The Biz of Coding

What Makes a Great Product Manager?

by Ujwal Tickoo on November 25th, 2006

If I had to use just 2 words to describe a great Product Manager I would say:

1. Vision
2. Execution

To be a great Product Manager you need to be a visionary and then be able to execute like crazy. I have met many people at work, during interviews or at conferences who are great visionaries. They can talk easily at 30,000 feet. But ask them to come closer to ground level and they either lack interest or fail to convert their grand vision into a tangible, deliverable and compelling product idea for real users.

Without the skill of execution, all vision is talk. Blah, blah blah…

Execution requires patience and an attention to detail to all things that could possibly mess the product. At the outset — it requires doing the hard work of writing product specifications, creating a business plan, and working with Engineering and Quality to refine the feature set. It requires reviewing your product often, seeking it crash and following up like crazy with the development team. It involves release and roadmap planning, customer support planning, writing PR copy, working with sales and marketing to get the launch details right…And even when the product gets released the Product Manager’s work hasn’t been completed!

Now the Product Manager must begin collecting user feedback and doing a bunch of analysis. How well is the product doing, is there a need to do a quick bug fix release?

All the vision in the world, cannot bring an idea to life without the nerves, attention, perseverence and patience to execute. All the execution skill in the world — cannot build a compelling product vision and strategy. Creating a compelling strategy requires a *lot* of hard work.

Vision + Execution *together* define a great Product Manager!

Also of interest Qualities of a Product Manager Practical Product Management — Giving the Bad News Software Product Management

POSTED IN: Product Management