What Does It REALLY Take To Become A Good Product Manager?

a lot of people struggle to become a product manager but even more people struggle to become a good product manager there's a huge impact to your career if you don't know how to stand out as an outstanding product manager because a good product manager can quickly get promoted as a senior product manager or director product in a short amount of time and average prod manager can stay on the job for 20 years and still being a senior prodct manager forever and even worse some inal prodct manager who doesn't know how to be a good product manager they got fired within 3 months into their new job in this video I'm going to discuss the six key factors to become a good product manager that all the product manager must Master starting from the day one into their job make sure to stay until the end of this video where I share with you number one secrets that 99% product manager doesn't do makes them become a mediocre product [Music] manager hey guys this is Dr ND a director product featur in fors I've helped thousand people land the dream PM job offering in fan companies and unicorn startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader in this channel I talk about tech Trends and free product management training like And subscribe and check out new video every Tuesday throughout my entire career as a director product I've hired promoted and fired lots of product managers in the past I can see the key differentiat between a good product manager and bad product manager there's a specific instance that literally open my eyes regarding what is a good product manager at the time when I was a director product I have two young women in my team and both of them entry level prod manager one of them literally getting fired was within 3 months into a new job the other person got promoted within 3 months into a new job however the first person has such a strong background on the book looks like she will be a better product manager because she got a computer science degree and went to really famous school and she was also a people person and looks like she's definitely can do the job much better than the second person however the second person and she was interior designer for Starbucks before she became an inable Club manager and the second person doesn't know how to code at all and she's not technical she even know which is HTML before she became a product manager and the product I work on at the time is called Edge Computing it's a decentralized cloud which make it really technical for the second person who has an interior design background to work on however who got fired and who got promoted probably to your surprise the first person who had a computer science background and end up getting fired the second interior designer end up got promoted the main reason is that the first person whenever I ask her to do any kind of pass such as doing vendor management or conduct voice of customer interviews I frankly have to push really hard to say hey you did those uh meetings with the vendors can you give me the meeting summary she said oh Nancy you didn't ask me to do meeting summary so each time I need to follow up with her and push her give her a specific task and tell her exactly what to do or she's not going to do it therefore I call it as a cube Behavior I had to push once and C but only move once however the second person is performing like a snowball behavior when whenever we see challenges for example in the Agile development process the second person was able to see the engineering team potentially having some bugs issue have some potential delay she was going to proactively working with engineering team bring out those Solutions and create those alternative plans and whenever she report those issues back to me she already told me and what different plans she has planned out potentially can mitigate the risk even if she doesn't know how to cope but she demonstrated the snowball Behavior I give her some guidance give some resources and training she's going to take it and round and the snowball just become bigger and bigger as she grew her career so that's why the first person literally was fired within three months and the second person I already had a plan with my manager to get her promoted as a lead prodct manager because she's treating herself as CEO of the product and trying to push herself into the next level therefore the number one most important thing for people to become a good prod manager is a CEO mindset I also invited our PMX alumni she's a senior prodct manager of generative AI at Amazon and she provide her expert opinion right here one of the most important qualities of a successful product manager is ownership and accountability as a product manager you will go through a lot of ups and downs in the product Journey sometimes you will not have all the answers uh there will be certain things which actually don't fall under your job description however at the end of the day it is still your responsibility to make sure that a successful product is launched something that your customers's love and something that has enough stickiness and for that to happen you have to make sure that you hold yourself accountable and that you take complete ownership of managing the product and helping your team out and making sure that you deliver a great product that users love if you're those kind of type A personality or you're somebody who really love the ownership of a product this will help you to become a good product manager because once it's a CEO mindset you you are the one who really push a product to the next level instead of having an exact to-do list and you complete the task and you're done this kind of employee will never survive in any kind of work environment regardless she's a product manager or non product manager the second important factor to become a good product manager is Advance prod management skills of course all plan manager must Master the fundamental prod management skills such as product requirement documentation the and driving product role map PRI prioritizing product features conducting The Voice customer interviews and those are fundamental for all product managers regardless your entry level senior level or even principal level I have a separate video where I dive deeper regarding the six essential skills to become product manager fast you can watch a video right here now the key skills that make a good product manager and great product manager is product strategy even if lots of people have already have years of product management experience but why they stay in the same company and the same role for 10 years maybe 15 years and 20 years it was because they frequently behave like The Operators is Right requirement doing customer interview and get it done however a good P manager and great P manager is going to think about long-term product strategy why they need to create certain product feature and what is happening in the market which one should they prioritize and how to see things in a longterm