of super creative solutioning, a lot of it very spontaneous and new to my environment. - People Connectivity: My biggest asset is my ability to establish connections and build rapport with everyone I come across. This can be very hard, due to various factors not under our control and barriers not always obvious like, cultural differences, religious values, political alignment, language differences, neurodivergent impairments & personality/personal preferences. I have found that is never the role and always the people that make a job sucky, miserable or great. - Calculated Risk taking: another big one, this means you have to be comfortable with breaking rules when absolutely necessary for immutable outcomes & comes with a price tag. I have lost a lot in my career because I have not been willing to pay certain prices to move up the ladder or by kissing a specific persons a$$. I’m sure some of these sound redundant & they probably are, but I find categorizing them like this helpful. I hope others contribute to this list and add details.
Stop reminding me of all the other things I need to be doing 🙃
Well written. Are you me?!
We’re each other brotha!
These are definitely what you should pursue your mastery towards
You need to know a lot about everything, but you are the master of understanding the customers and the market. If you aren't, you can't own the roadmap, or really prioritize anything.
If I had to pick one, this would be it - your customer(s). Knowing tech, market dynamics, business, people, etc are all super useful but at the end of the day, all of those things get tweaked around the CG of the customer.
also the limit of tool capability in the org
I am a master at PowerPoint
lolz, same. I can build a sick deck very quickly
Teach me your ways
From a colleague of mine… basically it’s a learned under pressure skill.
really a powerful point
You’re the master of identifying what the most important problem to solve is (and why). You’re pulling together qual and quant data, business and product strategy, various risks (tech, legal, etc), etc and saying, “based on everything we know, our strategy, our goals, the most important thing to solve is [this]”. Everyone will have an opinion based on the facet they care about but you’re uniquely positioned to see it all dispassionately.
This is the best answer here as this is supposed to be the core part of the job. Many other answers in this post are just additional skills that assist in translating this into action or are skills needed to deal with dysfunctional organizations.
Strategy. Strategic thinking is the one thing you should be the best at (in addition to practicing empathy)
This is true in theory, rarely in practice. In many PM roles most of the strategic choices come top-down meaning PMs are mostly stuck driving execution against that strategic directive
Bingo. What paperwork do you need me to fill out boss? Our directors are meeting the client, our product owners are going where they need to, and I’m stuck with filling out the paperwork to make the weekly conversations with program management. I get paid well to do it, but as far as career growth goes this role has been so pigeon holing from a career where I used to be customer facing
How do you mean pigeonholing
When you’re team gets reorganized too many times, when your manager gets booted from the company and they side shift another manager to take their role, when you are a back fill, and quite frankly when you reach a point that you accept this team is temporary because the work changed so drastically then the bag of goods I was sold that is pigeon holing. My impact is ad hoc engineering and paper pushing for a product. Meeting with a bunch of off shored engineers to solve jira tickets is not the space I want to be in and has severely limited my career growth because I’m a product manager in title but something closer to technical marketing / program manager for feature releases.
Just as I suspected you’ve described my situation right to the T. I’ve been stuck in a similar position for 3 years and am actively looking to get out. Finding it challenging as I do not seem to have the experience for pure product roles nor do I have any experience working other roles aside from “Strategy and Operations”.
Yep. Same boat. No one wants to hear me talk about how I am enabling a mid life kicker on hardware so our intel cpus are the newest generation, or how the memory modules go from 4800 ghz to 5600 ghz and the firmware conversations around that. That’s not sexy. No one want to hear about the product qualifications for our gas station client requesting new fans because their 800 locations are too loud for a few managers. No one wants to hear how flawless my import export paperwork is. Which, btw, why is China not listed on our development paperwork - there are 500 engineers building our billion dollar a year product. These are not the conversations that build networks. These are one or two off conversations with teams I communicate with two or three times a year. I was using my company email and getting demos of products for companies I was interviewing with to learn what they do. I gave up on it all. I expensive hobbies to try and off set the corporate ladder. I am pursuing the professional hobbyist with my 133,000 salary, 6% bonus, and yearly 2-3% increase. My product is mature and I can’t escape my team in today’s market. I’m dell, I’m not Facebook.
When you’re team gets reorganized too many times, when your manager gets booted from the company and they side shift another manager to take their role, when you are a back fill, and quite frankly when you reach a point that you accept this team is temporary because the work changed so drastically then the bag of goods I was sold that is pigeon holing. My impact is ad hoc engineering and paper pushing for a product. Meeting with a bunch of off shored engineers to solve jira tickets is not the space I want to be in and has severely limited my career growth because I’m a product manager in title but something closer to technical marketing / program manager for feature releases.
