6 Soft Skills Every Product Manager Needs

The ultimate responsibility of a Product Manager is to launch products that are truly useful to the target market. To achieve this, a diverse skill set is necessary, combining both Product Manager soft skills and hard skills. 

You might have the misconception that hard skills have more weight than any other skill. Yes, business, data analytics, and other learnable skills are relevant. But, it’s the Product Manager soft skills that will help build your career, help you lead a team, and gain a certain degree of influence in the organization to be seen as a product or market expert.   

If a PM wants to be heard and respected, they should start by mastering their soft skills on top of the engineering and technical skills they already have.

Why are soft skills so important in Product Management?

When you first start out as a Product Manager, you’re going to be more focused on executing tasks that are product-focused (ground-level execution and launching). These tasks include finishing the QA, collaborating with marketing, A/B testing, gathering customer data, doing market research, and so on.

As you go up a level and become a Senior Product Manager or Product Lead, your focus will shift more from execution to influence as you build stronger working relationships with colleagues. Although execution is still part of your role, you’re taking more steps towards leadership, the career development of team members, and convincing different teams to support the decisions that you make.  

When you gain even more seniority and move up to the leadership level as a Group PM, Head of Product, or Chief Product Officer, relation to and working with people becomes more important. A PM, at a leadership level, is expected to lead teams, empower others, make important product decisions, and communicate clearly within the entire organization – tasks that will need sharpened soft skills.

If you would like to know more about the different responsibilities of a Product Manager based on seniority level, read The Responsibilities of a Product Manager.

The Most Important Product Manager Soft Skills

We’ve summarized six of the most important soft skills every Product Manager should master. These essential Product Manager soft skills will help you become a top leader who’s respected by your team:

1. Communication

Effective communication lies at the root of all successful Product Managers because nothing gets done without communication.

From the very beginning, a product relies on effective communication to go from an idea to a full-blown reality. As a Product Manager, communication will be a part of every single moment of every day. From communicating with upper management, down to communicating with users, the PM is in charge of delivering the right message to the right group of people.

Communication is also vital when exchanging or conveying ideas to others who are directly or indirectly part of the process of product development. For example, a PM is expected to take complex ideas from engineers and present them to users in a way they can understand and relate to. PMs also need to know how to communicate with stakeholders and transmit their ideas clearly to the product team.

Any break in the chain of communication will lead to a product that you never intended on creating. With effective communication, a PM can listen to the people they interact with and bring ideas in a clear way to everyone else. Basically, the PM is the link between everyone, as well as the translator.

How to Improve Your Communication Skill

The first thing about communication is that you have to listen first because people want to know that they are heard, especially when it comes to Product Management. When you listen purposely and intentionally, people know that their ideas are being considered even if you’re not saying yes 100%.

2. Leading without Authority

To create an effective team, a Product Manager needs to earn respect and credibility with every department in the product line. And, this is because credibility and respect will help the PM with his or her influence when making and justifying product decisions.  

Contrary to what outsiders might perceive, a PM’s power is small and they need to work with what they have. In a product team, none of the members report directly to the PM. Engineers report directly to the engineering manager. The same goes with designers, they report directly to the Design Manager.

What a PM does is lead without authority. Rather, a PM leads with influence. A PM convinces everyone what the best decision is, all while providing the evidence to back it up. When a PM cannot provide evidence for a particular move, it’ll lead to doubting the legitimacy of the PM as well as the decision.

This manner of leading can also be referred to as non-authoritarian leadership which means that conversations don’t come as a command, but rather a suggestion. When PMs have this kind of conversation with their teammates, rather than a brief memo directing them to do something a certain way, it usually results in a high increase in the productivity and agreement of the employees. 

This increase in productivity comes from the leader being a part of the team. Leadership means collaboration. It means getting in the trenches with the team and participating in each and every aspect of the product development. This is the only way in which you will learn what it’s like to be in every role and know how to best work with each one of them.

How can you become more influential at work?

The first thing you have to do is to align yourself with the goals of the organization. Once a PM understands the “why” of the goal, it’ll be much easier to support and advocate for. The upper management will appreciate you for it. 

When it comes to your team, you have to also support the efforts that they are doing, especially when it comes to promoting their professional growth. Be their advocate to the upper management in cases where they have feedback on how things are run in the company.

3. Persuasion

Persuasion is about meeting in the middle, making compromises, and helping the other so they can help you. In other words, scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

The process of getting a product out to users can be a long one with countless roadblocks along the way. Product Manager soft skills need to include persuasion in order to get over or around roadblocks. 

Persuasion doesn’t just include making a big business deal with the retailers that will sell your product. It means standing up to upper management that may be too demanding for those on the floor. It means standing up for upper management when those on the floor don’t understand. Finding a middle ground and being the voice of reason should be a priority for any PM.

