Building Great Products with Superior Product Management Skills

Welcome and Housekeeping

Rina Alexin | 00:00:00–00:03:30 Sorry about that! As we were saying, this is Rina Alexin, I’m the CEO of Productside, and this is Roger Snyder. Good morning, everyone!

We are again so very excited to bring you the second installment of our Product Leadership webinar series. Roger will be leading you all through his expert tips on how to build great products with superior product management skills.

Before we dive into the content, let’s go over a few housekeeping items.

After this webinar, continue to stay engaged with the product management community. As product leaders, many of you share the same challenges, so get connected with your peers by joining our LinkedIn group today. In a short moment, I’ll be pasting a link for you to join our LinkedIn group where you can share best practices, talk about your issues, and get notified as we release great new content at Productside.

At Productside, we love interacting with our fans. During this webinar, we encourage you to ask questions and give us feedback. You can use the chat box located on the right of your screen to type in questions or comments at any time. We will leave time for Q&A at the end of the webinar.

We would also like to take this opportunity to answer the most popular question we receive, which is: “Can I watch this webinar later?”
Absolutely yes! All attendees will receive a link to view the webinar after the webinar has ended.

Once again, thank you for joining us today.

On the agenda for today’s webcast: first I’ll take a minute to introduce what Productside is all about, and then we’ll go over what you can expect from our Product Leadership webinar series. After that, I’ll turn things over to Roger for the main content.

About Productside and the Leadership Series

Rina Alexin | 00:03:30–00:07:00 At Productside, our mission is to empower product managers to do great product management and become product leaders.

We do that with our methodology and framework, the Optimal Product Process, or the OPP as we call it. The OPP was designed by seasoned product leaders with a combined 150 years of experience. It is a powerful framework that works for products in any industry, at any stage of the product lifecycle, and with any development methodology.

The OPP is just one example of how Productside helps transform product teams around the world. You can continue your learning after this webinar by downloading the Optimal Product Process eBook from our free resources.

We are so excited to bring you the second installment of our webinar series. We’ve really put a lot of thought into our topics. We talked with many of your peers to uncover the priorities of product leaders who want to improve their product teams.

Our Product Leadership webinar series covers critical topics across several themes. For those of you who joined us last time, we talked about how to transform teams and optimize them to produce great products. Today, we’ll be focusing on how to develop teams and skills.

Our ultimate goal, of course, is to help you and your teams build great products that delight customers.

Rina Alexin | 00:07:00–00:08:30
So, who’s in the audience today? Great question.

We took a quick look at our registration data and saw that we’ve got a great product management audience coming together: a mix of Product Owners, Product Marketing Managers, and the sweet spot is Product Managers, plus a number of leaders of Product Management — Directors and VPs of Product Management.

Thank you all for joining us today. We know you have a busy schedule.

Now I’d like to introduce Roger.

Introducing the Speaker and Session Focus

Rina Alexin | 00:08:30–00:11:00 Before joining Productside, Roger led product teams for over 15 years. He served as Senior Director and VP of Product Management at multiple firms including Openwave, Immersion, and Microsoft.

As a consultant and trainer at Productside, Roger has worked with many companies in various industries including consumer products, technology, SaaS, mobile, health, insurance, and professional services. He has used his experience to help companies improve their product strategies, development and full product lifecycle processes, and competitive and market research practices.

Roger is a member of the Association of International Product Marketing and Management, a Certified Product Manager, and an Agile Certified Product Manager and Product Owner. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Roger, take it away.

How Many Skills Does a Product Manager Need?

Roger Snyder | 00:11:00–00:14:30 Thanks very much, Rina.

All right, today we are going to talk about the skills of product management, and how you, as a Product Management leader, can put a system in place to grow those skills over time.

Before we get started though, I want to find out what folks think about the discipline of product management. There are so many different aspects of being an effective Product Manager, but let’s start with a quick poll.

The question is: how many skills do you think a Product Manager needs to be successful?

We’ve given you a couple of different choices:
– 5
– 9
– 15
– 21
– Or “too many to count”

The poll is now launched, so please select one of the options.

