AMA: Gainsight Director, Product Management, Sailaja Kalle on Product Management Skills

Product Manager Leaders essentially act as CEO of their Product. They bring 5 key traits to the table 1. Product and User Sense - Good Product Leaders have the talent to 'easily' obtain a holistic, strategic view of what the right product might be for a given problem space; they can identify the riskier assumptions and they know how to test them, learn and adapt; Successful Product Leaders demonstrate a ‘user mentality’ and use empathy to relate to user problems, frequent customer needs, and stakeholder expectations; they are able to feel the pain points and deeply understand the problem and the ecosystem in which it exists. 2. Innovation Mindset - Successful Product Leaders realize the value of innovation for product development and establish the right processes to empower a special culture — fostering ideas sharing, collaboration, creativeness, and experimentation. 3. Entrepreneurial Thinking - Product Leaders demonstrate a special mindset that sets the basis for success: they are enthusiastic about designing and building products people love; they are always looking for opportunities to create value and solve big problems in novel and effective ways; 4. Cross-domain Knowledge - Modern digital products are complex: their success depends on a mix of technology, usability, business models, marketing, and operational excellence — they must all work together in harmony to drive user engagement, value creation, and sufficient monetization. 5. Commercial Acumen - The commercial element is key. Good Product Leaders are able to identify the right business models, monetization strategies, pricing structures, and growth mechanisms to ensure the viability of the product;

User experience (UX) plays a critical role in product management, as it is the overall experience of a person using a product or service. A positive UX can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy, while a negative UX can drive customers away. As a product manager, it is important to prioritize UX in the development process and regularly gather feedback from customers to improve the UX of the product. This can involve conducting user research, usability testing, and analyzing user data to understand how customers are interacting with the product and identify areas for improvement. Additionally, product managers should work closely with UX designers to ensure that the product is easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and meets the needs of the target audience.

Apart from being a good product managers, natural propensity to build epic stuff, passion for impact, data-driven, ability to execute , great collaborator and communicator along with wide combination of skills - from software engineering, product development to monetization and growth is something that helps product managers be successful in their field.

Feedback, as they say, is a gift. Research bears this out, suggesting that it’s a key driver of performance and leadership effectiveness. Negative feedback in particular can be valuable because it allows us to monitor our performance and alerts us to important changes we need to make. But processing and acting on negative feedback is not always easy. It can make us defensive, angry, and self-conscious, which subsequently impairs our effectiveness. 1. Dont rush to react 2. Get more data 3. Dont be a lonely martyr

A great Product Manager is being a good partner with the Engineering team, as well as the rest of the cross functional team. A good partnership means inputs from the entire cross functional team are valued and encouraged. Including engineers early in roadmap plans or design studio sessions increases collaboration and engineers should bring in Product Managers to weigh in on different levels of implementation and tradeoffs.

Problem solving capability, Communication skills, Empathy - User and Product, Learning curiosity, Passion to impact and comfortable with failure are some soft skills we evaluate when we hire for the team apart from the necessary skills and relevant experience for the role