Product Manager Hard Skills to Master in 2023

The world today is fast-paced. Technology allows products to be developed at a rate that has never been seen before. As product innovation and production continue to increase, highly skilled Product Managers will only become more and more valuable. After all, someone has to see a product through conception to distribution!

Product Managers are key players in the evolution of a product, and their position requires finely-tuned hard skills. These product manager hard skills help them execute their duties to the best of their ability, but developing these hard skills will also ensure that Product Managers can work seamlessly with every player involved in product development.

Before we dive into the most important product manager hard skills, it would be beneficial to discuss the differences between hard and soft skills.

According to Indeed,

“Hard skills are technical knowledge or training that you have gained through any life experience, including your career or education.”

Whereas,

“Soft skills are personal habits and traits that shape how you work, on your own and with others.”

In other words, hard skills are what you do, and soft skills are how you do it.

Before you can begin to be the best Product Manager you can be, you have to understand the PM hard skills that the big companies out there are looking for. Here are the top six.

6  Hard Skills for Product Managers

Business Skills

Product Managers play a key role in the success of a product and the business its attached to, so it’s crucial that PMs develop a basic understanding of the way the business world works.

A few aspects of a business that will be important for a Product Manager to understand are how the following areas impact the bottom line:

• Revenues & Profit
• Budgeting
• Cash Flow
• Profit & Loss Statements

Basic business skills are very important for a Product Manager to have because their product is affected by things that are happening outside of their department. These PM hard skills will also make you more valuable to company leaders because they don’t have to run around from department to department to get the answers they’re looking for.

A Product Manager with business knowledge will be able to talk about revenue, product forecasting, budgeting, and more. The ability to have this type of communication with company leaders will put you on their mental map so they’re more apt to think of you when the time comes for promotions or new product ideas.

Industry Knowledge

There’s a ton of competition in the market these days and it will be absolutely crucial for Product Managers to understand what they’re up against. This means tracking market trends and having the ability to set key performance indicators (KPIs) for their projects.

These key indicators may include:

• Customer acquisition costs
• Customer conversion rate
• Daily active users
• Features usage
• User churn
• Net Promoter Score
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer lifetime value

This insight and knowledge allow Product Managers to create accurate customer personas and have well-defined use cases. Additionally, taking a deep dive into their industry will also allow Product Managers to understand the many different ways their job can be done. Once a Product Manager understands the options they have for executing their job, they can choose the best one for the specific project they’re working on.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking goes hand-in-hand with the previous PM hard skill that we laid out. Having that in-depth knowledge of the product management industry will allow PMs to think strategically, make the best decisions, and very possibly anticipate issues to solve them before they arise. A Product Manager with strategic thinking skills will be able to envision a company’s goals and determine what steps they need to take to get there.

It may seem like strategic thinking is actually a soft skill, but we beg to differ. Why? Because there is a science to it. Product Managers can use different prioritization models and techniques to determine the correct features and initiatives for their product’s roadmap.

Here are 7 frameworks that a Product Manager can learn to develop the PM hard skill Strategic Thinking:

• Value versus Complexity Quadrant – Evaluate opportunities and compare them to how difficult/complex they are to implement
• Weighted Scoring – Use a scoring method to weigh initiatives and features
• Kano Model – Take a look at a specific product feature and weigh that feature’s value to the customer vs. the cost to implement it
• Buy a Feature ­– Hand out “money” to a group of people and ask them to “buy” their ideal feature. The feature that was “purchased” by the most people will be the one that you prioritize
• Opportunity Scoring – Measure and rank opportunities against customer satisfaction
• Affinity Grouping – Brainstorm ideas on sticky notes with your team, group the idea together by category, vote on the best category
• Story Mapping – map out your workflow from the beginning to the end of the customer experience

Data Mining & Statistical Analysis

Data is absolutely crucial to a product’s journey. Thus, data is absolutely crucial to the Product Manager. Data helps determine roadmaps, discover opportunities and threats; it tells Product Managers where they should allocate their resources and where they can save, and it helps analyze the competition, so you know where your product and organization stand.

So, Product Managers will need to know how to conduct market research (this is where the data will come from), which tools they will need to collect the data, how to analyze and interpret that data, and finally, how to apply their interpretations to a product.

Economics

By definition, economics is,

 “A social science concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. It studies how individuals, businesses, governments, and nations make choices about how to allocate resources.”

Economics studies the way that we use the resources that we have, especially when those resources are scarce and have multiple uses. Product Managers are in scenarios just like this all the time throughout their career – restrictions on time, money, manpower, etc., can put stress on the job if you are not prepared to deal with it.

Understanding the basics of economics will allow a Product Manager to evaluate how they can stretch their resources the farthest, in a way that is still efficient and functional.

Technical Development Principles

Not all Product Managers work with products that are made for technical users (like engineers). However, a general understanding of technical development principles (especially in tech PM positions) will put many Product Managers ahead of their competition, so this is a great PM hard skill to have.

Understanding technical development principles can help Product Managers get to know their users in a whole new way – a deeper, more empathetic way. It’s important to note, however, that Product Managers are not engineers nor should they try to take on the role as one. Your team of engineers is there to do their highly technical job, while you are there to focus on the product as a whole and the overall customer experience.

Honing your Product Manager Hard Skills

When it comes to developing hard and soft skills as a Product Manager, you’ll want to first understand what the hard skills are that you need, and then find the best way for you to execute them.

As we mentioned before, soft skills are how you go about performing hard skills. Basically, your soft skills are what will set you apart from a Product Manager that has similar hard skills as you do. If another Product Manager has excellent research skills, but they’re completely disorganized – and you have good research skills and you’re highly organized – that may give you a leg up on the competition.

Once you have a good grasp on the product manager hard skills that we mentioned today (Businesses Skills, Industry Knowledge, Strategic Thinking, Research & Analysis, Economics, and Technical Development Principles) you can hone them with your personal soft skills that make you incredible at your job.

Product Management Exercises has everything you need to excel in your career as a Product Manager Free questions that are most often asked in product management interviews, fellow professionals to conduct practice interviews with, and interview coaching and courses. The product management position of your dreams is within reach with Product Management Exercises!