AMA: Walmart Sr Director II, Product Management - Marketing Technology, Milena Krasteva on PM Soft and Hard Skills

Even when feedback seems completely unfair, there may be some small nugget to pay attention to. So, in general don't dismiss the feedback without some introspection. Giving objective feedback is actually hard to do; most people can't distinguish between whether it is their own pet peeves that are driving them to provide feedback or if they are reflecting some broader consensus on true weaknesses that need correction. Who should seek to change: the person who got annoyed or the person who is generating the annoyance? A lot here depends on your manager's maturity, true intentions behind the feedback, their desire to level with you, and ultimately ability to hear feedback about themselves. If you are sure you are not dealing with a narcissist, try to have a dialog to get clarity on the actual triggers, what does success look like to them instead? Ask them what they see is the impact to the business or the team of you not act on the feedback. Ask other observers if they would have the same feedback. Lastly, consider that even if the feedback is subjective, making some change to meet your manager halfway is a way to build the partnership.

This reminds me of an interview question I got a very long time ago: "Is it better to have a bad team or a bad manager". In both cases, you'd rather not find yourself in either extreme. In both cases, there is no right or wrong answer and a lot depends on additional circumstances and assumptions. The answer will also depend on your value system and the experiences which have shaped your core beliefs about human aptitude and potential. For the sake of argument, if I had to pick, I would first apply the same framework: which suboptimal option is more mitigatable. I believe that most people have the capacity to learn the facts of the domain, the technical aspects, I.e. the hard skills, with sufficient effort and time. On some level, I see acquiring the hard skills in this contrived case akin to suceeding in a college course you know nothing about but are highly motivated to ace. The soft skills can also be learned, but these are much more entangled with personality, self-awareness, communication style, etc., all of which develop and become ingrained over the years. They are harder to inculcate artificially or to undo as bad habits. Poor soft skills can burn bridges and set the course of nascent relationships on the wrong trajectory, impacting your ability drive results far into the future. No amount of hard skills may be able to offset that. Good soft skills can even buy you time to get up to speed on the hard skills, and can get you critical early support from the team to actively help you get there. This is why if I had to, I would pick the soft skills option.

Fairly easily potentially, compared to transitioning from other less-related fields. Product Management is as much art as it is discipline or science. Leveraging technical expertise related to the same or adjacent PM area helps. Some job descriptions will even require engineering experience or area of study. One major pitfall to avoid however, is remaining in "engineering mode" as a PM. As PMs, our focus should be on the WHAT, WHO, and the WHY, whereas Eng/Data Science's focus is more on the HOW. While some may disagree, for me all these still fall in the category of Hard skills for PMs. As an engineer transitioning to PM you would need to potentially learn more about setting product vision and strategy, go-to-market strategy, user requirements gathering, writing product requirements docs, and prioritization. You would also need to flex a lot more of you soft skills as a PM: communicating in writting and verbally, synthesizing info, influencing, managing stakehorders, driving collaboration and execution, prioritizing, negotiating, inspiring, etc. This can seem overwhelming. So "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Ideally, you have the technical experience in the same business domain, and can read up plenty on the discipline of Product Management. You've likely even experienced all this on the receiving end as an engineer. The rest is the art and the soft skills which will come with self-awareness, observation of your own and other's interactions, practice, and even formal training. While you may not be crafting product strategy on day 1, getting as much exposure to frameworks for strategy, and even just listening to others make strategic decisions and trade offs will help you start applying similar frameworks yourself.

The two disciplines are very different, despite some intersections on go-to-market, outbound communications, and occasional blurred lines between the roles in some companies regarding strategy and customer requirements. Early on in my career I had the opportunity to simultaneously work in both functions and experience them. Product Management has very broad scope and deals directly with technology. Ultimately, for me, building (or fixing) products felt most rewarding. :)

It seems all too easy to NOT get roadmap buy-in. Sometimes, it can feel like the default answer is always "No" at first, and despite all the work you have done, you are getting sent back to the drawing board. Some things that help, not in any particular order: * Go as wide as possible early on as pre-work to understand stakeholders' motivations and identify any possible opposition * Dig deep to identify the true source of the opposition. Listen a lot, ask questions. Treat this exercise as part of requirements gathering. * Identify dependencies early * Tie roadmap item to financial impact upside * Is the impact estimate credible and defensible * Is the level of effort astronomical, or disproportionate to value * Is there a downside, beyond the lost oportunity of not doing the feature * Tie roadmap to broader strategy * Are you potentially missing technical or other considerations? * Have you been transparent and collaborative? Is anybody going to oppose the roadmap because they were excluded from discussions and decisions * Get exec buy-in in smaller forums, early, even at the conceptual level * Build a coalition of active supporters - there is safety in numbers * Assume positive intent * Seek to educate not sell * Seek common ground * Consider earlier conversations as setting the stage and foundation for later decisions. Aim to first not get a "no", rather than pushing for an immediate "yes" * Give yourself enough time to work iteratively through to buy-in.

I'd love to answer this in a slightly different way: The single most important skill, that cannot be rated highly enough is Communication. Many other soft skills are fundamentally still rooted in or are dependent on communication. Nuanced aspects of communication also matter: * adapting communication to the audience and situation * timing the communication * communication in all forms: written, verbal, non-verbal/body language.