As the data comes in, I can already see a variety of responses. I have to say I do agree with the majority right now — but let’s give it another second because there are still responses coming in.

All right, thank you all for participating.

Roger Snyder | 00:14:30–00:16:00
So, over half of you responded with “too many to count.” And you’re right — it certainly feels that way sometimes.

There truly is a big variety of skills a Product Manager needs to have. But what we tried to do was quantify it a bit, to make it more tangible and more measurable.

We boiled it down to 15 skill sets for a Product Manager. I hope most of these skills are things you’re familiar with, but I’m going to go into a bit more detail so we’re all on the same page about what we mean by some of them.

As you can see, we split these skills into two major categories: hard skills and soft skills.

Hard Skills of Product Management

Roger Snyder | 00:16:00–00:21:30 Let’s talk first about the hard skills.

These include things like:
– Market Research
– Competitive Analysis
– Pricing
– Product Roadmapping
– Requirements and User Stories
– Launch and Go-to-Market
– Managing End-of-Life
– Analytics and Performance Measurement

I’m going to highlight a couple of them.

First, business skills. Often, Product Managers come from a technical background and may have less understanding of the broader business context of the products they’re working on.

Business skills include understanding:
– How your product fits into your customer’s business
– How your product helps them improve their operations or outcomes
– How your product contributes to your own company’s strategic objectives

You need to be able to think in terms of return on investment. Is this a profitable product? Are your costs going up every year? How do you manage those costs? Are you helping your customers improve revenue, reduce cost, or reduce risk?

Business skills are about being able to understand both your customers’ business and your own.

Another hard skill that’s often neglected is end-of-life.

End-of-life is a critical skill. We often say in our training that end-of-life is like launching a product in reverse. During that process, you need to maintain customer loyalty and increase the lifetime value of that customer to your company, even as you take them through a transition.

You may have to take a product off the shelf, or in software terms, migrate customers to the next version. How do you do that in a structured way that satisfies your customers’ needs and keeps them loyal?

Most Product Managers don’t spend enough time on this, so I want to call it out as a distinct skill.

I think the rest of the hard skills are relatively straightforward: things like defining requirements, working with development, planning releases, and so forth.

Soft Skills of Product Management

Roger Snyder | 00:21:30–00:26:00 Now let’s turn our attention to the soft skills.

As much as product management needs to be a data-driven profession, one where you’re making decisions based on facts and information, you also have to have these soft and leadership skills.

Soft skills include:
– Communication
– Leadership and Influence
– Stakeholder Management
– Collaboration
– Domain Knowledge
– Customer Knowledge

Leadership is about knowing how to get a group of people together and form a common cause, so they’re all engaged and excited to work with you to take a product to market. That requires communication, influence without authority, and the ability to listen and synthesize.

Domain knowledge is knowing your market, your industry, your technology space. Yes, some of that comes from hard data and research, but the soft-skill side is about turning that understanding into compelling narratives and strategies that align your cross-functional teams and your executives.

Customer knowledge is a huge one. This is not just reading a survey. It’s about getting in front of customers, having real conversations, and observing them using your product and doing their work. It’s about developing empathy and insight.

As Rina mentioned earlier, these soft skills are so important that we actually offer an entire one-day course just on soft skills for Product Managers.

Benchmarking Product Management Skills

Roger Snyder | 00:26:00–00:31:00 Earlier this year, we conducted a survey to get a sense of where people are on these 15 skill sets.

This slide shows the results of our benchmark — the average skill levels across all the Product Managers who took the survey.

I’m not going to go into detail on every skill, but I do want to point out the top and bottom skills. As a leader of a Product Management team, those are the skills you probably want to focus on.

The good news: most Product Managers seem to excel at understanding their customers, understanding their marketplace, and communicating. That’s great news.

It’s not terribly surprising that domain knowledge scores high, because many Product Managers start as engineers, consultants, or marketers working around the product before moving into product management.

What’s encouraging is that customer understanding and communication are also strong.

Now, on the other side of the chart, we saw three skills that came in lowest:
– End-of-life
– Competitive Analysis
– Pricing

End-of-life being low didn’t surprise me, because most Product Managers underinvest in that. But it was more surprising that many didn’t feel strong in Competitive Analysis and Pricing.