as if your VP product to create those 10e strategic role map here a specific real life example and actually one our students she's working for one of tier one companies as a product manager within a year into the new job her man ask her and all the part managers wasin their team to propose the next key features on the role map they can work on in the coming a year or three years and 5 years this kind of task is quite easy for any product manager to put features on people's role map however if you use the right framework right strategies your vision will become very strategic in showing that you have far leadership and this literally what happen in her meeting with the manager her manager list was very very excited and telling everybody was that her proposal on her role map is is significantly better and all other manager need to learn from her so that's why she was able to get promoted within a year join the new company and her salary increase by 20% within a year one of the key tools for you to think strategically as a product leader is actually use the Gucci framework I invented you should check out this video right here where discuss in details the scho framework is not just good for the interview can also be used for real life product management scenario that definitely going to help you to become a good and outstanding product manager I'm also going to link the video in the description of this video the third Factor makes a great product manager is to manage organizational complexity yes prodct manages actually is going to deal with lots of people relationship in a cross functional team and of course different companies have different challenges in terms of human and people relationship as a product manager if you want to really stand out to make your team working coherently you must be able to manage the organizational complexity identify the right stakeholders and understand who could be your allies who can be your back Corners who is going to advocate for you when you see technical challenges or business challenges so that your team can focus on building the best product and you can help them to remove all the distractions have align the resources to actually launch a product and impact millions of people for example Amazon has a very complex organizational structure and the bottom 10% people likely get eliminated every single year so if you don't know how to navigate within Amazon it's also going to be very challenged for you to become a good product manager and of course is being very dangerous if you are the bottom 10% if you find the tip very useful make sure to smash the like button so that I have the motivation to make more videos like this now let's continue with Factor number four becoming a good prod manager must start from customer empathy I have emphasized this many many different times including my Tik Tok video right [Music] here you we need to fall in love with our customers but lots of entry level prod managers when they origin building a product they only think about themselves their own challenges their imagination why customers need certain features but they didn't really think from customers perspective and they only see one type of customer segmentation and forget about the entire uh pool of customers that they can impact using their product now let's use amazon.com as an example what do you think the customer segmentation should be for amazon.com for people who doesn't have strong customer empathy they're probably thinking oh they are prime users and non-prime users based on how often they use a product the answer is totally incorrect a good product manager need to think about why people go use Amazon and what type of people is going to fall in love with the product so therefore you think about customer segmentation for Amazon as if they are Niche buyers busy professionals people looking for deals and people who leave remotely wasn't able to get access to physical stores easily and this kind of customer segmentation is showing exactly why you understand the customer pain point and why they go use amazon.com and become a royal customers and eventually enroll into Amazon prime number five the secret that 99% prod managers Miss to become a good and great product manager is selling yourself a good product manager understand that not only you need to build a product launch a product leaving your team you also need to sell your product sell your Visions selling yourself to a group of stakeholders so that your product is going to get more resources and having higher visibilities within leadership team and you could also get more resource es for example go have a better goto Market strategy and support and fings bring it to the hands of customers after I launched the first AI Empower smart cities product myself and along with five other co-workers who all product managers were invited to give a training about our product in front of group of 100 sales person each of us will ask to give a presentation about our product and after I finish my presentation there's a long line of salesperson like 20 people ly up trying to talk to me shake my hand saying that Nancy this is the best presentation I've ever had heard I'm so empowered to sell your product and bring your product to the hands of customers and this kind of waving fan Empower my product to quickly launch into the Market within 6 months and also receive the mayor's best practice award in 2017 it became the most AI product I launched and Lally kick off my career one the key secret to sell yourself effectively in in front of stakeholders is to ask the right question to understand their needs and desires so they can help you to accelerate your career I have a free checklist about top 10 questions you ask your stakeholders to understand their needs desire and paino so that you're going to sell yourself much easier I'm going to put the website in the link of description so you go there and download yourself if you're able to master this top five skills to become a good and great prod managers your next step is get promoted and become a director product and you should check out this video right here I break down in details regarding how exactly I became a director within 4 years and you can use the same strategy to accelerate your career as well if you also motivate become a good manager make sure to like comment and subscribe to this channel this is dark city from PM x. see you in my next video right here

Channel: Dr. Nancy Li - Director of Product

Views: 509

Keywords: product manager, 产品经理, drnancyli, product manager roles and responsibilities, product management, Product management course, product manager job, career progression, CEO mindset, advanced strategies, organizational complexities, customer empathy, stakeholder support, career advancement tips, product manager guide, successful product managers, career development, skills for product managers, product market success, professional growth in tech, product manager role

Id: 9uZvpdPAq9g

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024