When joining a new team as a product manager, is it better to have the right soft skills and have to learn the hard skills of the job? Or vice versa?

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4 Answers

Product Management Skills

Milena Krasteva

Walmart Sr Director II, Product Management - Marketing Technology • 4y

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 ap ...Read More

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Neil Kulkarni

Cisco Director of Product Management • 1y

Great question ! My perspective on this is - it depends. It all depends on the expectations of the specific role and team you will be part of. Product Management as a role is far from standardized. You will find difference in how product management as a role is practiced in different companies and at different grade levels. Now, if you ask me which aspect I give more weight to when I look for PMs, I would say generally the soft skills, as those are harder to learn quickly. However, its also impo ...Read More

2,019 Views
Katherine Man

HubSpot Group Product Manager, CRM Platform • 2mo

You need a baseline of both, but if forced to choose, strong soft skills buy you time to ramp on hard skills. Trust, communication, and stakeholder alignment determine whether your ideas get heard and whether you can access the information needed to learn quickly. That said, you cannot coast on soft skills for long. Set a clear ramp plan for the technical and domain gaps in your first 30 to 60 days so you become independently effective.

403 Views
Tara Wellington

BILL VP of Product, Product Platform • 2y

If you had to only have one, I think it is easier to have soft skills and then learn the hard skills. I have done a lot of hiring for product managers both out of college and out of customer service who did not have any hard product skills. What they did have was: Empathy Customer focus Communication Passion Focus Curiosity If a potential hire has all of these things, I can teach them the practice of product management. However, if a candidate has none of these things, but is a very technical pr ...Read More

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