Why a product manager's soft skills are 10x more important than their hard skills
The five soft skills good PMs need to be successful.
This season I’ve been straddling two worlds with two very different product minded folks:
Graduating students eager to leap into the coveted product role at Cornell Tech (my class was quickly waitlisted - people really want to Break Into Product)
Burnt out product leaders facing disillusionment with the role and discontent with their career through my coaching practice and Product Leader NYC Breakfast Series
It’s gotten me wondering: is this just the natural progression of any career path or is it specific to product management?
Objectively, product management is a competitive, high pressure role. Often, PMs are billed as “CEOs1” of the product without having actual authority of the people they need to ship a successful product. Companies evaluate PMs on hard skills - MBA degrees and technical experience preferred - and mostly care if you’ve launched a real product to real customers. They care most if you’ve moved a top line metric, launched a revenue stream or reimagined the business from the ground up.
But, the reality is that shipping a product doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It happens when you corral a group of humans together. Often, it's a group with differing incentives, backgrounds and personal goals. And these days, it's stymied by having to do it all over remote technology, where we’ve lost the ability to read basic body signals, emotional cues and intonation2. During interviews, companies ask throw away questions like “how do you collaborate/negotiate/handle conflict” to make sure you get along with other people. They’re often secondary to the hard skills questions.
But…isn’t getting along with other people the whole job?
From the moment you get past the pivotal case study interview, where you’ve demonstrated you can build a business plan, it becomes less about those hard skills and all about how to get people to move in the same direction.
And to move in that direction peacefully while honoring the founder/CEO’s vision.
It’s often an impossible line to walk.
It’s something I felt in many corporate product roles, but more pointedly observed when I started coaching other PMs. Hell, it's why I named this Substack Product Therapy.
People “walk in my door” asking for help on the hard skills i.e. I need to build a go-to-market plan. But eventually, what I observe as the challenging parts are the relational aspects of the skill they’re looking to strengthen. Not just how do I build it but how do I negotiate the different needs, accommodate the big personalities and sell my vision to everyone. It’s in these relational soft skills that cause the most stress, imposter syndrome and intense burnout.
It’s why I believe and often talk about how a good PM doesn’t need to know the hard skills, like how to code or run a sql query.
Most urgently, PM’s need stronger soft skills.
So, in no particular order, these are the top 5 soft skills PMs need to be successful.
Influencing Without Authority
I named this one after a Learning & Development course I took at Spotify by the same name. It was one of the stickiest career development activities I’ve ever participated in. I spent 2 days at an overnight offsite in Tarrytown, NY talking body language, practicing active listening and working to create incentive alignment. The course wasn’t so special in nature, but it had a profound impact on how I think about the product role.
As a PM you have no tangible output. Yes you have docs, oh do you have docs, but you are continuously coalescing docs of other people’s discrete outputs, like designs, code, UX content, etc. This coupled with the fact that these people usually don’t report to you makes for a dicey situation.
I liken it to how I felt as the “bus counselor” when I worked at a day camp3 in high school. My attempts at telling kids to sit down while the bus was moving paled in comparison to the violent screech of the bus driver’s yell when we turned sharp corners around the neighborhood. The campers didn’t see me as an authoritative figure. They saw me as an overgrown camper handing out pretzel rods.
The Product role is really about getting everyone to sit down on the bus when they technically don’t have to. It’s about identifying an engineer’s incentives and connecting them with a designer’s incentives and convincing all of them that the path you’re on serves both of their needs. It’s a bit of politics. A bit of sales. It’s a lot of shepherding. And, it's a whole lot of nagging. It can be exhausting, but your ability to do this in a sustainable way will determine your success as a PM.
Evangelizing and active listening
I recently wrote about why your communications aren’t landing with your coworkers, so I’ll keep this one brief and link you out to the full read. How you share your message and your ability to shape it to different audiences, different mediums and do it over and over again will determine your ability to communicate your goals. You need to think of your coworkers as your customers. They need the catchy hook, they need solutions that meet their problems and they need to hear it more than once.
