AMA: BILL Sr. Staff Product Manager - Platform Intelligence (Data & AI), Aindra Misra on Product Management Skills

Skills for a PM leader are primarily categorized into two large buckets: * Hard * Technical/domain knowledge skills based on the product you support - eg:It can be understanding of MAU, DAUs, ad revenue etc for growth PMs or it can be AI, data and infra tools and technology for Platform PMs * Inferring information from data - It's very critical for PMs to translate data into information which is valuable to them * Soft * Stakeholder management - As a PM, you need to manage a bunch of teams and people both upstream and downstream. You should know how to manage and align them and understand the optics on what is in for them that overlaps with your story * Influencing without authority - PMs don't have direct authority over the team that is executing the vision. So, PMs should be able to influence upper management with their ideas and proposals and influence engineering who is executing their vision * Storytelling (Crisp and clear sync and async communication) - In this day and age; short and crisp written and speaking communication skills based on the audience is very critical for PMs to influence (mentioned in the second bullet). With global and geographically diverse workforce, async and written communication over Slack, teams etc is also very critical skill

Engineering counterparts are not easy to influence as they come with some kind of bias that PMs are not there to help them but to add processes, hierarchy and more meetings to their day to day, without knowing their pain points and/or technical stuff. Based on my experience, here are some of the qualities you can develop to influence and impress your eng counterparts * Get hands on wherever you can - In the age of AI, there are a lot of nocode tools to build prototypes etc (Cursor being one). If the eng folks see you being hands on and trying out these tools, they tend to feel more confident with sharing technical stuff with you and trust you more with their decisions * Pitch your value as a PM to them and how you can help their day to day - I use two things to pitch my value - one is to broadcast and share the hard work they are doing and translate it into business imperatives, so that they can get more visibility and credit for their work. Second, tell them that you will act as a shield from the noise and you can create focus and prioritization based on value instead of doing low value work. These two ideas on elevator pitch has been working well for me during my career. Note: You can just pitch the above stuff and not implement or execute them. If you have to lead by action for eng to gain trust in you Explicitly mention to them that you are not here to introduce more processes and ask for level of effort

1. Identify and decide on what kind of PM role you want to get into - Growth PM, Platform PM, Domain specific PM.. 2. Understand the details and day to day of a PM role and get clarity on the hard and soft skills needed to be a good PM 3. Start building your hard skills and follow the right PM influencers on social media and consume their content 4. Build your resume based on what you learn from 1 to 3 above and start applying

It's vice versa. Soft skills are something which you learn on the job. Hard skills can be easily acquired now with all the AI resources and training materials available online. Soft skills like stakeholder management, sync and async communication, how to tell the story, influencing without authority etc.. Soft skills like these are hard to learn theoretically, and comes only through experience and on the job. Some of it also depends on your personality.

I have noticed that PMs who do not have a solid proposal or data backed research, they try to push through their roadmap by backing it based on the buy in from upper management or who proposed it, instead of justifying and backing it up based on the impact of the outcome. If the stakeholders are not convinced of the impact of the outcome, and you are pushing it across then it will make them sulk. The best way to influence and convince your stakeholders on your roadmap is to use hard numbers for the impact outcomes and/or use market data to hypothesize the impact and have a clear plan on how you can prove your hypothesis.

As you progress through the PM ladder, the TL:DR is that you will be less in the weeds with the day to day functioning of your squads but rather be working on long term planning and strategy on a larger scope to deliver business goals. Some examples: 1. PM 1,,2, Senior PM - Prioritization for 1+ squads, scrums, JIRA hygiene, align with team goals, quarterly planning 2. Group PM - 1-3 year strategy, people management of PMs, larger scope with 2-3 products in the portfolio, ideation, opportunity sizing and building proposals for future initiatives 3. Director, VP, Senior VP - As you climb up the ladder, scope increases tremendously and you are thinking on higher altitude and how you and your teams can impact the business needle

As you are receiving critical feedback from your manager, ask them to follow the STAR format. Situation, Task, Action and Result. Make the manager accountable on what they want you to accomplish from this task. You can definitely provide proposals using the STAR format based on what you think. But ask the manager to align on those actions, and what you will chase and try to improve on. Ask them to share what they think you can do. Align with them on all the proposals and then start working towards it. Re: to the feedback which you don't agree on, you can try to nicely ask them to clarify and share your thought process. If the manager still pushes on it, try to think from their perspective. If none of the ways work, then either you are too stubborn to see through things or your manager is incompetent that they can convince you on their feedback.

Ability to tell the story and connect the dots. As a PM, if you are not able to tell your story in a crisp and clear manner with the right amount of details, and tailored to the audience - then how much good you are at your other PM skills, it will be difficult for you to get recognition. I feel that this skill is quite underrated and as you get into more technical PM roles, this becomes harder and harder as the business leaders and the non tech stakeholders are further away from your world, and influencing them and telling the story without using tech jargons is where it becomes hard.