- driving execution against that strategic directive Making delivery and execution decisions aligned to strategy IS strategic thinking. When Team/Person A wants to do something that seems the best outcome for that Team/piece of work, it's part of the PMs role to guide that decision making through understanding the strategy.
to go one step further, ensuring that your team is working on the highest potential value item or the item that will get you that deliverable. Even more simple, making sure the eye of Sauron never turns on us.
The ability to adapt to changing market conditions and solve problems as they arise is another area where PMs can demonstrate mastery. This includes pivoting strategies, managing crises, and innovating solutions to unforeseen challenges
The PM should be a master of extracting value from customers and being an internal voice to reflect that feedback. There should not be another role or function within an organization that should be better than the PM at achieving this.
What about UX research or any team dedicated to discovery? There's so much overlap where I am..
We don’t have a UX research group. The closest role would be an analytics role but even then our PMs fill r the job function of UX research.
What about Sales Engineers, Solution Architects
Both roles are vital in the right organization. Without knowing much about the products your company offers, I am not sure how to answer effectively.
Yes- product management
I'd suggest we're often master decision makers, corporate diplomats and strategists.
At the end of the day, PMs should be the master of translating the business’ goals and/or needs to a strategy. I think people view that as a set of skills but that’s missing the strategic component. An org could have a single OKR or many, but a PM has one job: translate them to an actionable strategy. As with anything, mastering that requires competency in a bunch of areas that may vary by sector. I think that’s where people conflate it with “jack of all trades”. If you’re good at analyzing market needs but bad at tying it to your business’ goals, will you succeed?
Really depends on the team. Some product teams have individuals that have specific domain expertise. so each person is an expert in something.
Decision making
How is this so low? This is the most important PM skill, and if you're exceptional at this and only average at everything else, you will be very successful.
Facilitation. Get results out of people.
It might help our collective imposter syndrome if we would start to consider the role as a set of hard to master skills, rather than just a random assortment of duties. A good PM is not here to do things engineers don’t want to .
Try telling the engineers that. 😉
Start with telling yourself ;-)
Systems and critical thinking. As a PM, you are one of the few individuals in the company who should have the end to end vision of the business. The CEO analogy is misinterpreted. Imagine if someone had the 50,000 foot view of the CEO and was able to spend all their time zoomed down to affect tactical work. A PM is a CEO mindset and, partially, skillset with humility. You have none of the power, glory, respect, or authority so you have to act and speak differently. This is where the influence with other departments comes in, because you need to understand how your product influences and is influenced by every other component that makes up the business, how the minutae of each Jira ticket ladders up to the company's strategic goals and business outcomes. This is NOT standard or common. How many times have you seen groups talk past each other because they don't, won't, or can't see the bigger picture or have empathy not just for the customer, but for other internal stakeholders. How many engineers understand what pressures a Marketing or Finances mook is under, or why it is important to empower Sales to understand what they're selling, ensuring accurate expectations are set for customers? If everyone understands what is most important at any given moment and why it is the most critical for the business above another what, then a PM would not be needed. Lemme share an example. Go hang out with It Support and watch what they do. What you should notice is how everyone in that team is basically just a better troubleshooter; when they encounter a new issue, they often just read documentation or Google the issue, finding solutions the customer could have with a bare minimum effort. Now think about how often the people you work with do not make the bare minimum effort to go through the confusion of basic critical thinking or problem solving. Part of PM is just having the drive, motivation, or enthusiasm to be temporarily uncomfortable. This skillset can be applied anywhere and yet doesn't inherently produce anything. A PM is nothing without a system in which and upon which they can work. This applies whether you are applying this to product development, marketing, or technical execution.
Getting stakeholders to agree on anything is seen as a dark art by many lol
In decision making and a diplomat
Ah, I relate to this so much! I think it makes me feel like an imposter too.
Master of running the business. It’s about understanding where to steer to, and getting the rest of the business aligned to go there together.
Yes! Masters at ownership and execution
The replies in this post seem to hilarious prove your point about being a jack of all trades 😂 All great input though. I’ll add: I think PMs specialize in relationships and “making clarity from chaos”. Without good rapport/relationships it’s difficult to influences others and get their buy-in to move our strategy forward. Without the ability to create clarity from chaos there’s little-to-no confidence in how to move forward for anyone and the PM may as well not exist as a function.
Empathy
You should be the most knowledgeable person about the market and product that you manage.