And those are critical skills if you want your product to stand out.

Competitive Analysis is what helps you understand:
– What your customers truly value
– How your competitors are delivering against those dimensions of value
– Where you can differentiate and win

Pricing is about:
– Capturing the right amount of monetary value for the value you deliver
– Avoiding leaving money on the table
– Avoiding pricing so high that you price yourself out of key segments

So, these benchmark results give us a baseline.

Skill Expectations by Experience Level

Roger Snyder | 00:31:00–00:35:00 Then we took the benchmark data and sliced it by years of experience.

This is important for you as a Product Management leader, so you can set the right expectations for the different members of your team.

We split the data into three buckets:
– Early Product Managers: less than 5 years of experience
– Experienced Product Managers: 5 to 10 years of experience
– Senior Product Managers: 11 or more years of experience

Early Product Managers scored about 11% below the overall average benchmark across the 15 skills. That makes sense — they’re still learning, still building their toolkit.

Experienced Product Managers scored about 6% above the average. Senior Product Managers scored roughly 19% above the average.

So there’s about a 17-point swing from early-career PMs to experienced PMs, and an even larger gap for senior PMs.

As a Product Management leader, if you have a mix of PMs with different years of experience, you can use this kind of data to calibrate your expectations.

You wouldn’t expect a first- or second-year Product Manager to perform at the same level on pricing strategy or product lifecycle management as a 12-year veteran. But you would expect growth over time.

And you can also look at specific skill areas where certain people are strong or weak, relative to their peer group.

Five Keys to Growing Product Management Talent

Roger Snyder | 00:35:00–00:37:00 So the big question becomes: how do we get better?

As a leader of a Product Management team, what can you do to systematically improve your team’s skills?

Based on my 15+ years running product teams, I’ve boiled this down to five “T’s” — five keys to building stronger Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers:

Team Culture of Learning – establish a true learning culture

Training and Learning Methods – provide multiple ways to learn

Testing and Certification – use certification as a motivating challenge

Timing with Business Cycles – align learning with your company’s annual rhythm

Translate Learning into Practice – put the learning to work right away

We’re going to walk through each of these in turn.

Establishing a Learning Culture

Roger Snyder | 00:37:00–00:42:30 Let’s start with the first key: establishing a learning culture.

I drew on my own experience running teams, but I also wanted a solid framework. So I looked at research from Harvard Business Review, where Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Josh Bersin wrote about four ways to build a learning culture.

Those four elements are:

Reward continuous learning

Give meaningful and constructive feedback

Lead by example

Hire curious people

When I read that article, it really clicked. It matched what I’d seen in my own teams.

We actually ran a quick poll with our audience, asking: “How many of these four do you feel your organization does well?”

If you count up:
– Do you reward continuous learning?
– Do you give meaningful and constructive feedback?
– Do your leaders lead by example?
– Do you explicitly hire curious people?

Most people fell in the middle: “a little” or “some.” Very few said “not at all,” but equally few said “very much.” That tells us there’s a lot of room for improvement.

So how do you put these four into practice?

Rewarding Continuous Learning

Roger Snyder | 00:42:30–00:48:00 First, **reward continuous learning.**

Here are some practical ways to do that:

– Recognize victories — and connect them to specific skills.
As a leader, whenever one of your Product Managers achieves a major accomplishment, of course you want to celebrate it. But go a step further: call out which skill made the difference.

For example:
“As a result of the competitive analysis that Jane conducted, we now understand what to build in this new release. That analysis was a key driver of our strategy.”

When you do that, the whole team hears that you value learning and applying specific skills.

– Encourage specialists and cross-training.
You’ve got 15 skills — not everyone can, or should, be world-class at all 15. Some PMs will naturally gravitate toward pricing, others toward customer research, others toward go-to-market.

Encourage Product Managers to lean into their strengths and share them. Set up opportunities where the PM who is great at pricing teaches the rest of the team. The one who loves competitive analysis shares her methods. That raises the baseline for everyone.