How you listen to your coworkers, show them empathy and make space for them matters just as much. Back in the day, when I worked with smaller teams, I maintained regular 1:1s with each member of my team - from design to QA to engineer. We rarely spoke of what we were building in those meetings. I just gave each of them space to share what was working and what wasn’t. I fostered trustworthy relationships that couldn’t be built in group settings alone. It was a luxury (the time, that is) that I wouldn’t have for forever, but it was hugely important in my ability to move my team in lockstep when we were shipping great products.
And we shipped AWESOME products. There was confetti. Shoutout to the Upload Squad. I still miss you all.
Negotiating like a Boss
I famously hate sales. I hate the give and take and the icky bits of negotiating. But I quickly learned mid-career that my ability to negotiate would determine my success as a PM.
I learned that just because some coworkers have law degrees doesn’t mean I had to give up what I was building entirely. I learned it a few times over at many companies actually. And I learned it at work despite my family being filled with lawyers4.
I learned from some of the best product leaders the art of give and take and that no contract is too scary for me to sink my teeth into. I learned that legalese is still English and that asking questions isn’t a bad thing, it's an empowering thing that gives you the ability to better advocate for your customer/team’s needs.
Good PMs don’t take no for an answer. They also don’t die on dumb hills. They sink their teeth into the why and borrow from their scrappy, experimental practice to artfully give and take when the going gets tough. Aka when the legal team tries to shut down your project5.
Your ability to engage forcefully and respectfully with non product development obstacles will determine your success as a product leader.
Leading with a point of view
Mid-career, I got recurring feedback from a string of managers (I had 4 in 2 years time, *sigh*) that I was failing to lead with my perspective. I was skeptical of this feedback, but I was also self aware enough to know that my midwestern-ness was showing.
I was so scared to disagree with people and mostly, scared of being wrong.
Leading with a point of view is downright vulnerable. Sadly the alternative is being the indecisive doormat. It doesn’t bode well. I promise. I did it for many years.
My secret to leading with a point of view is simply in showing your work. There’s many ways to do this but I love a decision making framework that incorporates both your leading opinion alongside all the other options you considered and nixed.
Good PMs aren’t scared to be wrong but they’re not threatened when they’re wrong either.
Maintaining an agile mindset
Years ago, I worked for a very top down organization. After months of using data to launch a site redesign, a leader overrode a data driven design choice. I was visibly fuming during the meeting. My manager at the time, bless their soul, pulled me aside after and told me I needed some poker face. It was one of the most important workplace lessons I learned6 - not to wear my emotions, disappointment and frustration so overtly on my sleeve.
The reality is that PMs have all the responsibility without the authority. Remember, influence without authority from above? Often, despite our best efforts, it's the leaders making a final call, even when you courageously lead with your point of view as a PM.
Being a PM requires an agility muscle that's tough enough to withstand the overrides and the pivots. It’s getting everyone moving in the same direction, only to have to hold up the “shit umbrella”7 when that idea gets rained on. That agility and resilience isn’t PM specific of course, but it makes weathering the pressures of the role a lot easier when those muscles are strong.
…
Did you make it to the end and are you asking yourself, wait Jori, hard skills?!
Yes. They are hugely important. But perhaps radically for some, to me, they pale in comparison to the relational, soft skills that you need in order to survive in the high pressure role that is product management.
What do you think?
How important are soft skills compared to hard skills?
Isn’t it ironic they’re called soft skills if they’re so important?
Hey I’m Jori and I empower product leaders and teams to catalyze their product practice and drive real outcomes (not outputs) for customers. Come say hi.
I think this is technically passé now but I’m sure its still being said somewhere in the universe.
Shout out to voice notes. My preferred way of communication.
Shout out to Apachi Day Camp. Thanks for my first lesson in influencing without authority.
I am NOT great at negotiating with this set of lawyers.
Your data privacy laws won’t hold us back, Germany!
Second only to “die before you cry” - which, despite my best efforts, I violated many times.
Thank you to the last Product Breakfast for giving this experience this amazing name ☔️