This question is often the topic of endless conversations in various project or product management meetings. If you look at the definitions of project or product management, you can already assess what skills are necessary for the direction you want to develop. In this text, however, I’d like to list some of the hard and soft skills that I consider extremely useful and necessary for any project or product manager.
Hard skills
The most exciting, but also the most complex thing about working in the IT industry is the fact that trends and technologies change extremely quickly. Chances are that in a year or two, several approaches and technologies your team uses will change. However, most innovations are based on similar concepts and the basic working principles remain the same. This means that once you understand the basics, you won’t have any problems.
The basic technical knowledge that any successful project or product manager in the IT industry should have includes:
- • Knowledge of all phases of the development process and the product life cycle in general
- • How the Internet and other types of networks work – architecture, communication method, protocols
- • Basics of UX/UI design and the prototyping process
- • Fundamentals of programming – knowledge of the concept of object-oriented programming, knowledge of the principles of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, understanding the differences between frontend, backend and full stack development
- • Knowledge of the concept of working with databases (structured and unstructured) and knowledge of the basic ways to manipulate the database
- • Understanding of the architecture and process of developing web and mobile applications
- • Basic concepts of the different approaches to product testing (Quality Assurance)
Soft skills
One of the most important qualities of a good project or product manager is a good organisation with good team management. Although technical skills are important, they basically mean nothing if the team isn’t motivated and happy and doesn’t know what to work on.
It’s important to always remember that a project or product manager cannot be successful or achieve results without their team.
For this to be possible, any project or product manager should look to develop the following skills:
- Organisation and communication – team communication should be as transparent as possible, and tasks should be clearly defined and organised in advance. Personal organisation should also be at a high level, so attention should also be paid to good time management.
- Giving timely and useful feedback – we should consider feedback as a gift that enables us to improve our work. It’s important to phrase feedback correctly and find the right time to share it with team members. One of the methods I use to structure feedback is Situation – Behaviour – Impact (SBI).
- Motivation – it’s extremely important for every project or product manager to get to know their team, to stand by them in stressful and difficult moments, but also to share happy moments and successes with them. A human approach to all team members is perhaps the most important thing for a successful and productive team.
- A quality process of setting goals and evaluation of existing goals – here I often use a combination of SMART goal-setting guidelines and the OKR method for forming main objectives and results.
- Knowledge of different aspects of product development – from business development to sales, marketing, financial and legal challenges. A project or product manager should have a clear overall picture of the product or project they’re working on.
- Problem-solving mindset – the main task of a project or product manager is to solve problems. Through brainstorming, market research and target groups of customers or users, we think about how we can improve a product to solve current problems.
Although there are many more hard and soft skills that are useful for any project or product manager, I believe that the above skills are a good foundation that everyone should (pro)actively work on in the first years of their project or product management career.
Do you think there are other important skills for a good project or product manager? Do you need advice on how to improve a particular skill? Contact me at hi@kajapavlinic.com.
