Rockstar product managers

I had the privilege to take a Pragmatic Marketing week-long course through Travelport this week with my entire Platform Services and Agency Commerce product team. Day 1 and 2 was spent taking the pragmatic foundations and focus course. On day 3, we had a guest speaker, Paul Young, from Pragmatic lead a discussion around the effective qualities in product management that propel you on a upward trajectory – what he calls the qualities of a rockstar product manager.

What separates a rockstar product manager from a stagnant one that continuously hits a ceiling? It’s all about getting beyond the wall of effectiveness, and it comes down to a number of traits – many of which aren’t even known by the successful product managers employing them.

The technical skills of a rockstar product manager – business, strategic, technical acumen, tactical – are the table stakes just to get to the wall. But the offer half of the equation is exercising the muscle of the softer skills to get beyond the wall. There’s a similar continuum of those skills – some of these skills are genetic (inherited), while others are learned (environment). They can be executed at the company level but also on the personal level.

From learned to inherited, there’s a spectrum of rockstar product management qualities:

Personality traits: always learning, high integrity, servant-leader, confident, whole person, competitive, charismatic, optimistic, curious

Product managers think slightly different from others at the company in that they have more of an entrepreneurial bent. Of the big 5 personality traits, managers are different from product managers/entrepreneurs. Lower in neuroticism, higher in extroversion, higher in openness, mid-level agreeableness, high on conscientiousness. These are all the innate skills.

Then we can take a look at the learned skills (most important ones bolded).

• Learned skills: questions authority, delegator, business savvy, inspires other, networker, multi-vert, time selfish, strategic thinking.
  • Great question for interviews: who is mad at you right now? If you are trying to please everyone, then you are probably not saying no enough. Product managers should say no enough and exercise that no muscle in order to focus.
• Product Management Skills: very broad but selectively deep, sees products as a business, technical chops, truth to power, measurer, pragmatist, right thing vs. the Thing Right.
  • Interview question: how do you measure yourself? Have you ever killed a product? Have you ever shipped a sub-standard product on person?
• Communications: master communicator, master listener, street cred, synthesis, pitch artist, story teller.
  • Interview question: I want to talk for 30 minutes about your market, your business, and your problem and how you’re going to win. Now tell me everything you just told me in 30 seconds.
• Executive acuity: multi-level effectiveness, executive debater, consensus builder, empathetic,

Of these, there are 7 important qualities, or X-factors, that can get you to rock-star Product Manager status:

1. Inspire others to action by starting with the “Why” to keep the team motivated and the sense of urgency up
2. Ability to speak to truth to leadership, and deliver the hard facts that no one wants to here
3. Synthesis – can take the 100 page project ppt into a 10 slide executive summary
4. Pitch artist – do you not just tolerate standing in front of your executives, but you thrive. Here, you have to defend your ideas and your opinions.
5. Consensus builder – can you go across the organization to build the consensus that you need.
6. The skill of the executive debater is all about being able to go toe to toe with your executive based on data, and be able to have the hard conversations with leadership without emotion. It takes practice.
7. Empathetic. Can you empathize with others to get their buy-in? If you understand their metrics and what matters to them, you can speak their language and make it a win-win.

You will be well on your way to becoming a rockstar product manager if you are actively practicing these traits – any pretty soon they will become second nature.