Are you a Bad Product Manager?

July 7, 2023
blogs
4 min read

Of late, you have been thinking what makes a good product manager? Building great products requires a broad skill set. We need to know how to explore a problem space, uncover unmet demands, design feasible solutions, and validate those solutions. A good product Manger also needs to be able to work efficiently with Engineers, Sales, Managers, and so many others. But is there a set of traits or skills that underlie all of these?

Is there a set of skills that if you develop each one of them, would fuel our development in all of these other areas and would help in getting the answer that why do we call some as a good Product Manager while a few a bad Product Manager? Below are some common missing traits in Product Managers, which if taken care of, can improve your product management skills significantly and can help you becoming a good Product Manager.

Poor Communication:

Ensure that your communication is effective. Engineers think (bad) product managers are “fickle minded” because they fail to clearly communicate requirements, or they frequently change their minds. Not being able to backup product decisions with data. Good product managers are precise in explaining the obvious. On the other hand, bad product managers never explain the obvious.

Not respecting the 20% rule:

A good PM knows that it’s important to “let the doers do.” On the contrary, bad product managers always intervene and disrespect the 20 percent rule (i.e. not letting developers allocate 20% of their time to projects that are not on the roadmap). Bad PMs do not respect the developer’s ability to think beyond the specification and improve upon the initial design (i.e. overly controlling).

Power of Empathy:

Active Listening:

Like empathy, active listening is required to unleash unmet needs, to understand how to persuade and influence, and to really get to the root of an issue. It’s easy for the product to be ego-driven. But this will surely result in failure more often. To be a good product manager, you need to deliberately develop active listening skills so that your product becomes more about your users than about you.

Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the marketplace during inbound planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during outbound. Bad product managers get confused about the differences amongst delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity. Good product managers decompose problems. Bad product managers combine all problems into one. Because product management is a highly leveraged position, a bad product manager leads to many other bad consequences, generally including the wrong product being built, which generally has a significant impact on revenue, morale, and reputation of both the product manager and their company.

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