The Product Management X-Factor: How to be a Rock Star Product Manager

Over the last few months, I’ve been sharing a presentation across several ProductCamps called “The Product Management X-Factor: How to be a Rock Star Product Manager.”  The premise is that across your career, you have probably been exposed to several dozen people in the role of Product Management or Marketing.  If you think about all of the people that you have met or worked with, why is it that some people have that “it” factor and rise to the top, whereas other people struggle – even when they have similar levels of experience?

I have been very fortunate in my career to work with a broad array of talented individuals, and have been exposed to even more through various ProductCamps and the many teams I’ve helped as an Instructor for Pragmatic Marketing.  Based on those interactions, I’ve formed some hypothesis about what separates the good from the great in Product Management and Marketing.  What are those key abilities that the rock stars posses that enables them to crack the code and get a different set of outcomes for their products and careers?  The good news, is that there is a pattern to this leadership which we can all learn from, emulate, and use to change the trajectory of our careers as well.

When thinking of all the various people that I’ve seen across my career and what separated the great talents, I kept returning to two Product Management professionals over and over in my mind.  I’ve changed their names, but for the purpose of this conversation we’ll call them Joe and Bill.  Joe worked for me as a Product Manager on a team that I took over at a large company.  He was in his mid-thirties with about 10-12 years of experience at a broad variety of companies.  Over a period of months, Joe expressed to me time and time again that he was frustrated.  He was frustrated and worried about his job security.  In Joe’s words, he was always stuck with the “loser” projects: those products at the end of their lifecycle or moving toward end-of-life.  Products that were about to go into re-architecture mode, or that the Sales team didn’t pay attention to for whatever reason.  Joe felt like he was stuck in a rut in his career.

Bill, like Joe, was also in his mid-thirties when I met him.  Bill was one of the people that gave me a break into Product Management and hired me for one of my first roles.  At the time, he was of similar age and experience to Joe, but was on a completely different career track.  Bill’s products consistently outperformed expectations.  He was the “go-to” person for the Executive team and always seemed to have products that were on the up-swing, or 1.0 exciting products.  The executive team kept asking for his opinion and he was always pulled into executive strategy sessions to talk about potential acquisitions and new directions.  Eventually he was promoted several times before being poached by a recruiter.  Today he is a high level Product Management executive at a technology company whose name you would immediately recognize.

Two Product Management professionals: similar backgrounds, age, and experience.  Two completely different career trajectories.  Why?

HR’s Point-of-View

If you look at the world the way that HR sees it, they would tell you that as product professionals get more experience, their effectiveness increases.  That a Product Manager with 20 years of industry experience will be more effective than one with 5 years of experience.  They will also tell you that finding the one professional who is a good fit, good PM, and has 20 years of experience is almost impossible.  I am here to tell you that HR’s perspective on Product Management is wrong.  It is completely possible to be very effective as a Product Manager or Marketer with less than 20 years of experience.  Experience and effectiveness do correlate, but they are not necessarily casual.  There is something more than experience that makes leaders in Product Management and Marketing effective.

It can be very frustrating to work with someone who is a rock star.  They have seemingly cracked some secret code to being more effective.  If you’ve been to one of our Pragmatic Marketing classes, you’ve heard us talk about our framework and how product managers need to think of their jobs from Strategic to Tactical and also be business-oriented and technical-oriented.  These are tickets-to-entry for calling yourself a product management or marketing professional.  In order to go beyond, you have to look at what the rock stars are using to get a different set of results.

Thinking of Product Management and Marketing Leadership in a New Way

If you think of the skillsets that the rock stars have learned to use, either consciously or unconsciously, some of these skills are inherited.  Some skills are learned.  Some of them apply more to you as a person, and some apply more to the company/organization that you are working for a the time.  If you align these softer skills to categories, moving from inherited to learned, you find skills that are personality traits – inherent to who you are.  Next you find skills that are more learned, or picked up along the way.  Third, you find base product management skills – the skills we teach every week.  As you move more towards learned skills you find communications skills and finally a category that I refer to as Executive Acuity: the ability to be effective at the executive level.

Each of these categories multiple skill sets in each.  For example, under personality traits: are you confident in yourself and the data you bring to bear?  Are you a servant-leader?  Are you optimistic?  Under learned skills: are you a multi-vert – do you have the ability to be an extrovert and gather data from the market, then become an introvert and close the door to your office and pound out a MRD for a week?  Under product management skills: are you a measure of everything you do?  Do you have the technical chops to speak with credibility to engineering?  Under communications: are you a master listener?  Can you craft a good story?  And finally under Executive Acuity: do you have the ability to build consensus up and down the organization?  Can you debate effectively with an executive, under pressure?  Do you have empathy for how the other parts of the organization are measured and judged?

There are a lot of soft skills that the rock stars use to be more effective.  I’ve identified seven of them that I call the X-factors of Product Management, highlighted in green.  These will be the topic of several follow-up posts over the next few weeks to explain why these are so important and how we can use them to become more effective.

In the meantime, please explore the presentation linked embedded above, and leave a comment about the skills that you’ve seen the rock stars in product management that you’ve worked with use to be more effective.