How To Become a Peak Product Manager

Mastery for Product Managers

There is much for Product Managers (PMs) to master, and most PMs excel in just a few skills. The best PMs leverage their strengths and build teams that fill in their gaps. Understanding your shape is the first step.

In "How To Become a Peak Product Manager," we present 12 essential competencies that PMs need to develop in order to build valuable products for their customers and companies. These competencies are categorized into four main areas:

1. Product Execution (The ability to build exceptional products)
2. User Insights (The ability to understand and meet customer needs)
3. Product Strategy (The ability to drive business impact through product innovation)
4. Influencing People (The ability to rally people around the team’s work)

There is a lot to master. Most PMs excel in only a few of these competencies. The difference between an average PM and a great PM is understanding their gaps and the ability to bring together a team that fills those gaps.

The Recipe for Growth

In 2011, McKinsey, a renowned strategy consulting firm, and Egon Zehnder, one of the world’s top executive search firms, launched an exhaustive study involving over 5,000 people. They aimed to understand the differences between high-growth companies and the rest, and how leadership influences these differences.

Consistently, leaders in top-performing companies were average or even deficient in many critical leadership competencies, while average companies focused on building well-rounded leaders.

The average companies followed conventional wisdom: weaknesses hold you back, so they spent time identifying and filling in people’s weaknesses. However, they missed an essential fact about human nature: exceptional people have natural talents and perform best when they leverage those talents. Think of something you excel at. How did you feel the last time you demonstrated that talent?

High-performing companies recognized that exceptional people do their best work when they are encouraged to use and develop their natural talents. They also recognized that talented people have weaknesses—often the mirror image of their strengths.

It is inspiring for talented people to spend time reinforcing their strengths and demotivating for them to struggle to improve their weaknesses.

Average companies spend a lot of time identifying and addressing areas of weakness. The result? Well-rounded leaders who are consistently average.

Meanwhile, high-performing companies chose to invest in people’s strengths and tolerate their weaknesses. McKinsey calls this "spiky leadership." Exceptional leaders excel in critical areas and surround themselves with people who complement their weaknesses.

This doesn’t mean that companies should tolerate incompetence. Incompetence is subtractive—it drags a team down. Each person must bring a baseline level of competence to the team so that they add, rather than subtract, from the team’s capacity.

The popular concept of the "T-shaped professional" offers a similar perspective. The best teammates are good at many things but excel in areas aligned with their natural talent.

Individuals Must Excel, Teams Must Complement

Today’s new product market is hyper-competitive. There’s no room for average products; the products that stand out are exceptional. Exceptional products, like exceptional companies, are built by people who excel and who work together in complementary teams.

People need to "know their shape" so they can fit their team together like pieces of a puzzle. Without careful consideration, teams can become unbalanced—and unbalanced teams launch unbalanced products.

Knowing Your Shape

Mapping your shape is simple. Start by assessing yourself on each of the 12 competencies on a scale of "Needs Improvement," "On the Way," and "Above Average" (or something in between these three levels). Then, mark on the radar chart where you stand and observe the final shape; it might look like this for an execution/analysis-oriented PM:

Builders and Architects of Products

The competencies can be organized into four groups, each representing different patterns in product teams.

The first two hemispheres—the "Western" and "Eastern" hemispheres—contrast Product Builders and Product Architects. Similar to construction, great product teams need both to prepare the nails (i.e., building) and sketch the designs (i.e., design).

Often, people and teams tend to lean toward one type of work or the other, but both are essential for success. After mapping your shape, check if it’s overly weighted on the left or right side of the chart.

• If you lean towards Product Builder: You enjoy making things and are good at it. But be careful; this is a critical posture because you need to figure out how to build the right thing first.

• If you lean towards Product Architect: You understand how to design products that solve pain points for customers and the company, but you might lack some of the skills needed to bring those products to life.

"Success Requires Vision and Execution."

In his article, "Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple," Steve Blank describes the distinction between Visionary CEOs and Execution CEOs. This mirrors the distinction between Product Architects and Product Builders.

Success requires both vision and execution. However, Steve Blank concluded that vision is increasingly vital, given the accelerated, technology-driven changes of the 21st century. He suggests that boards should appoint Visionary CEOs rather than Execution CEOs.

Similarly, product teams require both Product Builders and Product Architects, but Product Architecture competencies are of utmost importance in today’s world. If you are a Product Architect, you can grow by investing in your strengths and partnering with strong Product Builders. If you are a Product Builder, your growth path will be different. Besides joining teammates who enhance your skills, you should personally level up your Customer Vision and Product Strategy capabilities.

