Our Product Manager Skills — it’s all about chemistry

Product at Luxclusif is all about helping the company push forward and achieve business goals in a sustainable way. In short, it’s about trying to reach the difficult balancing act of vision, scalability, customer happiness and short term goals.

Still, every product comes with a specific context and story. Every product brings in a set of customers, stakeholders, business goals, development stages and challenges. The combination of the Product setting and the Product Manager is what we call chemistry.

Therefore, our Skill book has this chemistry in mind: we selected 5 hard & soft skills that allow us to select, grow and evolve our PMs in always being the right fit for the product challenge at hand.

The chosen ones — Five hard skills of Luxclusif Product Manager:

Tech Awareness

Do I need to be very technical to become a PM at Luxclusif? This is one of the most common questions. My answer is always this: my background is in Marketing, but in reality, I can get down and dirty into a technical conversation if needed, in order to provide my unique point of view to the conversation.

So what is tech awareness? It’s not ensuring you know how to code, or you can discuss and win a technical debate. Rather that you can follow the ball, step in when needed and steer the boat if appropriate.

It means you can discuss solutions in technical terms when needed, and be a strong, credible interlocutor of technical decisions. It means you understand the key aspects of technology your team talks about, and it means you can relate with the key terms that make up the tech marketing of your product.

How to succeed? Be very curious and always eager to know more from your engineering team. Learn about the building blocks of your product and deeply relate with the concepts.

Business Modeling

If you are managing a product, you need to understand end-to-end how the business works and how your product fits into the overall company strategy.

Understand the business. Understand the operation. Understand the product.

What is your market? How do you get revenue? What challenges is your company solving? What does the operation look like? What could disrupt your company? What are the main metrics of your business? Who are your customers? Who are your competitors? How does the supporting functions contribute to the business success? What makes your product interesting for the business?

Think of it as napkin math. If somebody comes up to you and asks you to explain how your product fits into the business, would you be able to explain it with ease? I bet if you answer all of the above questions, you will.

How to succeed? Always be mapping and documenting. The business is always evolving, but if you map and update the critical interactions in simple terms, and get a grasp of the main concepts, you will understand where your company is going and how you can build your product to successfully support it.

Negotiation

Product Managers spend most of their time negotiating, even if they don’t actually realize it.

Almost every conversation is about negotiating the state of things, being it timelines, scope, priorities, needs, deliverables.

We don’t look for aggressive negotiators who are always trying to “close the deal” or “get to a yes” and in the end customers hate them. We want great negotiators, always being able to navigate the turbulent seas of software development that are able to land in win-win situations.

How to succeed? As our CEO always says, if you really believe what you are proposing is the best for both sides, you will win the negotiation. So experience, empathy and transparency will get you there.

Problem Solving

Let me start by saying this:if you don’t like problem solving, PM is probably not the best career path for you.

Inside Luxclusif we are both Problem and Solution oriented. Wait.. What?

Yes. If you are not able to find solutions for your problem, you are probably understanding your problem the wrong way, so spend time in understanding it. Also, if you are stuck with a problem for too long you are not solving it correctly, so test more solutions and improve your process.

We also believe that almost everything we face is a problem yet to be solved, which means we like our Product Managers not only to stop at the software solution, but to factor the problems in processes, communications, relationships.

How to succeed? Always be solving. Don’t let problems block you. And, above all, think of problem solving as a team effort, nobody is waiting for you — and only you — to solve everything, but they expect you to come up or facilitate the process that will result in problems actually being solved.

Communication

Crisp and clever communication is deeply valued. Ensuring every audience is on the same page about your plans, ideas, product and ensuring you are marketing what you are doing or trying to do well is crucial.

Specially when backed up by strong engineering, you will see that your success will most of the time be linked with how well you are communicating or allowing communication to flow.

Being it written, verbal, visual, really any form. We want our PMs to be the storytellers of their product, team, projects, processes, being able to capture the audience towards their goals with ease.

How to succeed? I would say practice plays an important role. Pay attention to what works when you see a communication you like or somebody achieving results through great communication, break it down and learn from it.

These are the hard skills we believe in, hire for, and actively invest in to grow our Product Team.

But is this all it takes to be a PM at Luxclusif? No. We also factor in a range of soft skills, briefly summed up right here:

Risk assumption: How smart is your approach to risk taking? If too defensive you won’t see anything being done, if too offensive you will be risking the business. Balance is key.

Information monitoring: Separating the signal from the noise is like magic for a Product Manager.

Planning & Organization: Frameworks, processes, plans, need to be part of your toolkit. You are not a project manager, but you will need to wear the hat from time to time.

Emotional Intelligence: Empathy, mood swings, frustrations. Managing emotions is like managing a product in the end. Right?

Do you think you got what it takes or want to know more about our skills and how they are applied everyday by our Product Managers? Leave your comment, reach out to me or our team at hr@luxclusif.com, we’re always down for a chat!

Next week we’ll share some more with you!