5.6 Soft Skills
In recent checkpoints and modules, you learned about tools for developing your product vision and artifacts for communicating that vision to stakeholders and your team. These tools and techniques are fundamental to executing your responsibilities as a product manager. But product management is not a science; it's an art. And mastering soft skills, like communication, negotiation, and persuasion, is equally critically important to your success.
This checkpoint focuses on self-assessing and improving your soft skills. How well do you engage with colleagues? Can you artfully navigate challenging situations? What could you do to improve these skills—and, therefore, your prospects of getting and keeping a PM job?
By the end of this checkpoint, you should be able to do the following:
- Identify the various roles a product manager plays, and your fit for each
- Apply principles of emotional intelligence (EI) to your interactions
- Give feedback, persuade others, and address potential conflicts in a constructive manner
A PM wears many hats
PMs interact with a broad range of stakeholders and collaborators to ensure a product's success. On any given day, you'll be faced with situations where you'll need to do the following:
- Explain a technical concept to a non-technical group
- Convince a designer to include a specific functionality
- Justify aspects of your product roadmap and work prioritization
- Make the case to protect or expand your staffing resources
- Provide instruction for training users on a new tool
All of these tasks involve communication skills. You will play various roles, depending on which team you're interacting with. You'll need to listen to each team's concerns and determine how the issues they're concerned about are impacting the product. You'll also need to communicate updates to and collect input from these various teams. You need to be attuned to the different dynamics of your interactions with each team, which means you'll have to wear many hats.
Visionary
This role is also described as "the Director" or "the Architect." It's your role to establish a vision for the product—to identify a point on the horizon and motivate your team to get there. You'll rely on others, but you will establish the goal and then communicate it.
Translator
Often different partners will consider the same topic with different relevance. You are the translator between many specialized areas, from legal review to database design to sales. Your ability to process information and translate it into a language people from other professional fields can understand is key.
Therapist
During interviews, you need to listen to what customers and users are telling you, both directly and indirectly. Like a therapist, you need to hear what they are saying, but also push them to think about something they might not have imagined. By asking the right questions and conducting quality research, a PM can uncover solutions that users didn't realize they needed. You'd be using skills similar to those of a therapist—listening, asking good questions, and interpreting responses.
Fortune teller or statistician
Much like a weather forecaster, you'll be expected to predict the future in an uncertain environment. How will you do that? By being a statistician, too—relying on whatever data you can gather to back up your projections.
Diplomat
Different stakeholders and members of your team will sometimes have conflicting ideas. A sales rep may be frustrated because she's targeting a different user population than you've targeted. The support team may feel their feedback was ignored. Another PM may seek reassignment of your developers over to their project. You'll need to recognize issues early on and respond diplomatically. Reach out to team members and address frustrations. Recognize their perspective and reiterate the rationale for yours. Try to identify mutually beneficial solutions or tactfully escalate the issue to your management team without creating unnecessary drama. Work to create rapport with team members so you can more easily communicate with them in an environment of trust when conflicts inevitably arise.
EMT or paramedic
When there's a crisis with your product, regardless of whether it's technical, legal, or market-based, everyone will look to you. You'll need to assess the situation quickly, identify trade-offs to get things back on track, and communicate the plan. Your triage will marshal the right team and define a path to a solution.
Gardener
After a product is released, you will continue to iterate and nurture the product. You will try many things, learning what succeeds and what doesn't. You'll cultivate small ideas where you see possibilities, and you'll need to weed out problems before they grow.
Emotional intelligence
Pivoting effectively between roles requires reading and engaging with your colleagues on an emotional level. You'll need to recognize which emotions drive behavior and impact people.
Emotional intelligence is a management concept you'll come across in product management articles and networking forums. It focuses on the idea that you're better able to handle yourself and your relationships when you acknowledge and seek to understand emotional influences. The four building blocks of emotional intelligence are explored below.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is a challenging but important quality to develop when you move into a new professional field. It requires self-reflection. You have to take an honest look at your strengths and weaknesses so that you can identify both your innate skills and those you need to reinforce. Understanding yourself better in this way will make you a better product manager.
Self-management
Self-management is about handling emotions in an effective way. Don't let your emotions get in the way of what you need to accomplish. Instead, be attuned to them and learn from them. Examine when you're impatient or frustrated. Recognize what calms or refocuses you. Every emotion has a function, but managing your impulses will enable you to better accomplish your objective.
Social awareness
Social awareness applies the aforementioned building blocks when working with others. It focuses on recognizing and interpreting verbal and nonverbal cues from others. A mantra of social awareness is that everyone has something to teach you, even if it is only patience.
Empathy is a skill that requires practice. It manifests itself in active listening or in thinking before speaking or acting. Openness to others' perspectives will give you a better understanding of your audience and their goals. When you express empathy, colleagues are more likely to trust your intentions and offer you the same respect.
Together, self-awareness and self-management help you recognize when your mood is affecting your decision-making. Thinking clearly and assessing your emotions accurately in a stressful situation will enable you to trust your intuition and make better decisions.
Relationship management
Self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness all come together in relationship management. Being open and understanding yourself and others equips you to build productive relationships with your colleagues. Communicating clearly enables you to inspire and influence others, work well in a team, and manage conflict.
Don't avoid conflict; resolve it. Understand how differences of opinion impact the work you need to do. Acknowledgment of others' positions, combined with a genuine effort to find resolution, strengthens trust and improves morale. Offer constructive criticism, but also be willing to accept it. Don't leap to defend or justify yourself or your product. Rather, listen and seek to learn from feedback.
