How can you improve your product management skills with self-awareness?
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Product management is a complex and challenging role that requires a range of skills and competencies, from technical knowledge and market research to communication and leadership. But one of the most important and often overlooked skills is self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and biases, and how they affect your behavior and decisions. In this article, you will learn how self-awareness can help you improve your product management skills in four key areas: stakeholder management, team collaboration, user empathy, and product vision.
As a product manager, you have to deal with various stakeholders, such as customers, users, executives, developers, designers, marketers, and salespeople. Each of them has different expectations, needs, opinions, and interests, and you have to balance them and align them with your product goals. To do this effectively, you need to be aware of your own communication style, preferences, assumptions, and triggers, and how they might influence or conflict with others. For example, are you more assertive or passive, more analytical or intuitive, more direct or diplomatic, more optimistic or realistic? How do you handle feedback, criticism, or conflict? How do you persuade, negotiate, or influence others? By being more self-aware, you can adapt your approach to different situations and personalities, and build trust, rapport, and respect with your stakeholders.
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Megan Shulby
Associate Director @ AT&T Business | Advanced Analytics, Product Management | Drives 30% reduction in product development for businesses
Stakeholder management is a two-way road. You need to be aware of not only how you communicate and interact but also aware of how others communicate and interact. From there, you need to flex your communication style to align with the stakeholders but to do this you need to practice consistent self-awareness. It’s a delicate but critical skill.
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Joao Moita
Founder | Product Manager | Building the Product Weekend 🚀
Understanding yourself, recognizing your emotions and your communication style, is the very first step in understanding others effectively and consistently.
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Raj Kumar Sekar
Product Manager with a Passion for Product Innovation @Salzer Technologies
Self-awareness is the ability to understand your own strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and biases. It is an essential skill for product managers, as it allows you to make better decisions, build stronger relationships with stakeholders, and create better products. Here are some ways to improve your product management skills with self-awareness: Reflect on your performance. Get feedback from others. Identify your biases. Develop a personal development plan. Once you have a better understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and biases, you can develop a personal development plan to improve your product management skills. Set specific goals and identify the steps that you need to take to achieve them.
As a product manager, you also have to work closely with your product team, which consists of developers, designers, testers, and other roles. You have to lead them, motivate them, empower them, and support them throughout the product development process. To do this effectively, you need to be aware of your own leadership style, strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots, and how they might affect your team's performance and morale. For example, are you more visionary or pragmatic, more strategic or tactical, more delegating or micromanaging, more empowering or controlling? How do you set goals, prioritize tasks, provide feedback, resolve issues, or celebrate successes? By being more self-aware, you can leverage your strengths, address your weaknesses, and foster a positive and productive team culture.
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Cody Reeves
Product | Technology | Process @codreev
The crux of self-awareness in team collaboration lies in understanding that your natural tendencies directly affect team dynamics. A product manager who is aware of their own inclinations toward certain leadership styles can adjust to bring out the best in the team. This might mean: A - Stepping back for self-reflection when a project isn't going as planned. B - Recognizing when personal biases may be clouding judgment on a team member's ideas or performance. C - Actively seek diverse perspectives and challenge your own decision-making process. The strength of a product is as much a reflection of the team's collaborative effort as it is of the manager's guidance, making self-awareness an essential product management process.
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Mark McHugh
Product Manager - Global & EMEA | Medical Devices | Endoscopy | Urology | Pelvic Health | MedTech Strategy | Product Management | Marketing | Launch Excellence
Effective team collaboration as a product manager requires a combination of self-awareness, clear communication, empowerment, proactive issue resolution, celebration of individual and team successes, adaptability and a commitment to ongoing team and personal development. By prioritizing these aspects, you can create a positive and productive team culture, driving successful product development outcomes.
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Prapti Jain
Fintech & AI Product Manager - IDfy | Juspay | ISRO
Collaborating with multiple teams is at the core of a PMs role. It is the unsaid responsibility to see that the team is aligned with the mission and vision of the company and the product, while also seeing that any arising conflicts are resolved and a healthy environment is maintained with the team being motivated!
As a product manager, you have to understand your users, their problems, needs, goals, behaviors, and preferences, and deliver solutions that solve their pain points and delight them. To do this effectively, you need to be aware of your own user perspective, assumptions, and biases, and how they might differ from or distort your users' reality. For example, are you more familiar or unfamiliar with your users' domain, context, or environment? Are you more similar or dissimilar to your users' demographics, psychographics, or characteristics? Are you more influenced by your own opinions, experiences, or preferences, or by data, research, or feedback? By being more self-aware, you can avoid projecting your own assumptions or biases onto your users, and instead empathize with them, validate your hypotheses, and test your solutions.
