AMA: Vanta VP Product, Boris Logvinsky on Product Management Skills

The answer depends on the stage of company and product you're working on. At Vanta, where we're growing very quickly and are still formulating many of our process, I've found that the most successful PMs / candidates: * Customer focus. I look for past examples where they have deeply understood their customers and users. * Agency and comfort with ambiguity. In high growth environments, there often isn't a beaten path. PMs need to be able to make progress and drive when there's not one. * Commercial mindset. The best PMs don't just think about what to ship, but think about how to position what they're shipping in the context of the market.

Perhaps a contrarian take, but technical skills aren't the most critical for the majority of PM roles out there, except for deeply technical products or platform positions. For the general PM role, it's much more important to demonstrate your ability to delve into customer problems, set strategy, execute, and drive impact that aligns with your organization's mission and vision. Technical skills matter, but they are secondary. They usually revolve around your ability to work with engineering counterparts and understand enough technical concepts to make trade-offs, and to work with data and perform analysis for decision-making. In my experience, both of these skills are often inquired about directly.

Start by showing interest and taking steps in your existing role. Work with your engineering manager or the PM on your team to take on PM work. You can listen to customers calls, gather insights and turn those into a feature or investment proposal, or perform competitive research and synthesize that into an action plan for your team. The best place to make the transition is at your existing company, where you have already built trust and there is someone who's willing to work and invest in your development.

Product management decisions should ideally be data-informed rather than purely data-driven. Being data-informed means leveraging data to guide and support decision-making, while also acknowledging the context, the subtleties of customer behavior, and the broader market trends that quantitative data might not fully capture. Data is invaluable for validating hypotheses, understanding user behavior, and measuring performance against goals. However, it's equally important to recognize the limitations of data and the potential for it to lead to suboptimal decisions if relied upon in isolation. Product Managers should indeed lead with an informed intuition—a blend of experience, understanding of the customer, and strategic vision. This intuition is then refined and validated through the use of data. By using data to back up assumptions, Product Managers can challenge their biases and ensure that their strategic direction is grounded in reality. Ultimately, the most successful Product Managers are those who can adeptly interpret data, understand its implications, and also know when to question its suggestions. They balance the art of intuition with the science of data, using each to enhance the other. This holistic approach allows for innovation and creativity, driving product decisions that resonate with customers and succeed in the market.