As you read the next sections on feedback and establishing credibility, consider how each of the emotional intelligence building blocks applies to the examples.
Giving and taking feedback
Everyone will have an opinion about your product, your features, your decisions, and your work. How you listen and respond when they offer those opinions is important. The same principle applies when you're on the other side of the conversation; it's important to be professional and understanding when giving constructive feedback. Apply the emotional intelligence building blocks to get the most out of these give-and-takes.
Active listening
Give people your full attention. Look at them, not at your computer or cell phone. Face them and mind your body language. This communicates interest in what they're saying. Nudge them along with gentle nods or "mm hmm's." To show that you're really listening, repeat and rephrase what they say. For example, you could respond by saying, “So, you're unhappy with our rollout plan for the undo feature?”
Yes, and ...
Encourage contributions and make others feel that you welcome their input. Responding to others' ideas with "Yes, and..." acknowledges their suggestion and keeps the door open for further contributions. You want to be remembered for positivity and receptiveness.
Ask before giving advice
Most people are sensitive about being corrected, so create some space for yourself by asking, "Can I give you a piece of advice?" This lets them be part of the improvement process. Also, a good rule of thumb is to praise in public and offer critiques in private.
For more helpful advice on giving feedback, check out the video by none other than Simon Sinek below.
Learning how to say no
At some point, you'll need to tell someone that you can't or won't do something—maybe because you have other priorities, because the costs and constraints are too great, or because a limited impact means it's not worth pursuing. When you say no, provide your reason and what would need to change before you could say yes. For example, you could say, "We can't now, but we can revisit this next month" or "We can't do it like that, but maybe we could work on a smaller version of it." Regardless of your response, be clear and honest. Don't suggest that the team will get to it later if there is no likelihood of that happening.
Establish credibility
If you want to earn trust throughout your organization, be an expert on your customers, industry, and product. Be the person who others come to when they have a question. When you've fostered your expertise, others will have confidence in you when you state something about the product or your customers.
The more you establish trust, the easier your job will be. Below are some methods to build that trust and to foster credibility.
Ask lots of questions
The rule of thumb is to ask seemingly basic questions to get a handle on how your colleagues approach something and how things work in an organization you're new to. Ask them—even if you think you already know the answer. It is helpful to hear the way someone else describes or explains something, and there will often be something new to learn in their answer. In addition, the person you asked will feel respected and helpful, and it will strengthen your rapport with them.
Watch and learn
A good way to understand your product better is to watch people using it. If you can arrange it, sit down with customers and watch what they do. If you can't observe your customers informally, work with your sales and support teams. Listen in on support calls, sit in on sales team pitches, and read incoming support tickets. Not only will these experiences help you get to know your customers and their problems, but they'll also reveal these teams' perspectives and help you get to know your colleagues.
Do some dirty work
Many tasks in the process of creating products are thankless. Answering support tickets or doing QA (quality assurance) testing requires much time and effort and offers little recognition in return. Take one for your team, especially when they are under a lot of stress, and they'll thank and respect you for it. Plus, there is the added benefit of gaining insight into your product.
Engage your customers
Evidence is the best way to convince others that what you're advocating for is the right move. Spend as much time as you can with your customers to maximize your understanding of them and their challenges. Collect stories about their issues. Getting their time is hard, so work with your sales team to help you. In the B2B space, customers will usually have a designated sales rep or point of contact at your company. Go through that person, and you will develop them into an ally as well. If applicable, attend industry events and join online communities. You'll be able to both talk to and observe your customers and potential users.
Be the industry watcher
Set up a few Google News alerts for your competitors and your industry. When an interesting article pops up, share it with your team. They'll appreciate you for helping them keep informed, and you'll get a reputation for being someone who is in the know.
Be a bridge builder
Some of the teams you'll work with will have limited interaction with each other. Help bridge those gaps to facilitate better communication and information sharing. Get the support and engineering teams together to discuss common user issues. Schedule time for your engineers to meet the marketing team to discuss how they are pitching your product's features. Helping the various teams communicate and getting them all onto the same page goes a lot way to improving quality and builds credibility for your leadership with the larger organization.
Practice
In your notebook/notion, write a response to the following situations.
- You just received an irate message from someone on your sales team demanding that a specific feature be prioritized so they can close an important deal. You know it's a huge feature that can't be done given your other priorities. Write your "no" response email.
- After you work on a product, a customer gives you extremely negative feedback about it during a conversation. Record a video of yourself responding to the feedback.
- Your design team created some visual mockups of the product that are just plain ugly. You've gently communicated your concerns to the team. Their revisions are minuscule, however, and the designers don't seem to hear your overall message. Write down a plan for approaching the situation. Will you email or have a conversation? Who with? What will you say?
- A new feature for your app enables users to create tags for organizing photos. The user need is to be able to flexibly associate multiple topics with any photo. The developers insist the feature should be implemented as folders instead of tags. But you know from user research that tags are the way to go. Write down notes in preparation for a meeting with your developers. How will you convince them?
Consider running through a few of these role-playing situations with your mentor, a peer or friend, or another professional. Develop self-awareness by reviewing the skills described in this checkpoint and analyzing which ones you are better at and which ones you need to work on. Talk about your past experiences dealing with conflict or communicating with colleagues. (This is another common interview question, so it can be helpful to think about it now!)