PMs vs. Product Leaders

The next two hemispheres—the "Northern" and "Southern" hemispheres—contrast PMs and Product Leaders. As PMs become more senior, they shift focus from managing products to leading strategies and people (considering just this branch of the Y-shaped career). As this shift happens, the importance of each competency evolves.

During the journey from PM to Product Leader, PMs move clockwise around the competencies, starting with Product Execution.

• PMs need to master product execution early in their careers—launching products is the foundation for success as a product manager. At this stage, junior PMs need time and space to learn how to execute; they can and should rely on their managers to help them define what to build.

• As PMs progress in their careers, they should take a more active role in product architecture. This is where "User Insights" skills come into play—initially at the feature level. Strong PMs and senior PMs are capable of defining, building, and evaluating successful features.

• Next, PMs need to learn to think beyond individual features and start thinking about how features connect with each other—how they evolve and complement each other in delivering value, contributing to a clear, compelling, and cohesive product vision, and how this connects to the company’s strategy. This is the point where PMs, at the GPM and Director level, start transitioning from PMs to Product Leaders.

"Product Managers create products. Product Leaders build products, people, and companies."

As Product Leaders become more senior, they work increasingly through people. There may be dozens or even hundreds of people mobilized to turn a Product Leader’s vision into reality. These senior leaders must master the art of influencing people across the organization.

Great Product Leaders build strong teams, but that’s only one component of product leadership. They must manage up and down, act as the connective tissue that unites people across the company to achieve product goals, and work effectively with executives to achieve the company’s strategy.

Throughout the journey from PM to Product Leader, the competency that remains equally important at all levels is "ownership of business outcomes." No matter your level, the best PMs focus on driving business impact, not just launching new features.

We can see how PMs evolve from APM to CPO, highlighting the relative importance of each competency by level:

Product Manager Archetypes

Everyone’s shape is different, but there are some common patterns. Let’s take a look at four common archetypes; they might resemble people you know or how you see yourself. The strengths and weaknesses of each archetype have been exaggerated to illustrate growth opportunities and discuss how they fit into a product development team.

The Project Manager

Some companies and new Project Managers confuse project management with product management. A good "Project Manager" is excellent at execution but hasn’t yet mastered the art of creating products that people love and that move the needle for their company.

Companies need to draw a clear line between project management and product management. Otherwise, they risk fostering teams that know how to build but can’t figure out what to build.

Project Managers should work on developing Customer Vision and Product Strategy skills to grow as product managers. Companies should resist promoting PMs who haven’t yet started developing these skills—even when they have a strong track record of feature launches.

The People Manager

Leadership is a critical element of product management. Great people managers bring together teams, stakeholders, and senior leaders. They create the energy necessary to turn product aspirations into results.

Great people managers are rare, so they are valued within an organization. However, it’s important to recognize that Product Leaders must build people and products. Consequently, naturally talented people managers should focus on developing Customer Vision and Product Strategy skills. This will give them the tools not just to lead, but also to understand the right destination.

The Growth Hacker

PMs dedicated to growth combine speed, analytical vision, and experimentation-driven product development to deliver measurable gains in business metrics. They drive growth at every stage of the product lifecycle: acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, and monetization.

Growth has become a critical aspect of product management, and every tech company should promote a strong growth team. That said, companies should be careful not to confuse growth optimization with product innovation. If they do

, they risk being outpaced by more innovative competitors.

For example, Facebook has one of the largest growth teams in the tech industry, and this team has been instrumental in growing Facebook’s reach to 2 billion people. However, Facebook has reinvented itself many times: transitioning from profiles to the feed, transitioning from desktop to mobile, and transitioning to stories.

Companies need to invest in both growth and innovation, but individual PMs can choose their path. A growth-centered PM can strengthen their skills by further developing strengths such as Data Fluency and Ownership of Business Outcomes or by evolving by focusing on skills like Customer Voice and Product Vision and Roadmap.

The Innovator

Product Innovators excel at thinking about the next steps. They intuitively understand what customers want and can translate that understanding into a compelling vision for the product.

Innovative PMs are a vital force within their organization—they encourage companies to think disruptively rather than incrementally. This is crucial for the survival of rapidly evolving tech companies.

However, Innovative PMs often suffer from a weakness that is a mirror image of their strength—they may struggle to break down their big ideas into iterative, measurable pieces. But companies need to act quickly and validate their innovative bets, or they risk over-investing in the wrong path.

Companies can achieve this in two ways: pairing Innovative PMs with execution-oriented and data-driven teammates or encouraging individuals to improve their product delivery and data fluency. Either way, companies will increase their success rate by balancing intuition with empirical results and analytical thinking.

This document has outlined how to identify your strengths, how to bolster them, and how to assess the areas that hold you back. Additionally, it has discussed how to build teams that fit together like puzzle pieces—making the sum of the parts greater than the whole.