6x6: The Most Important PM Skill

Part 6 of 6x6 series, where we share perspectives from six PMs on six questions about product management. See Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash

Working with teams across the company, filtering the signal from the noise, enabling good execution — product managers do a lot of different kinds of work. So, we asked, of all the things to learn, what is the most important PM skill? How do you learn it?

1. Clarity

What does being good at clarity actually look like?

• You know you bring clarity when you can take an ambiguous space and get people of different disciplines to all answer the same thing, independently, for what your team is doing and why. When people are making decisions independently from you, late at night, without the PM, they’ll be consistent with yours.
• Be able to explain the same thing in five ways to five different people. You have to persuade someone to your point of view or inform them at the right level of detail. Clear communication means they’re getting it.
• Great, succinct value props inspire stories. iPod’s pitch was “a thousand songs in your pocket.” That says a lot. Remember, 1,000 songs was a big deal back then. They didn’t need to explain the value of music — despite our different tastes, we all inherently value it. Finally, they celebrated the size and mobility of the device not with dimensions, but with the use case of it fitting in your pocket.
• PMs need to be good at metaphors. Pretty much all professions are some style of information retrieval and investment, so you need to be able to express yourself in the right way. You identify the information you need to make the investments that are necessary to achieve the goals you need. The better you are at identifying where that info is, retrieving it, and combining it with other info, the better your decisions will be.
• As you progress in your career, your mission gets more and more ambiguous. You go from ‘go fetch this rock’ to ‘why is the sky blue’. So clarity gets increasingly important — and difficult.

How do you learn it?

• Everything can be an exercise of clarity: why is this meeting being held? Did you invite the right people? Did you lead with the right decisions? Did the agenda make sense? If the world is more clear at the end of the meeting than at the start, then you’ve done the right thing. Ask someone you trust about whether you achieved this.
• You have a lot more time to reflect on written communication, so practice this way first. For example, if you have a tendency to be super detailed, write a draft, cut it down, and cut it down further. It takes twice as long at first, but it develops good habits over time. Write a tl;dr at the top. One day, delete the rest.
• Review best practices from templates —read the specs and product requirement documents (PRDs) of your fellow PMs, look at how Amazon does PRFAQs, watch popular TED talks. Collect the nuggets. All communication strategies have different components that work well for certain needs. Adopt the best from them to the format that works for the particular thing you’re trying to get across.
• Ask your manager to pay close attention to how you’re communicating and give feedback immediately after. Because you asked, they’re able to notice and help more. I invite my manager to recurring meetings and ask them where did I do well, where could I have done better.
• A lot of people know how to be clear but they’re afraid. Fear of clarity is the fear of being wrong, of picking the wrong nugget to focus on. But you can be clear and flexible — today, we’re all focused on this, and tomorrow, we can try something else. Trust yourself.

2. Empathy

What does being empathetic look like?

• Just as you have to understand what your users’ needs are and how they’re feeling, you also have to understand what your colleagues’ needs are and how they’re feeling. For example, when someone asks you a question, especially if they’re not super familiar with your space, they often don’t want an answer to that question. They’re trying to ask something different, but they don’t know how. You need to figure out what they’re getting at and respond to it.
• One hour you’re talking to your engineers, another hour to your VP, maybe about the same topic — the strategy for X — but the way you should present it is so different. I see people communicating to leadership in a lot of detail on why something happened, when all that person cares about is the business impact and when it will be resolved.
• When you’re in school, the model is authority knows the answers and you’re just trying to match up to what they think. At work, for the most part, no one knows what the right answer is. Everyone, including the exec, is just trying to read the landscape, understand the data, and make an informed decision on that. Help others come to the same informed decisions you did.

How do you learn it?

• Get regular feedback from your colleagues so you can understand, over time, what they need and want. For example, not all engineers are made the same. At my first company, engineers wanted me to be very detailed in the feature spec, because that was the culture of the team. At the next one, I got the opposite feedback, that I was defining the solution when all engineers wanted was for me to define the product scenarios. Hear the feedback and be willing to adapt.
• Let go of your ego, because that’s the only way to get things done. It’s not about your ideas. It’s about who can make the thing happen in reality.
• Reflect on what worked and didn’t, and why. Iterating on products works and so does iterating on the interactions you’ve had with people. You might have a user interview, they say something to you, you act upon it, and the data doesn’t show the reaction you were expecting. So you know that what the user said is not what they meant. You need to ask, what about that case could have suggested this to me? What did I miss? This can also be applied to interactions with colleagues — someone says or doesn’t say something, and you realise later there was a delta. Ask yourself, what could I have done to remove that delta. It’s an iterative cycle: what happened in the past, how could I have improved, what will I try next time.

3. Prioritisation

What does being good at prioritising look like?

• In essence, PMs define how the company brings value to users within the resource constraints it has. So using those resources to create the most value possible requires great prioritisation.
• You’ll never know if you made the right decision until you’ve made it and have outcomes to reflect on. You can’t go back in time and see what would have happened with another decision, so we can’t train real intuition. There are so many variables in real life that it’s impossible to connect which variable affected the outcome in the best way; even experiments will only trade off one decision of the hundreds that came together to make a product. But experience shipping products and reflection on what happened make you better at prioritising over time.

How do you learn it?

• In real life, when you trade off something vs. something else, you’re starting to learn what real prioritisation means. In a vacuum, it’s really easy to say, go after the thing that has high impact low effort. But in real life, that becomes much harder, when you have a lot of organisational constraints, pressure from stakeholders, emotional attachments to ideas, different metrics — all the parts create a complex picture to keep in mind. In a lot of cases, people prefer to skip the tradeoffs and just make decisions unconsciously, based on emotional factors. If you want to train this skill, be methodical about how you evaluate different aspects of the decision.
• I have a policy with my team: every list with numbers must represent a priority. There’s a finite amount of time in the world, so tell me in order. Every email, every document, is an opportunity to prioritise information.

4. Flexibility

What does being flexible look like?

• The best PMs can change modes quickly through failure. There isn’t always a framework that will work, a template that will solve your problem. Even in a given day, you might be connecting what the team is working on to an overall milestone, then shifting to arbitrate between two people with strong opinions, and then creating a framework to align two teams that are digging into their own separate ways. The best PMs can jump between modes several times a day, going from blue-sky thinking about the future of the market in a few years, all the way down to helping their teammate prioritise the next 3 things on their todo list and why.

How do you learn it?

• Start every conversation with a reset and recontextualisation: this is what we’re here to do and why, and this is how I will help us do it.
• Figure out as many ways of working as you can. You may have been unsuccessful because you’re not using the right tool for the job. Great PMs are chameleons. You come in and talk a lot about why something is frustrating and feelings, and then try to bring everyone back into alignment. That requires more versatility and to recognise what is needed and what tools you have to bring than in other roles. So try a bunch of things out and look for patterns that work.