As much as I enjoy being a Product Manager, I’ve felt the role to be redundant. Product Managers seem to be “communication-gap” fillers who wouldn’t be required on a team with capable builders and sellers. Why are we in awe of smart engineers who communicate well or smart salespeople who transition easily between numbers and technology? Shouldn’t that be the norm? Instead, we’ve got a whole discipline that seems to make us all believe that kids are growing up telling their parents — “Mom, I really want to be a Product Manager one day!” CMU, Boston University and Northwestern, to name a few, offer Masters programs in Product Management. Many others simply morph their business courses into Product Management. There are a raft of frameworks and tools for feature management, backlog management, UI design, and design thinking. There are about as many 2x2 charts as there are leadership and strategy courses. Throw in some accounting basics for good measure and wrap it all up with a capstone project that involves AI.

And why not? It’s a hot field, only trailing even hotter fields like software engineering or data science.

But does it have to be this complicated? In my opinion, the raft of degrees, courses and frameworks miss the mark, convincing you that those things will magically transform you into a better product manager. While tools and frameworks are important, they don’t help you build the EQ that’s really required for the role. Here’s what I think are key ingredients to becoming a better product manager and how you might practice them.

Relationship management

If you’ve been able to build relationships easily, congratulations, you’re halfway there! A lot of product managers transition from another core role and sometimes those core roles don’t require a lot of relationship building. As an engineer, I never cared about discount trends or what fiscal quarter it was. “What’s a fiscal quarter anyway?” This was OK because I was geeking out with other engineer buddies on hash collision probabilities or default log levels. As you learn frameworks and tools on the road to becoming a product manager, remember that it’s more than that. You learn about sales compensation, but do you understand the risk your account manager carries for not making quota? You hit a home run with the customer presentation, but do you understand what the VP is trying to accomplish at their company?

Don’t amplify your echo chamber.

Data management

Being averse to data or numbers isn’t a great place to be if you’re going to be a product manager; in fact, it’s probably best to find a different role if that’s the case. As you’re surrounded by data and KPIs, try to look beyond the data. Think about the explicit and implicit biases the data might carry. Simpson’s paradox is far too real in business trends and KPIs. My favorite business example is around growth. Businesses love showing growth, even if it means only showing it selectively while masking what might be an overall downtrend in the business. Learn to expand the scope of whatever data you might study. Experiment with different time scales, create meaningful benchmarks and never accept anything at face value.

Understand biases in data and KPIs.

Self management

We live in an age of too much information and equally, too much misinformation. The use-cases for AI are advancing at a pace that leaves little room for even trying to comprehend the long-term implications to our lives. In such times, it’s very easy to acquire just a little bit of knowledge, just enough to be dangerous. Regardless of whether you believe the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real, being self-aware is critical to success as a product manager. In some cultures, modesty is a virtue and people tend to underestimate their capabilities. Do you understand your own cultural contexts and beliefs deeply? Know yourself and your own blind spots before you try to interpret what a customer, peer or salesperson might really mean.

Look inwards before you look outwards.

Epilogue

Working on and building better EQ will also not magically transform you into a better product manager; it will help you develop better perspective on the tools, frameworks and various interactions you will need to have to be successful. If you are really craving for more conventional wisdom, I love Dave Wascha’s presentation on product management.

Rabbit Holes

The psychology of interpersonal relationships and biases plays such an important role in product management that it’s easy to forget and instead focus on the tools, KPIs and methodologies prevalent in your organization.