Attributes of Great PMs

People are the bedrock of the Product Leadership OS. 

Many product leaders have written about the attributes of great PMs, including Josh Elman, Ben Horowitz, Marty Cagan,  Adam Nash, and Julie Zhou. A couple of our favorite posts are from Mat Balez and Ellen Chisa. We’ll add to their insights by asserting that best-in-class PMs have four attributes: an Engineer’s Know-How, a Designer’s Heart, a Quarterback’s Spirit, and a Diplomat’s Tact. 

An Engineer’s Know-How

Great products are built by talented engineers who apply logic and analysis along with deep knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of available technologies, gained through experience, to solve technical problems and plan future iterations. PMs need not match the technical acumen of the engineers with whom they work; after all, the PM’s role is to determine what to build, not how to build it. However, having a strong technical background enables a product manager to both gain the respect of her engineering counterparts and have a well-informed view of what’s possible and what’s sensible when evaluating the trade-offs that constantly confront development teams. 

A great PM has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer and the speech of a diplomat

When engineers are over-optimistic about deadlines, too concerned about safeguarding against highly unlikely edge cases, or too eager to work with bleeding-edge new technologies, a PM who truly understands technology can bring realism and pragmatism into team deliberations. Technical know-how also enables the product manager to be self-sufficient when creating quick-and-dirty prototypes to get early feedback on product concepts and to perform rudimentary data analysis to understand how their products are doing. In fact, every PM at Google was expected to learn Sawzall — its internal data analysis language — so they could independently analyze their product’s performance.

A Designer’s Heart

Users and customers respond favorably to brilliantly designed products. Whether a product is physical or virtual, and whether it is targeted to consumers or business customers, its fit and finish play a huge role in the product’s adoption and ultimate success. While design is a witch’s brew of art and science, world class product managers have a finely tuned intuition about what leads to delightful experiences. This intuition is honed not just by building products, but also through keen observation of the countless products we encounter in everyday life, and being intellectually curious about how these products are built and why they gratify us—or fail to do so.

One of Deep’s favorite products is the Starbucks coffee stirrer which doubles as a stopper for the coffee cup cover. Consumers have spilled coffee — even when using a cup cover — for ages. Nobody thought of fixing that problem until 2008, when Starbucks’ idea forum generated the brilliant idea to have the stirrer do double duty as a stopper. Called the “splashstick,” this product is an elegant embodiment of form and function coming together.

Great designers empathize with users to discover what will delight them. That takes a big heart. But great designers put big brains to work, too, as they weigh tradeoffs and consider constraints when creating products that, in IDEO’s formulation, are simultaneously desirable to customers, technically feasible, and economically viable. PMs confront the same tradeoffs and constraints during the product development process. In a previous post, we shared the view of Qualtrics’ Jared Smith that PMs must be capable of systems thinking, like an architect. A great architect — who is, at the core, a great designer — understands their client’s preferences and goals; how a building should relate to its surroundings; the technical constraints of selected materials and construction methods; the economic constraints on the project; and so forth. Similarly, a great PM will employ systems thinking during the design process — taking into account company objectives, customer needs, and technical capabilities — in order to create a product that is desirable, feasible, and viable.

A Quarterback’s Spirit

Product managers are not “mini-CEOs.” Far from it. Typically, no-one reports to them, and in most companies, product teams are among the smallest. For user-facing product teams. Deep prefers a 1:8 PM-to-engineer ratio and a 1:4 designer-to-engineer ratio. 

However, as the leader of this small team, a PM shoulders huge responsibilities. Like a football team’s quarterback, the PM plays a big role in their product’s success or failure. Like a quarterback marching their team toward the goal line with the clock ticking, the PM must deliver against a deadline. Like a quarterback, the PM must lead their team through inspiration, not formal authority.

Like a quarterback who must figure out on-the-fly whether to call an audible, the PM must decide what to do with suggestions from senior executives.  Finally, like a quarterback, the PM is heavily dependent on each teammate executing flawlessly. A world class product manager celebrates the team’s collective victories. They help foster a star team as opposed to a team of stars.

A Diplomat’s Tact

A product manager is the hub of a wheel with many spokes. In addition to their tech lead and the engineers, designers, and data scientists who are dedicated full time to the product team, the PM must be in sync with counterparts in other functions, including Marketing and Customer Service/Operations. In some cases, this group expands to include representatives from Legal, Business Development, Corporate Development, and Corporate Communications. 

With all of these colleagues, the PM must have an appreciation for the pressures they are under and the values they espouse. Like a diplomat, they must listen carefully and state their positions clearly to avoid miscommunication. They must be adaptable as they search for win-win solutions—and decide when to hold firm on points that are non-negotiable.

We could easily list more attributes of great PMs. The point is, this is a very demanding role; one that requires capability on many different dimensions. In our next post on the Process elements of the Product Leadership OS, we’ll share thoughts about how to recruit talent with the attributes of world-class PMs.