Below I outline a list of key traits that make great product managers that I found across the internet along with my thoughts on them. To supplement this assignment, I also spent some time updating my LinkedIn profile, aiming to weave in some of these traits into my experience descriptions.
Grade for this assignment: 85/100 (good effort).
In no particular order…
- Great product managers are future-focused, often employing big-picture thinking and disruptive visioning. Honestly… this is great for certain products, but for a lot of the product roles I’ve seen at my company and beyond it wouldn’t actually be that important to do these things. Or maybe it’s more critical for more senior product positions and I just haven’t had enough exposure to that yet.
- They inspire their teams to be great. I have often seen that the product managers on tech teams tend to fill the “champion of culture” position, and I feel like truly inspiring teams to be great starts with boosting morale, trust, and interconnectedness on teams by championing team culture.
- They are great at writing & storytelling. I strongly agree with this and try to focus heavily on this in my current role by taking every opportunity I can find to practice communicating and get feedback.
- They drive impact, optimize solutions, and are really good at prioritizing. This feels elemental to success in product management, and good product managers I’ve worked with have a really strong instinct for prioritization and optimization. That said, I feel like this is a skill that can definitely be learned over time.
- They are skilled at making fast-paced, high quality decisions. To a certain extent I feel like this is an innate personality trait, though I do think someone could improve on this over time.
- They have really strong follow-through and make stuff happen; they also do so while being detail-oriented. Again, this feels like a mostly innate personality trait that can be grown some over time.
- They have a refined taste in product quality. While some people naturally have this trait, I think over time someone working intensely in a specific industry or on a specific product will develop an appreciation for high quality design of that sort.
- They have a deep fluency in data. I would add to this that a great product manager would not just have a fluency in data but also a deep motivation to seek it out and incorporate insights into decisions.
- They are tech focused and have strong partnerships with tech. The importance of this probably varies across different products but given the nature of almost all products these days centering around software or technology it’s probably a pretty ubiquitously useful trait.
- They obsess about customers and love getting feedback. I really think this could be one of the most differentiating traits in product managers – great product managers will be literally excited to learn more about their customers, and it makes their products great.
Stay tuned for specific tips on how to improve some of these traits in upcoming assignments.
Thanks for reading.
Works Cited
Weiss, Noah. “10 Traits of Great PMs.” Medium. 18 October 2018. https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/10-traits-of-great-pms-a7776cd3d9cd.
“What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%?” Quora. https://www.quora.com/Product-Management/What-distinguishes-the-Top-1-of-product-managers-from-the-Top-10.
BYOMSPM 
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