– Spotlight learning with internal white papers or lunch-and-learns.
If you send a PM to a pricing conference, don’t let the learning stay inside their head. Ask them to come back and do a short lunch-and-learn:
“Here’s what I learned. Here’s how we might apply it here.”

For those who are less comfortable presenting, have them write a short internal white paper. It doesn’t have to be long, just focused.

– Value the best ideas from anywhere.
Product Managers can get very passionate — and sometimes very narrow — about their product. A true learning culture means that if a customer support rep has a brilliant idea, or a salesperson sees a pattern in the field, you take that seriously.

When you spotlight good ideas from everywhere, people start looking for good ideas everywhere.

– And yes, use raises and bonuses — but last.
We eventually get to money. Many organizations give a salary bump for an MBA. You can do similar things for certifications or substantial learning achievements.

But study after study shows that internal motivation and recognition matter more than money alone. So use financial rewards, but don’t make them the only or primary lever.

And one important note: this doesn’t change overnight. Continuous learning as a culture takes months, even years, to develop. You have to be patient and persistent.

Giving Meaningful, Constructive Feedback

Roger Snyder | 00:48:00–00:52:00 The second piece is **meaningful and constructive feedback.**

A lot of people struggle with giving constructive feedback. They don’t want to hurt feelings or create tension. But done well, feedback is an essential part of a learning culture.

A few tips:

– Celebrate successes publicly; coach improvements privately.
Praise in public, coach in private. Publicly, be specific about the success:
“Great job on that launch. Because of your work, we saw a 3% increase in market share.”

Privately, when something needs improvement, make it a conversation, not a verdict.

– Support your feedback with specific examples.
Vague feedback like “You need to communicate better” isn’t actionable.
Instead: “In the roadmap review yesterday, you jumped straight into features before explaining the customer problem. That made it harder for the sales team to connect the dots.”

– Co-create an improvement plan.
Don’t dictate a fix. Ask: “How do you think you could improve here?”
Then collaborate on a plan. Maybe it’s reading a book, taking a course, practicing in lower-risk settings, or getting a mentor.

– Agree on metrics and checkpoints.
Set a time frame, like: “Let’s check in on this in two months.”
Agree on how you’ll know it’s better — maybe through feedback from stakeholders, or observing them in another big meeting.

And do this regularly. Don’t save feedback for an annual performance review. Ideally, you’re giving bite-sized feedback continuously — and tying it back to skill growth.

Leading by Example and Hiring Curious People

Roger Snyder | 00:52:00–00:55:30 The third element is **leading by example.**

As a Product Management leader, you don’t get to sit back and just tell people to learn. You have to demonstrate that you’re learning, too.

A few ways to do that:

– Set your own learning goals.
Maybe you want to deepen your understanding of account-based marketing, or modern pricing strategies, or SaaS metrics. Write those goals down.

– Hold yourself accountable.
Share your learning goals with a peer or your own manager. Ask them to check in with you. It’s like going to the gym with a buddy.

– Show how you’re applying what you’ve learned.
Come back from a conference and say:
“Here’s what I learned, and here’s one change I’m going to make in how we operate.”

When your team sees you investing in your own learning, it reinforces that this is part of the culture, not just lip service.

The fourth element is hiring curious people.

For Product Management, I’d say this is non-negotiable. Curiosity is at the heart of the job.

In interviews, you can look for curiosity by:
– Asking them to walk through how they’d understand a new problem
– Seeing if they ask you good questions
– Asking what they’re reading or learning right now
– Asking what blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or books they follow

If someone isn’t naturally curious, they’re going to struggle in a role where the whole job is discovering problems and exploring solutions.

And once they’re on the team, if you find there isn’t a fit — if someone isn’t learning, isn’t improving, isn’t engaged — don’t just suffer a poor fit. That undercuts your learning culture.

Providing Varied Learning Opportunities

Roger Snyder | 00:55:30–01:00:00 The second “T” is **Training and Learning Methods** — providing a variety of learning opportunities.

Everyone learns differently. Some people are great at self-paced learning; others thrive in interactive, live environments.