What you need to remember, however, is that this skill will take some time to master. A PM also needs a good amount of experience to foster this skill. Nevertheless, any Product Manager who is an expert at persuasion will succeed with launching great products.

Become More Persuasive

One of the most important things about persuasion is the credibility of the person. Personally, once you build this within your team and organization, you will have no problem persuading them to do something.

Another aspect that you have to remember is reciprocity. When your teammate or anyone in the organization grants you a favor, you also have to return the favor somehow. If not in the form of favors, you have to share opportunities that you are aware of.

4. Prioritizing

If a PM doesn’t know how to prioritize tasks concerning roadmaps and backlogs, he or she will quickly see progress stop in its tracks – something that you never want to happen while working with a tight timeline.

The number of tasks that need to be completed for a product to come out can be incredibly overwhelming. It’s here that Product Management means time management, prioritizing the tasks to get them all completed on time. It’s not just you who needs to complete all of their tasks on time too. You also have engineers and designers who work with the same timeline as you.

You’ll also see that ideas come at you from every direction. Some of these ideas may seem like the perfect solution to a problem or a great addition to a product. But, prioritizing means knowing what will be absolutely inherent to a perfect product rather than fluff to the design. 

One of the most important things you should know about prioritization is that it can often mean having to say no. This can be to an idea offered that doesn’t fall in line with your vision, or it can be to yourself when you simply don’t want to sacrifice anything. Learning to say no will be both empowering and productive in the end. 

Using certain prioritization frameworks such as Kanban or Value vs Complexity Quadrants will help PMs to truly optimize their time. These frameworks are simple systems that are designed to bring success into every workplace. 

We will talk more about PM frameworks and other techniques in the PM Exercises Prep Course. You might want to check it out.

5. Delegation

As a PM, it will often feel like each and every task is yours to complete. While it may be your job to get things done, it isn’t your job to do them all by yourself. Letting go of this control will be tough, especially if you’re carrying enormous pressure on your shoulders to lead your team and ship a great product. But, delegating tasks to others will make the team efficient and productive.

Delegation means you need to know the strengths of every person in your team. This way you know what tasks fit each team member. This creates an efficient environment with everyone doing what they are best at. No Product Manager can do it all, but the best ones know exactly who is the best fit for a particular task. 

In fact, delegation can make a PM’s job incredibly simple. Once you know the right person to delegate different jobs to, it takes tasks off of your plate. In this way, you will lighten your own load and know that the job is going to someone that is fully capable of getting the best work done. You just have to learn to let go.

6. Problem Solving and Creativity

Problems are often at the core of a Product Manager’s day-to-day life. That’s why we see problem solving and creativity as part of this list of essential Product Manager soft skills.

When issues arise, upper management is going to expect the Product Manager to fix them while those under the PM will turn to the PM for an answer. Not every solution to a problem is going to be cut and dry. There will need to be a lot of creativity in order to fix all of the problems that come up.

Problem-solving means looking at an issue through many different lenses. By taking several perspectives into consideration, a Product Manager can see different ways to fix a problem from different angles. This form of empathy and perspective-taking have solved huge world issues, and can definitely solve small problems in production.

Other Product Manager Soft Skills to Take Note of

Ability to Sustain the Enthusiasm of a Team

Yes, keeping the team motivated is also another silent responsibility of the PM. When the enthusiasm of team members is up, productivity will also likely be up. But, how will a PM keep team members motivated? Doing this doesn’t have to be a big, one-time, thing. It has to be done during small moments, one day at a time. For example, within the product team, you can try:

• Communicating openly
• Giving teammates a purpose
• Recognizing each member’s contribution
• Becoming your team’s advocate
• Promoting teamwork

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In Product Management, this skill will come in handy because empathy makes it easier for PMs to work with people.

Having empathy will allow you to understand your customers, the product team, as well as the stakeholders. When you understand the perspectives of all of the players in the product development process, you can strike a balance in your decisions, and communicate why that balance is the route that’s been taken.

Tips on How to Develop Your Empathy

• Cultivate your curiosity (especially about those you work with)
• Step out of your comfort zone
• Take feedback constructively
• Try walking in the shoes of others
• Join community activities organized by your company

Takes Initiative

Taking initiatives is the ability to assess and initiate things independently. In one of our blog posts about the typical day of a Product Manager, most of a PM’s day will be filled with several meetings. We can say that a PM is taking initiative when he or she prompts and leads the meeting (even if it is spontaneous or unplanned).

Also in that post, we talked about how a PM will review different reports like health metrics or competitor reviews. A good PM will do all of these things and more without being told to do so.

Why would you need to take initiative as a PM?

