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. For example: * Building alignment not only on the overarching "why" of the solution but also the approach including making fast decisions about what are "must haves" vs. "nice to haves" in order to balance scope, quality, and speed to market * Communicating effectively with technical counterparts who are often interested in the "how" or "how long" and can often struggle to articulate the trade-offs they are making * Oftentimes having to play a project management type of role where you must rally the team to both a deadline and an outcome My suggestion is to demonstrate examples of times you have displayed these skills, if not with an Engineering counterpart, but in your role as a Product Marketer. And if you haven't actually had to demonstrate these skills, understand and articulate what you would do in these types of instances.

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 standout Product leader: * Financial and data acumen to inform your hypotheses and decisions on where to invest and, more importantly, where to divest * Strong product intuition built over experience and time in understanding other products (in and out of your market)

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: 1. Listen openly. It may be hard not to have an immediate defensive reaction, but try to deeply understand the problem. 2. Be curious. Ask questions about examples and try to learn more. 3. Understand the impact. Don't focus on the advice of the feedback, ask and understand more about the impact of your actions/inactions. 1. For example, your manager might give you feedback like, "You need to be more open to other people's ideas." This is advice. Ask questions to understand where this is coming from and the impact. Perhaps it was because at a meeting, an Engineer had suggested an alternative solution approach to your proposal and you immediately responded with all the reasons why it wouldn't work because you already had thought of that. The impact of that might be a teammate who doesn't feel safe to challenge or bring different approaches throughout the development cycle and the impact might be tech debt, longer development times, or a worse user experience for your customers. 4. Ask for some time to digest if you need it. If you're unable to process feedback in the moment, possibly in person or over Zoom, ask for some time to process and return back to the conversation at a later time. It's always better to have a constructive conversation than one where emotions are high.

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 decision in itself). I like to think about these as one-way doors or two-way doors. Take your time, build your evidence and confidence on decisions that are difficult to undo. For things that can be undone or reversed quickly, don't waste your time or effort on collecting data and building a case. Run that experiment. Fail fast. Apply previous experience. This gets easier over time as you are able to pattern match and learn frameworks to apply (also known as product intuition).

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 make execution easier and faster, PMs are now expected at ALL levels to have better understanding of their customers/market and how to address their most important issues to optimize for business objectives. They're also expected to have a better understanding of their most important cross-functional stakeholders and be able to produce (basic) work those functions are specialized in: design, engineering, and product marketing. It's truly the rise of generalist vs. the specialist. The skills that become increasingly important in order to succeed: * Building a POV and a coalition around it - influencing those around you, making them feel like they were part of the definition journey so they can be advocates throughout the ideation, execution, and launch stages * Building alignment, not consensus - it's nearly impossible to get consensus on solutions or prioritization; your job is to build clarity and alignment to the objectives you're optimizing for * Fast(er) iteration to get to learning faster - what's the shortest path to (in)validate your hypotheses so that you have evidence to make clearer decisions? Just do that.

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 prioritize the opportunities to go after to better serve your customers/market and your business. Otherwise, it becomes an exercise of whack-a-mole, execute on a never-ending list of requests. As a Product Manager who works at a company that doesn't prioritize product vision or impact-based product building, I encourage you to always start with alignment on the goal or objective. When you open the door to understanding what success looks like and are aligned to it, then it's about the most efficient and effective ways to reach that goal and less about execution of a specific solution as quickly as possible. Now if you get the answer, "Because the CEO/Customer X wants it" every single time, it's probably not a good fit for your career path as a Product Manager.