This past week a friend ask me to review his resume for product management jobs, and in giving him feedback I was reminded of how I answered an interview question a few years ago. The question was: “What makes a Good PM? What makes a Bad PM?” I can only assume the question is an allusion to Ben Horowitz’s famous blog post. It’s a good question, and every product manager has a different answer since there are so many diverse jobs and skillsets within the product management community. It is worth understanding your own answer, and, even though it is always evolving, here is mine at the moment.

I believe a good product manager has the following skills, in the order (usually!) that their job calls for them: user centricity, informed decision making, collaboration and leadership, and execution.

User centricity

Being user-centric has almost become overused in the tech industry, but it is true that to be a great PM, one must know one’s customers’ values, motivations and incentives in order to build the a great product for them, despite tradeoffs (there are always tradeoffs!). Understanding the full system allows product managers to make good decisions, which leads us to…

Informed decision making

Great PMs make use of quantitative and qualitative analysis to build strong frameworks where they can make decisions and thus set meaningful strategy. To gather information and conduct the analysis, PMs must also be great at…

Collaboration and leadership

PMs need to know how to work with designers, engineers, marketers, researchers, salespeople, etc. PMs need to know the lingo of the various disciplines at their company in order to make tactical and strategic decisions. They need to be able to rally their team to solve a user problem. To do that efficiently, they need to know their team’s motivations and incentives such that the team can also excel at…

Execution

PMs need to be able to define how to tactically achieve their strategy. This means great communication, good goal setting with the correct metric, efficient meetings and demos, ability to keep work on track, planning tasks and deadlines well, flexible and creative problem solving. They resolve conflict, give feedback, and are always clear and methodical. They energize their team to get a task done.

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In conclusion, a PM needs to be a creative, collaborative and analytical doer.