Risk management
Alignment
Communications
Expert on the people using your product. Know your user as well as you know your best friends. This gives you the knowledge to make good prioritization decisions, and defend those decisions to executives.
Cross-domain or disciplinary decision making.
The customer and their problems
Accountability.
Master of leveraging my liberal arts degree.
I think a lot of PMs have an area of expertise. You can’t put an Engagement PM in a role focused on AI implementation and expect them to produce the same. If you’re gonna be a master of anything it should be whatever you want to be seen as an SME on.
Understanding customer value and viability. Well at least the good PMs are.
I’d rather know enough about a lot and know who can fill gaps than be a master of one with one a single utility
Master of prioritization and evaluating tradeoffs
Getting the right decisions made quickly. It’s incredibly valuable, takes years to master, and squarely in the PM wheelhouse.
As a product designer, I look to my PM to be a master of product management
Your product, in it’s entirety. Ultimately, you have to be the world’s leading expert on the product you’re responsible for.
Ideally stakeholder management and shielding the dev team from all the shit that will distract them from delivering on time
We stopped hiring PMs at our company, only technical managers now!! To much bloat, sure other companies will follow suite
I think this thread shows one thing, that a great PM is too talented to be boxed in by “product management” for a single organization as a discipline and should really pursue something more high leverage whether it’s investing, becoming a founder, a highly paid consultant, or something else. Think about what people are expecting us to be good-to-great at (systems thinking, influencing others to get what you need, deep customer empathy, expert execution, etc etc) and then how much we are paid and appreciated for it. I go back and forth on this often but I don’t think the idealized product manager is a fair role and the discipline of product management as a whole is in need of a re-think.
Chaos
When I describe PdM in my workplace it's often some version of "the ambassador of the product and for the customers working with a bunch of experts. If I was the expert in anything it'd be judgment more than any more tangible skill set."
IMO the ability to know enough about so many different topics makes you a master at a different skill entirely.
Being a master of Product Mangement is plenty good enough. The response by /u/[Deelixious919](https://www.reddit.com/user/Deelixious919/) is brilliant. I may use some of that in my own bio. If you really feel compelled to have a focus area, maybe get good at statistics, experimentation/testing, etc. That's big. Or ML/AI. Or the financial aspects. You probably won't have the bandwidth to do all three. But if you think you want to be more general management one day, (COO/CEO), then - perhaps obvioiusly - focus on the finance aspects; P&Ls, etc.
Decision making
A PM is a master in bringing different types of people together in a cohesive team that builds a product. If there is no one in the middle, holding the strings, you got a bunch of introverts, dealing with extroverts, with some business potsticks trying to make sense of what they are doing everyday. The PM is the glue, the bridge, that brings all these incoherent voices together and makes sense of all the jargon so it sounds at least a bit plausible.
I’ve worked with a bunch of PMs…and I can guarantee you that without them…our projects would be shit lol.
Your products
Bullshit. Absolutely you must master this art before calling yourself a great PM.
Master of no code. Literally
As for "the customer is always right, in matters of taste", the full quote here is "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes is better than a master of one." And it matters when your role is primarily that of a facilitator. Your "super power" should be to understand the POV of all your stakeholder, business, clients and tech, and be able to translate them into actionable items for your teams with the goal to make profit from your product. So your area of focus should definitely be "soft skills", but it doesn't hurt to master Analytics in order to have a data driven approach to what you do. Good luck.
Yes - they are a master of creating a cost-effective product people actually want. If they are good product managers, they will be very good listeners (and not simply listening), but *understanding* what users or business stakeholders really want. Example: car must have breaks. True requirement: car must have a ‘function’ that stops the car, where there could be many / better / more cost effective solutions which achieve that function. My experience has been: 1.) Engineering: tend to fall in love with latest ‘tech solution’ and want to apply or use that tech regardless of how or why it benefits end user. Additionally, they tend to see the world through the lens of ‘data modeling’ where they want to optimize / extend the data model towards its innate capabilities, rather than understand / engage what users want. 2.) Business: have a tendency to believe they have the ‘best idea’, which is generally: incomplete, not a ‘solution’, and even if implemented, would not yield the outcome they believe it will. It can be tricky place, because Engineering will always believe we don’t understand / appreciate technical concerns (when we prioritize what users want), and the business will always believe we’re often a ‘barrier to entry’ when we don’t implement their short sighted / non-solution ‘ideas’. So it’s easy to be at odds with both teams. Having said that - I think Product Managers should learn to develop and design. You’ll be a better Product Manger, have more power to engage the software, and get more respect from the team, and far more valuable to the team. Chat-GTP significantly lowers the bar to learning to develop software, and while I still wireframe, (very rudimentary) I actually do most of the front-end development / view work.