Here are some ways to support different learning styles:

– Create an open team library of resources.
That could be an actual bookshelf in your office, or a shared digital space. Stock it with books on product management, strategy, pricing, analytics, UX, leadership.

– Build a shared repository of online resources.
Use your intranet, SharePoint, Notion — whatever you use. Encourage everyone on the team to drop in interesting articles, talks, podcasts. Make it easy to browse.

– Encourage attendance at webinars and podcasts.
Webinars are a low-cost, low-friction way to learn. Podcasts are great for commutes or walks.

– Make mentoring a norm.
Encourage your PMs to find mentors — inside or outside the company — for areas where they want to grow. Provide some guidance on how to be a good mentee.

– Offer multiple training formats.
Some people do well with self-paced online courses. Others benefit from live, virtual instructor-led training. Others get the most value from on-site workshops with the whole team.

A nice pattern is:
– Use on-site training to set a baseline for everyone
– Use online training to onboard new hires or go deeper in specific areas
– Use mentoring, reading, and practice to keep growing over time

Justifying the Learning Budget

Roger Snyder | 01:00:00–01:04:30 Of course, all of this raises a very practical question: **how do I justify the learning budget?**

People sometimes say, “Training is expensive.” And it can be.

But I love this quote:

“Education is expensive. The only thing more expensive is ignorance.”

In today’s competitive market, if you’re not investing in your Product Managers’ skills, you’re falling behind.

We’ve seen from our own data that:
– Skills can increase by 30–49% when teams go through good training and improve their product processes
– The weakest skills (Competitive Analysis, Pricing, End-of-Life) tend to improve the most
– Soft skills like leadership also rise as confidence grows

External studies back this up. Accenture did a “Return on Learning” study and found that training produced a 353% return on investment — for every dollar spent on learning, they saw about $4.53 in measurable value.

On top of that, our surveys of clients show that companies see profit increases in the range of 5% to 34%, depending on their size and context, when they invest in product management capabilities.

So when you go to your leadership to ask for a learning or professional development budget, don’t frame it as a cost. Frame it as an investment, with data to support it.

Certification as a Motivating Challenge

Roger Snyder | 01:04:30–01:07:30 The third “T” is **Testing and Certification**.

Certification can be a powerful motivator and a useful structure for learning.

Here’s why:

– A deadline creates focus.
When you know you’re going to sit an exam on a specific date, you plan your study. You don’t just say, “I’ll get to it someday.”

– A tough exam encourages deeper learning.
If the exam is easy, you can cram the night before and forget it a week later. If it’s challenging, you have to really understand the material.

– Certification signals mastery.
Certifications like AIPMM’s Certified Product Manager or Scrum.org’s Product Owner certification signal that you’ve achieved a recognized standard.

– You can reward certification.
You can incorporate certification into career paths:
“To move from Associate Product Manager to Product Manager, we expect you to achieve this certification.”

And again, combine this with your learning culture:
– Provide time and resources for people to prepare
– Recognize and celebrate when they pass
– Tie it to growth and opportunity, not just a badge

Aligning Learning with Business Cycles

Roger Snyder | 01:07:30–01:12:00 The fourth “T” is **Timing with Business Cycles**.

Every company has a rhythm — an annual cycle of activities — and you can use that to time your learning investments.

Let me give you an example from a previous company where I led the Product Management team.

Our year typically looked like this:
– January: Sales Kickoff
– January & March: Major industry trade shows
– Mid-year: Regional sales roadshows and customer visits
– September/October: Strategic planning for the next year
– November/December: Budget approval and final forecasting

Once you map out your company’s calendar, you can line up learning that will make each of those activities more effective.

For example:
– Before Sales Kickoff, invest in sales enablement training for your PMs.
– Before major trade shows, sharpen your positioning and messaging skills.
– Before roadshows, train on customer interviews and discovery techniques.
– Before strategic planning, level up market analysis and competitive research.
– Before budgeting, train on forecasting and financial modeling.

That way, you’re not just randomly sending people to courses — you’re aligning learning with the moments when those skills will have the highest impact.