Simply put, taking initiative is allowing the company to see how valuable you are. When you take initiative, you don’t just do your job, you also take on other things that are not required of you as a PM. This may seem like an extra workload but you have to reframe your thinking because you’re putting yourself in a position to grow when you take initiative.

Flexible/Adaptable

A lot of seasoned PMs will tell you that this type of job is very dynamic. What this means is that things can be very fluid, unexpected, and fast-paced. As early as now, if you can’t anchor your perspective on the fact that PMs don’t really follow a fixed schedule every day and that anything can happen, you may find yourself always overwhelmed to a point where you won’t be able to do your job properly.

Great PMs know how to adapt to every situation. They have already anticipated that unexpected situations will arise. They know how to deal with each one, and, although it may be challenging to address some, the best PMs will always step up to the plate.

How to Improve Your Adaptability and Flexibility

1. Change Your Mentality

When your circumstances change, you have to accept that you should change with it. Let go of the mentality of doing exactly what you planned. You have to roll with the punches and embrace change.

2. Learn as You Go

One way you can train yourself to always be adaptable is to learn. Be open to learning new technologies, lessons from a bad situation, rising trends in the market, and the like.

3. Encourage Others to be Open-minded

As a PM, you also have to help others to be open-minded and adaptable. Everybody’s going to need this skill when working on a product so you might as well encourage and teach others how to adapt to changing circumstances. Be as supportive as you can.

Final Thoughts

Falling back on hard skills can be the easiest thing to do as a Product Manager. You can be a PM who is so well-versed in the technical aspect of Product Management but, in reality, the most successful PMs find a balance between hard skills and soft skills to create an efficient and productive system. 

Soft skills will be there when your hard skills can’t solve a problem, and both skills will work together in unison as you do different aspects of your job.

In the end, it is this blend of skills that creates a product of higher quality with a much larger group of users. Communication, non-authoritarian leadership, negotiation, prioritization, problem-solving, and more, are going to be the perfect addition to a Product Manager’s tool belt.

Lead with the confidence that you know you already have. Becoming the most essential and top-performing PM is on the horizon, and you know what you need to do. Get out and apply these Product Manager soft skills in your day-to-day, then watch as everything changes for the better. 

Nonetheless, before you can do your thing as a Product Manager, one of the first hurdles that you have to conquer would be acing your PM interview. Most find it challenging which is why it would be ideal for you to prepare as early as possible. But, where do you start? Here are some of our suggestions:

1. Start with familiarizing yourself with the Product Manager Interview process.

Preferably, you might want to read about the process of the specific company you’re planning to apply to.

2. Go through a Self-Paced PM Interview Prep Course.

3. Learn how to answer Product Manager Interview Questions

Pick one category at a time and try answering PM Interview Questions with frameworks and tips you have already learned from the PM interview course.

4. When you have already learned how to answer PM interview questions, test your skill by doing several mock interviews.

5. Repeat the course and move to a new category when you feel more confident.

If you’d like to learn about the preparation process in detail, check out Product Manager Interview Prep: 2022 Guide.

Additionally, the following resources may aid you in your preparation:

• At PM Exercises, we’ve put together a Product Manager Interview Course. 
• We also have over 2000 Product Manager Interview Questions with sample answers from our PM community you can learn from.
• You can also find a section labeled Practice where you can find other Product Managers who are also prepping for their interviews to practice with.

FAQ

What are the four (4) critical skills of a Product Manager?

The four most critical skills of a Product Manager are empathy, communication, listening, and organization. Definitely, there are other skills involved in order to do the job well but the four mentioned are non-negotiable or the minimum skills that a PM should have.

What skill is useful to be a Product Manager?

As a PM, you’re mostly going to be working with people. In this sense, it’s not just one skill that’s going to be useful to you. It’s going to be the collection of your interpersonal skills that will prove useful when dealing with other teams, customers, and stakeholders. 

What are the top 3 qualities you have that would make you a good Product Manager?

For you to be good at your job as a Product Manager, you have to be a strategic thinker, be passionate about your products, and aim to deliver a fantastic user experience. However, for each PM, the qualities may be different but the three qualities listed here are like the foundation that a PM can build upon to be great at Product Management.

Is coding a skill that a Product Manager needs to possess?

No, coding is not a required skill that a Product Manager should possess. The skill will definitely come in handy, especially if the Product Manager is working with a technical product, and has to communicate and collaborate properly with the engineering team. However, it’s not a skill that is a prerequisite.

If you want to know more about coding and Product Management, read, Do Product Managers Need to Know How to Code?

Is Product Management a soft skill?

Product Management is more like a combination of both hard and soft skills. Hard skills, like knowing how to write technical specs or use Product Management tools, can be useful when on the job but that’s just half of it. PMs also have to deal with the human aspect of Product Management. This is where soft skills come in since attending meetings, communicating with different department teams, and reaching out to customers to understand their needs are the norm.