What Makes a Good Product Manager

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You are a big-picture thinker. You like having clear goals. You know how to balance vision, instinct, and logic. You work best in a team of like-minded strategists and know what’s best for them. You want to be a leader. You want to create and own a product. 

If you ticked off all the points, then you have what it takes to be a good product manager. But hold on–being a product visionary–one who leads a product from its vision, to inception, to planning, and finally to execution–would need more than just ideal individual traits.

Start with a set of tools

In other words, start building your product stack. A product stack–the term borrowed from the developer community–refers to the apps, digital tools, technologies, suites and any other form of resources product managers use in their line of work. Your product stack is what you use to create the ecosystem that will then help you in your product development.

Product stacks vary in its variety and reach and are as diverse as all the products that have been developed and produced. It could be made up of Slack, for communications, and Excel, for data analysis, and there you go–your own product stack. It could also be made up of different tools for each function–it all depends on you, your team, and your product.

Below are some examples of product management tools and their functions:

  1. User tracking - Amplitude
  2. Roadmapping software - Monday.com
  3. Online survey tools - Typeform
  4. Team messaging tools - Slack
  5. Product management tools - Jira, Asana
  6. Presentation tools - PowerPoint
  7. User behaviour tools - Hotjar

 

Be data-driven

Product managers need cold, hard data to back up their decision-making. And in product management, there are decisions to be made at every point in the roadmap. A product manager equipped with a practical understanding of analytical tools and languages such as Google Analytics, Tableau, SQL and Python. It’s no secret that data analytics skills is wanted in almost every industry, and product management is not exempt. 

The process of product management involves a lot of input–from internal stakeholders, team members, and most importantly–users. Surveys and user behaviour tracking provide a lot of data to be analysed, which should be used to impact the product making itself.

 

Figure out a career path

Product management covers a wide range of industries and specialties–what is your direction? Whether you want to jump into consumer goods, technology, finance, or education, among others, there should be a linear timeline that could clearly guide you throughout your career development. Check out the map below crafted by General Assembly on what makes a product manager, the career paths as well as associated skills required to become a product leader.

 

Get certified in product management

Having a solid, end-to-end place of guidance to help you acquire technical skills as well as build up the mindset of a product manager would accelerate your new career journey. With our Product Management Bootcamp, you’ll get to build your confidence and capability in leading teams through the product life cycle and solving customer problems.

You’ll get to experience the end-to-end process of product management and apply it to a real-world scenario–from evaluating users, to roadmap management, to developing metrics and more.

Start your product management journey today. Check out the Product Management Bootcamp page and request a syllabus or talk to a member of our admissions team.


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GA Malaysia

Published on Apr 04, 2022

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