This also helps you justify the timing and budget:
“We want to spend X in Q3 so our team is ready to lead the strategic planning process in Q4.”

Putting Learning to Work Immediately

Roger Snyder | 01:12:00–01:15:30 The fifth and final “T” is **Translate Learning into Practice** — put learning to work right away.

Whenever someone:
– Attends a conference
– Completes a course
– Finishes a certification
– Reads a high-impact book

You want to ask: “Where can we apply this now?”

A few ideas:
– Assign them a project where they must use the new skill
– Have them run a small experiment using what they’ve learned
– Ask them to lead a change in a process or template based on their learning
– Host a lunch-and-learn where they share the key insights and propose one concrete change

This does a few things:
– It deepens their understanding through practice
– It gives them a quick win and builds confidence
– It helps the rest of the team benefit from their learning
– It gives you tangible proof points to show leadership when they ask, “What did we get from this training budget?”

And that loops us right back into the learning culture cycle.

Bringing It All Together

Roger Snyder | 01:15:30–01:18:00 So, let’s recap what we’ve covered today.

We started by looking at:
– The 15 key skills of Product Management — hard and soft
– The benchmark for where PMs tend to be strong (customers, communication, domain) and where they tend to be weaker (competitive analysis, pricing, end-of-life)
– How skill levels differ by years of experience, and how that can help you set realistic expectations

Then we talked through the five T’s for developing a stronger product team:

Team Culture of Learning
– Reward continuous learning
– Give meaningful, constructive feedback
– Lead by example
– Hire curious people

Training and Learning Methods
– Provide varied opportunities: books, blogs, webinars, mentoring, courses

Testing and Certification
– Use certification as a motivating challenge and a signal of mastery

Timing with Business Cycles
– Align learning investments with your company’s annual rhythm

Translate Learning into Practice
– Put what you learn to work immediately, and share it with the team

My challenge to you is this:
Before today is over, write down one specific action you’re going to take to improve your Product Management team’s skills — something related to culture, training, certification, timing, or practice.

Q&A and Closing

Rina Alexin | 01:18:00–01:20:30 Thank you, Roger. That was fantastic.

We’ve had several questions come in, so let’s tackle a couple before we wrap up.

One question was:
“If there is one piece of learning you would recommend for a Product Manager, what would it be?”

Roger Snyder | 01:20:30–01:23:00
Great question.

If I had to pick just one, I would probably say: voice of the customer and customer discovery.

You simply can’t make good product decisions if you don’t deeply understand your customers’ problems, pain points, and needs. That means learning how to:
– Ask good, open-ended questions
– Listen more than you talk
– Observe customers actually doing their work
– Avoid leading questions and confirmation bias

If you combine strong customer discovery skills with solid competitive analysis, you’ll dramatically improve your product decisions.

Rina Alexin | 01:23:00–01:25:00
We also had a question about getting into the Product Management role when you only have startup experience.

Our advice there is:
– Start by helping the existing Product Managers at your company
– Volunteer to do projects like competitive research or customer interviews
– Build a track record of product thinking where you are
– It’s often easier to move into a PM role at your current company than to switch companies and roles at the same time

Roger Snyder | 01:25:00–01:27:30
Exactly. Find ways to demonstrate that you can think like a Product Manager — understand customers, analyze markets, and make tradeoffs.

And for leaders, if you see people like that in your organization, invest in them. Give them opportunities to step into product responsibilities.

Rina Alexin | 01:27:30–01:30:00
We’re almost at time, so I want to wrap up.

First, thank you so much for joining us today. We had a great time talking about concrete tips for building up your team’s product management skills.

As a reminder, all attendees will receive a follow-up email with:
– A link to watch the webinar recording
– A link to the Product Management Skills Assessment benchmark report
– A link to take the free assessment yourself

We also invite you to join us for our next webinar in the Product Leadership series:
“Product Success in 2020: Six Trends You Must Track.”
Roger will be back to talk about tech, market, and practice trends that may have a big impact on your products.

Thank you again, everyone. Have a great day and a great rest of your week!

Roger Snyder | 01:30:00–01:31:00
Thanks, everyone. Take care, and happy product managing!