AMA: Skilljar SVP, Product, Tammy Hahn on Product Management Skills

While I am not familiar with Cisco in particular, I would say that my biggest concern as a hiring manager for someone that hasn't recently worked in the Product Management capacity is the ability to work cohesively and collaboratively with Engineers. While I value the core skills of Product Marketing (and have a belief that these skills make the BEST Product Managers), there's the tactical pieces of getting work through the build phase that can be difficult for those that aren't practiced in it. ...Read More

Are you committed to working on this known gap? If not, then I would say this is a deal breaker for becoming an effective Product Manager. A Product Manager's role is to be able to take multiple, loud, often urgent inputs and be able to identify which opportunities to pursue now, pursue later, or never pursue. You need to make these decisions and micro-decisions on a day to day basis. It's better to make fast, wrong decisions on reversible things than to paralyze and make no decision (which is a ...Read More

A year ago, I would have said that the more senior you get, the less execution-oriented you will get and more problem/opportunity-oriented focus. It will become expectation that your time, energy and outputs are oriented around identifying what opportunities to pursue that will move both your customers/market and business forward. While this is still mostly true, I believe that this shift is starting to happen earlier and earlier in the PM career ladder. With the emergence of AI tools that help ...Read More

Unfortunately, this is more common than not. A solid understanding and ability to execute project management tasks is important in the overall role of a Product Manager given that part of the role is to ensure enhancements (value) are delivered to customers and the market, thereby increasing the value of your business. That means it's still critical to perform some responsibilities of project management. That being said, the most valuable responsibility of a Product Manager is to identify and pr ...Read More

Must have skills that are difficult to gain and develop: Building alignment on objectives across multiple, high level stakeholders Making all stakeholders feel like they were part of the journey with influence at all points (even if they didn't) Ability to make hard, risky decisions quickly with just the right amount of data (a no-decision is actually a decision) A strong pulse on your markets - their trends and what's informing decision-makers to move Nice to have skills that will make you a st ...Read More

First of all, you have to truly believe that feedback is a gift and that there is always room for improvement. That doesn't mean that it's always easy to hear and digest upon first receiving critical feedback. Here are the steps I suggest you take: Listen openly. It may be hard not to have an immediate defensive reaction, but try to deeply understand the problem. Be curious. Ask questions about examples and try to learn more. Understand the impact. Don't focus on the advice of the feedback, ask ...Read More