Psychology: Non-Standard Ways to Upgrade Your Agile Product Management Skills

Agile product management, first of all, is working with different people united by a mutual goal – meeting a product objective.  A good product manager should communicate well to each person individually and the audience as the whole.  Therefore, to be a successful PM, you need to learn how to get into product management and develop the personality features necessary for fruitful work and cooperation with both your team members and your customers. You should well know and understand all people whom you have to work with, in the first place, secondly, be able to convince and, thirdly, make an effort for the mutual success as a real leader. How to do that? Why not look up one of the best product management blogs and check out for non-standard product management skills to upgrade your personality.

Top Product Management Skills

Skills needed for product management may be easily divided into two groups:

1. Professional business talents, your PM competence, communication style, methods and techniques of management used, etc.
2. Personal qualities: knowledge, ability, intelligence, emotional and will powers.

This group has a couple of specialities:

• Firstly, it is the foundation on which your professional, and managerial competence are actually built.
• Secondly, it is much more difficult to develop and change them, than the first group traits: to change the way of thinking or your character will be much harder than to learn an anger management technique, or improve decision-making and control PM technology, etc.

One of the main psychological qualities of a successful PM is his or her style of thinking. So, in the process of product management agile, he or she must be able to think:

• critically and prospectively, to determine the possible difficulties and ways to overcome them in advance;
• systematically, covering all the aspects of the case and influencing factors;
• practically and reasonably, featuring the real factors and being able to distinguish the real from the desired.
• gradually and progressively at the same time. Something unconventional, combined with the advantages of former expertise and original, innovative methods of management;
• think fast, quickly reacting to changes in the situation and making the right and rational decisions under the pressure faster.
• purposefully, achieving your goal by prioritizing the things and separating primary from the secondary, without a much in-staff turnover;
• critically, showing the ability to soberly assess the actions, maximize the positive experience, improve professional knowledge and skills.

It’s also widely accepted that all product managers like any other busy people spend a considerable part of their working time at communication. To save your time use great workflow management software by Craft – create multiple workflows for all your teams in one place. Therefore, an important quality for a professional PM is the ability to carry out business communication with different people effectively enough to be understood and remain proactive and optimistic, regardless of their own emotional evaluations. It should control their behavior so that a negative attitude towards someone can not affect the nature of the business relationships with him, and a positive attitude towards the employee grow to increase agile activity.

Depending on the situation, the head of the management has to perform a variety of “roles” that are determined by his or her position in the organization or scrum. There are many roles. Below there is a list of the qualities of a good PM, based on the results of trustful psychology studies that enable playing those roles effectively:

1. Administrator (oversees the execution).
2. Planner (developing methods and tools, which help others pursue the goal).
3. Diplomat (sets objectives and course of actions in the group, organization).
4. Expert (a person that is accessed as a source of reliable information or a qualified technician).
5. Representative (a staff member in an external environment).
6. Regulator (relations within the group, organization).
7. Inspirer  (ideas, information, rewards and punishments, etc).
8. Judge (either chastener or a peacemaker, simply a person to provide feedback).
9. Mascot (agile face, brand and the group entity).
10. Dictator (a responsible one for the whole group).
11. Companion (a friend who’s at hand).
12. Scapegoat (a person in charge of everything in the case of failure).

Also, to correctly define product management, its goals, triggers, to communicate with people and do anything you need to achieve your product vision, non-standard product management steps for your skill upgrade will also be useful. Here are some.

Non-Standard Product Management Tips

Why product management non-standard skills? Here’s the answer:

• PM should be mathematically creative.

That means to be able to create creative and beneficial products.  In life, sometimes two components that were previously considered incompatible are successfully mixed and even considered to be the product masterpieces (e.g. pistachio ice cream with salted nuts, etc). However, a real PM should have a good taste no matter what niche he or she is working in. Though tastes differ, the taste of a product manager should 95% match the taste of the target audience.   

• PM should be attentive and careful.

His or her work is related to keeping record, storage of the original models and reprints of the articles with top secret information and other non-public data (which is often very expensive), and the like. Thus, building relationships with competitors and sharing should be extremely wise. Attention to the details and trimming the sails to the wind are your safeguards from unexpected troubles or inside espionage.  Fortunately, not all competitors are so driven and the stakeholders so thoughtless and basically, hire the managers who are not directly interested in developing their business.

• PM must be very energetic and ideologically-driven, with the distinctive leadership skills.

For example, medical representatives will believe in the product, only if a product manager sincerely believes in it, has the needs, and can inspire his team to have same feelings.

• PM should have pedagogical skills.

It’s deeply convincing that no one will train a team of same medical representatives better than a good product manager, experienced and sharing. The truth is that PM training should have both theoretical and practical character, curved to bring result. Of course, no one knows how to become a successful PM because there are as many recipes as successful PMs, but training and learning still are good tries to at least approach people to that, and only a good teacher can provide that. A good product manager needs to know about the product more than any professor, in any case, he should know all that may be interesting for the target audience.

To upgrade your management skills and become a strong and successful leader, each product manager can read books, articles, train and learn or simply visit our blog for some pieces of advice, and, of course, use the up to date product management tools like craft.io for the best results.

Feel free to come over any time!

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