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Wajih ur Rehman
Getting Things DONE Guy - Product Manager (Healthcare, ERP, IT Solutions, Access management)
User empathy is one of the critical topic which is being taught while it has to come first from within. Empathy has a lot of lecture on tedtalk as well while the real effort is to practice it. It takes time, consideration, understanding then practice with consciousness to excel with empathy.
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Joao Moita
Founder | Product Manager | Building the Product Weekend 🚀
Understanding what levers (both internal and external) make you feel and act in certain ways, help you understand how emotions and actions can be influenced. Having this clarity about yourself, helps you understand these about your customers as well.
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Mark McHugh
Product Manager - Global & EMEA | Medical Devices | Endoscopy | Urology | Pelvic Health | MedTech Strategy | Product Management | Marketing | Launch Excellence
Developing self-awareness and showing empathy involves recognizing personal biases and how to mitigate them, actively seeking to understand diverse user perspectives, embracing data-informed decision-making and fostering a user-centric culture within the product team. Continuous learning, incorporating feedback as you move forward and cross-functional collaboration further contribute to refining product management skills, ultimately leading to solutions that better meet user needs and expectations.
As a product manager, you have to define your product vision, which is the overarching purpose, direction, and value proposition of your product. You have to communicate your product vision to your stakeholders and team, and align it with your product strategy, roadmap, and backlog. To do this effectively, you need to be aware of your own product vision, motivations, and passions, and how they might inspire or limit your product's potential. For example, are you more driven by your own vision or by your stakeholders' expectations, more passionate about your product's problem or solution, more focused on your product's features or benefits, more creative or conservative, more ambitious or realistic? By being more self-aware, you can articulate your product vision clearly, convincingly, and compellingly, and ensure that it is relevant, feasible, and desirable for your users and your market.
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Mark McHugh
Product Manager - Global & EMEA | Medical Devices | Endoscopy | Urology | Pelvic Health | MedTech Strategy | Product Management | Marketing | Launch Excellence
Self-awareness in shaping the product vision involves understanding personal motivations, balancing stakeholder expectations, emphasizing problem-solving over solutions, demonstrating real value over features and benefits, balancing creativity and how realistic it is to adopt new approaches, setting realistic goals with ambition, and communicating the vision effectively. This self-awareness enhances a product manager's ability to create a vision that is not only inspiring but also relevant, feasible and desirable for both users and the market. Continuous evaluation and user-centricity further contribute to sustained product success.
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Prapti Jain
Fintech & AI Product Manager - IDfy | Juspay | ISRO
Ambiguity is unavoidable in a space with multiple stakeholders. A PM is poised to bring calm to this chaos. The first step to be able to bring clarity is to bring all the stakeholders on the same page.
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Ayush Mongia
Building Products & Digging Problems | Product @ jumpingMinds.ai | 10L+ Impressions | Copywriting | Data & Design | Ex-Classplus
Something which has worked for me and a lot of other folks is being aware while using any other product. Being aware about: - Why we use it? - Why do we think we are shown an ad? - Why did we quickly swipe that screen in that way? Asking these internally directed questions really helps in developing a basic understanding about consumer behaviour (not everything will be right though).
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Tony Pagliocco
Chief Product Officer at RAI Digital | Ex-Boeing ✈️| Ex-Hasbro 🕹| Gartner Product Management Community Ambassador 🎓| Agile Evangelist & Data Driven Leader of Best-in-Class Product Teams 👍
Self-awareness is a cornerstone of effective product management. It's the human element that reminds us we're not infallible machines but people who make mistakes. Recognizing our own emotional drivers, strengths, and areas for improvement allows us to make more balanced and empathetic decisions. It helps us to understand not just the 'what' and 'how' of our product decisions, but also the 'why'.
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Utkarsh Saraiya
Product Manager @ London Stock Exchange Group | ex-Product @ Goldman Sachs | FinTech | Digital Identity & Fraud | CSPO® - Certified Scrum Product Owner | I talk about Product Management, Leadership & Career advancement
Think of yourself and your own strengths and weaknesses like a product and be agile. Flexible to take feedback and absorb change! For example - Post every product launch/delivering an initiative, evaluate what you have done better, where have you grown, what went wrong and how can you improve! Ensuring that we as Product Managers do not get complacent and constantly improve our strengths and work on our weaknesses not only helps us become self aware but also makes us well rounded PMs, a culturally fit employee to work with and sets us up for success in the corporate world. :)
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