6 Key Skills to Become a Senior / Principal PM faster

What happened this week?

As I prepared for my mid-year team review, I found myself evaluating my PM team members. This process involves ranking them, identifying high performers, and those whose departure wouldn't be a major concern. Fortunately, it's a challenging exercise for me, highlighting my satisfaction with the team's overall performance.

This exercise has prompted me to define the essential skills I want PMs to develop and how to nurture these talents for a top-tier product team. I've invested significant time in it and have had insightful discussions with many PMs from other great companies. Now, I'd like to share those critical skills for accelerating your PM career.

What’s in there?

1. Leadership

2. Execution

3. Strategy

4. Communication

5. Deliver Impact

6. Leverage user insights and data

1- Leadership

This one is non-negotiable. We lead teams without authority, so strong leadership is a crucial skill for any product manager. Effective PM leadership involves inspiring teams, serving as role models, motivating engineers, spreading best practices, mentoring other PMs, and actively assisting in skill development.

Weekly Action items

• 🤝 Apply the servant-leadership principles. You are here to serve.

• 💪 Demonstrate the ability to motivate and lead a large team of engineers, designers…Focus on the WHY when talking to your team.

• 🔄 Try to spread best practices throughout the product team for collective improvement. Share tips with your team.

• 👥 Volunteer to mentor and develop other product managers.

2- Execution

This is my favorite and you want to be known for that! Execution, the ability to get things done effectively, is (to me) the second most important attribute for product managers, with many companies recognizing its significance.

Weekly Action items

• 🔍 Ensure team priorities are clear, and trade-offs are well understood. eg over-communication is good.

• 🎯 Keep the team aligned on vision, goals, and strategy over 6-month periods. eg. schedule cadence meetings to align

• 🎯 Consistently deliver on goals and strategies, even for 12-month long initiatives involving multiple teams. This is hard!

• 🛠️ Take ownership and provide explanations and rapid solutions when execution failures occur. Do not shy away from issues.

• 📢 Identify issues on time, communicate these to leadership, and develop a plan for resolution.

3.Strategy

🚀 Great strategy for Product Managers involves creating clear principles and focused strategies, connecting diverse elements for strategic impact, coaching value delivery, addressing important and unforeseen problems, and articulating a path to achieve results.

Quarterly Action items

• 📝 Develop the ability to create clear principles eg. When making decisions, always focus on A over B, roadmap principles for your stage

• 🌐 Connect the dots across pillars, industries, and trends to maximize strategic impact. eg speak higher than your current role

• 🤝 Coach teams in delivering value to customers at the right intervals.

• 🗺️ Articulate a clear path to achieve results for your product area.

4.Communication