Product & UX: Crucial Product Management Skill 8/20
17 November 2024 ‧ 3 min read
This post is part of a series of short articles about the 20 most crucial product management skills.
What it means
Product & UX domain skills refer to understanding the product, the customer and user experience and its drivers. It means having good product ideas and instincts on macro (what features to build) and micro level (UI), and making correct trade-off decisions from a user and customer experience perspective. Product and UX skills are both general (“product sense” and “taste”) and specific (knowledge about the specific product area the product manager is working on).
Why it is an important skill
Without strong product & UX skills, a product manager simply becomes a coordinator and orchestrator between the perspectives of different stakeholders – basically, a glorified project manager. That can still be valuable, but they can hardly be called a product manager.
Great product & UX skills are also required to put together a compelling vision for the PM's product area – without a strong understanding of the status quo of the product and a good sense for the evolution of the product from a user and customer perspective, it will be hard to put together a strong vision.
Lastly, product & UX skills are also inextricably linked to customer value, which is one of Marty Cagan's four risks that is owned by the PM. While the basis of customer value is a good understanding of the customer and their needs, you still need to define a solution to meet those needs, and that's where Product & UX skills come in.
What great looks like
PMs with great product & UX skills have great instincts on what solutions will work. They are not the source of all ideas that the team implements, but they contribute a significant amount of ideas, quickly identify good ideas by others in the team, and find ways to improve upon ideas shared by others. In the words of one of Amazon's leadership principles: they "are right, a lot".
They can effectively resolve conflicts and make trade-off decisions, identifying all the relevant factors and weighing off the pros and cons holistically.
They also collaborate very effectively with design to build great user experiences that are intuitive and usable. They can effectively provide valuable feedback to designers and are valued as a partner in the process.
How to improve your Product & UX Skills
The only way to really improve product & UX skills practice – you won't get better by just studying, you need to do the work. That said, there are some ways to make that practice more effective.
The first step is obviously to put in the reps: ideally, working in tandem with a great designer who can also teach you about good UX, but in the absence of that, paying attention to the big and small decisions or even running through product exercises yourself can help.
In addition, it pays to learn all the ins and outs of your own product in depth. Read all the docs (external and internal), explore all of the UI, even read the code if helpful. You really have to understand how your product works in depth to make sound decisions about how to change it. Sometimes, it can even help to write internal documentation about particularly tricky business logic that already exists in the product – writing something down is a good forcing function to make sure you truly understand that.
Another way of sharpening your product skills with your own product is using it. Ideally, you are dogfooding your product on a regular basis – ie., you are a regular user of your product. That doesn't mean that you should start believing that you know your customers well because you are one yourself, but it does help with understanding how the product works and in which ways it doesn't or is hard to use. A more deliberate way to look for usability issues is friction logging, in which you go put yourself in the shoes of a user or customer trying to achieve a particular use case with the product and write down all of the ways in which you encountered friction (ie. the process was harder than it needed to be). That provides good input for then improving the product and its UX.
Another way to get inspiration is by doing product teardowns of competitor or simply any other product. You can do this alone or in a group, and with any degree of formality. Thinking through what decisions the product team for that product made, what trade-offs they faced, and what friction is present in the product will give you a lot of inspiration for how to improve your own product. More broadly speaking, curiosity about products is immensely valuable to sharpen your product skills. The more you look at the products you use with open eyes, and the more different products you try, the more inspiration you will have for your own day-to-day work.
I hope you found this article useful. If you did, feel free to follow me on Twitter where I share thoughts and articles on product management and leadership.