What skills do product managers need?

An excellent product manager must be a successful communicator, and communication skills include oral communication skills and written communication skills. One of the most important roles of a product manager is to be the center of communication. The communication ability of product managers is not only reflected in effective communication with people in different jobs, but also in effective communication with people with different personalities. For example, most engineers are introverted, while most sales and marketing personnel are extroverted and use different "languages" when communicating with people in different jobs. In order to communicate effectively, it is very important to speak an easy-to-understand "language" that the communication object pays attention to. For example, when communicating with marketers and engineers, we should adopt different communication methods: talking too much about "database performance" and "memory management algorithm" will undoubtedly make them depressed; And talking to engineers is too conceptual, which will not help them design the real implementation details; Similarly, when communicating with your boss, you should pay more attention to a higher level and avoid details.

2. Leading without authorization

Successful product managers are excellent leaders, even without clear authorization. Product managers usually need to perform leadership work in many fields, including leading project teams, leading product strategy and blueprint design, and leading cross-team product activities. But in most cases, the product manager is usually not officially authorized by the company. At this point, whether you have "ultra vires leadership ability" becomes the key to success or failure. How to lead a team without authorization, my suggestion is to use influence, negotiation, interpersonal relationship and other similar skills comprehensively.

3. Learning ability

IT industry is a rapidly changing industry. "Perhaps the only constant is change", and new technologies are constantly emerging. Today's new products will become the staple food in a few months or even sooner. A good product manager must be able to learn quickly, even in a relatively new field. With this ability, it is relatively easy to manage products under the changing market and technology trends. Many companies make a mistake when recruiting product managers-paying too much attention to existing experience. For example, if a company wants to do security software, they will explain that "it needs more than 5 years of work experience in the field of security software" when recruiting. This is actually a wrong method. A better way is to find a product manager who has working experience in software field and is good at learning quickly.

4. Commercial sensitivity

Excellent product managers have excellent business sense, they know how to find market opportunities, understand the importance of competitive differentiation, and can put forward winning product strategy, pricing, promotion strategy, cooperation plan and profit and loss analysis. Seeing this, don't think that the product manager should be an MBA graduate. In fact, most excellent product managers have no MBA, but they are very sensitive to business.

5. Love products

Excellent product managers have a heartfelt love for products. They try all kinds of new products tirelessly, register trial versions of all kinds of products, download trial versions of products and ponder them carefully. As soon as they have time, they surf the Internet to see the websites of various new products. They like well-designed products, even if they are not from their own companies; They despise those cheap products, even if they are developed by their own companies. Most importantly, they are obsessed with creating excellent products-whether brand-new products or improvement of existing products.

6. Pay attention to details and pursue perfection

Excellent product managers are eager for details, and paying attention to details is the most important prerequisite for developing excellent products. As the saying goes, "details determine success or failure." Jobs once said: iMac notebook is not only different in transparent color and shell shape, but also the core idea of this product is to become the most exquisite consumer computer. In the latest iMac, we resolutely removed the cooling fan because we think it is more pleasant to work with a computer that doesn't buzz. Of course, it is not my decision to cancel the cooling fan. This requires engineers to make great efforts to find a better way to manage power supply and heat dissipation. This is the core concept that existed at the beginning of product design. This is also the reason why users are willing to choose our products-the pursuit of perfection in every detail, so that users can use computers more conveniently and happily. Excellent product managers not only pay attention to the details of product design, but also pursue perfection in other things, such as analyzing the competitive situation, making project plans and all other work they are responsible for.

7. Daily product management ability

Excellent product managers have good daily product management skills, including writing market demand documents (MRD) and product demand documents (PRD), analyzing competition, planning product roadmap, making product presentations, PPT design, user interface and analyzing product data. These core skills not only help product managers to improve themselves, but also have reference value for recruiting product managers.

Product Manager (English name: product manager), also known as brand manager and product planning, refers to the person who plans and manages a product or a certain type of product in the company, and is mainly responsible for product research and development, manufacturing, marketing and channel.

The product manager is the enterprise goalkeeper, the brand shaper and the marketing backbone. It is not only a perfect marketing operation system, but also a profound marketing operation. A product manager is an enterprise manager who is fundamentally responsible for a certain (line) product (media, service and brand) according to the company's product strategy. From creativity to listing, all related R&D, research, production, budget, advertising and promotion activities are controlled by the product manager.