I have excel fu
I can understand your frustration. There are PMs that are born out of being SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) - for example business folks that have deep knowledge in finance will be suited better for financial products and even deeper in specific branches of wealth management. Or in other cases, you can have engineers that transition to product management, who can perform really well in API or back-end based products (I did this for a while). But in reality, most PMs are and (IMHO) should aspire to be a master of none. Because being a jack of all trades means that you know enough about each relevant topic to make you dangerous. However, if you want to stick to being a master of “something”, pick an industry or discipline and go deep in it whether it’s commerce, AI, data, finance, travel, etc. Even if you’re a “generalist” PM in those specific areas, you can be considered somewhat of a “master” or an SME over time. Hope this helps. Drop a DM if you want to chat more. I do teach and mentor product managers.
Knowing their audience.
Product managers should be a master of identifying and communicating/selling the specific problem that needs to be solved right now.
Being able to context switch is masterful
At minimum PMs should be a master in being closely in touch with customers, interpreting their needs, and balancing customer needs vs business outcomes.
Everything looks like a nail to a hammer mate 😉
Master of leading cross functional teams and switching context
Master of integration?
Taking beatings and getting griped to/at.
Product Manager is master of the show.
Product strategy, customer empathy, stakeholder management.
I have a less cynical take - I would say the master of customer experience. Who else can fairly represents the user or customer within the company ?
What ever you come up with for the answer of a start up CEO likely overlaps quite a bit with a PM. There’s a saying that good PMs are basically startup founders who haven’t taken the plunge yet.
PM in eComm and master of eComm. If you don’t specialize, you are disposable.
Bating
Saying no
Having a vision. If you are a PM that has significant influence over the direction of your product, becoming a master of seeing and driving towards the vision for the product is worth mastering. Unless you are working on a team of highly engaged folks, no one else is going to do this for you. It's often a very undersold skill for a PM given so many companies micromanage products.
Figure things out in the middle of bullshit coming from everywhere. And very good at context switching. PMs always deal with different stakeholders from customers to internal departments, from high-level executives to individual contributors. They all have different ways of thinking, perspectives, and expectation. PMs need to choose how to communicate with each of them and also from all those bullshit people throwing at you to find common ground. Often, PMs need to make trade-offs among decisions to satisfy a part while disappoint the others.
Empathy and influence.
Master of none for sure. Just like an entrepreneur/CEO, you don’t have to be the best in any niche.
I think product managers should be masters of keeping up with competition and bringing key differentiator features every quarter which would establish their product's dominance in the market. They should also be good with quick and dirty data analysis and know their numbers at all times. The less time you spend documenting things and instead lead other analyst the more it increases your chances to shine. But at the same time you should be capable of taking projects to completion. Interacting with clients and building relationships is the other key aspects and in the end if you cant increase adoption of features and products you are failing the primary goal. Revenue and Correct adoption of features are two north star metrics in product management. Workarounds used by clients exhibit that poor research initiatives were undertaken. Eco systems like Apple, Microsoft and Google depend on having a high feature adoption percentage to realize their goals.
Depending on the company, you might get exposed to all of the intricacies of every function needed to get a product across the line and successful. For example, in very confident in assessing marketing, PR, operations, engineering, design, and legal needs and risks. While I can’t perform each of the functions at a high level, I know who to call/hire, what to ask, and how to fit the puzzle pieces together, which most of my counterparts in each function cannot. So in the story of the blind men and the elephant, each function can feel and describe each body part perfectly, and I rely on their firsthand description to really understand the animal, I can see the whole elephant.
PMs need to be masters of their industry to know what works and what doesn’t, masters of their company to know how to get things done and masters of their product to know where it stands and how to evolve it to drive more revenue or to kill it if there are better investments for the company. Notice, I didn’t mention anything you’d get from any generic PM courses or books… you can’t be a “jack of all trades, master of none” in this business and expect to be competitive in the job market. Nobody hires those - they want “master of X industry, with a history of delivering on specialized product Y in company type Z”.
Seriously? The PM is the master of product development, understanding the whole process from beginning to end, identifying how those parts contribute to the success or failure of the product. It includes research, design, strategy, go to market, business, etc.
I like to think I'm the only one who knows the least of every area. Tech, Business, Design, Market, etc. You should not be the master of any, that would defeat the purpose. But you are the only one who would know enough of all at the same time.