- Soft skill: Great product managers can seamlessly adjust their communication to match their audience. As a product manager, you'll speak with people in different roles and varying levels of expertise in your subject area. It is essential that you can communicate your ideas and exchange information with everyone! I really love the perspective shared by Camilla Boyer in a recent talk at GitLab about communicating with emotional intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pZoNORrDjU. Product managers should approach conversations with the mindset of providing the information their audience needs instead of focusing on what they need to say.
- Hard skill: Iteration is one of the hardest things to master, but it is essential for providing value quickly and getting feedback to improve your product. GitLab has great resources to help improve this skill. Check them out https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration! One thing that has really helped me improve my iteration skills is to think of my product as ever-evolving and that what we release is not the final version. If a set of changes are an improvement to the current experience and there's a clear roadmap to build upon that experience, then we should release it even if we are not done!
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Lives In Austin, Texas, United States