GUIDE 2024

Essential Group Product Manager Skills

Are you looking for the most regarded group product manager skills to ace your next interview?

This article includes an elaborate list of the most important skills required to excel in the group product manager role.

The group product manager position is a new role that gained popularity over recent years. One of the main reasons for this popularity is that it allows cross-functional collaboration to create products and increases customer satisfaction.

In simple terms, cross-functional collaboration happens when a group of people from different areas of an organization, such as sales, finance, marketing, and engineering teams, come together. They gather into units to make an overall decision for a common business goal.

 

Who is a Group Product Manager? 

As the name suggests, a group product manager (GPM) is a product leader responsible for aligning different business teams with a single objective. A GPM combines individual contributions from all teams to create and deliver a product or a group of products to the market.

This article discusses the essential skills a group product manager needs to have.

 

What Skills Does a Group Product Manager Require?

 

1. Administrative Skills

You need administrative skills to interact with people in different roles.

The Ability to Develop Product Roadmaps

Managing multiple teams can be nerve-wracking. Yet, a good GPM has project management skills and knows how to keep their team members informed. You have to use a product roadmap to plan the product strategy and guide a product’s development, release, and expansion. It helps to enable a smooth start-to-end process of creating a product and releasing it. Here is an example of a roadmap.

Credit: Roadmunk

Leadership Skills

Roadmaps are not the ultimate solution for all problems. Working with cross-functional teams involves huge leadership responsibilities.

Leadership abilities come into play when creating products and satisfying deadlines. It also involves excellent knowledge of project management needed to create products through product development and release.

Written and Verbal Communication Skills

To work with and lead their teams, the GPM must have good written and verbal communication skills. It allows keeping your product running and the orders flowing in. It is essential for everything from training materials, meeting notes, and product roadmap, to presentations.

Group product managers communicate with stakeholders and discuss the success of a product as well as areas of improvement.

Time Management Skills

Group product managers divide their time between various products and projects. Those with good time management capabilities balance everything on their plate while working on getting products to market.

Agile Knowledge

Nowadays, effective product managers follow the Agile approach. It allows them to work towards a common goal in an environment where cross-functional teams have various objectives and goals.

Continuous learning, planning, departmental and personal growth, teamwork, consistent development, and simplified delivery are all components of the agile methodology.

2. Technical Knowledge

Coding Knowledge

As a product manager, having coding expertise is a huge plus. Although the nature of your work is technical, knowing what your engineers and data scientists are saying and doing is advantageous to you and the company.

You do not need to master coding or know how to write code. However, a fundamental understanding of code enables you to comprehend the job your technical staff completes and explain its nature to the rest of your team. Having a better understanding of the technical team’s work makes it easier to allocate time and resources.

A/B Testing 

The managers evaluate the viability of a product and its efficacy in the actual world through A/B testing. It is the most significant stage following development.

Group product managers identify the most useful characteristics of the product without releasing the finished product and risk receiving unfavorable reviews.

A/B testing is useful in this situation. It contrasts two parts of a product, feature, or flow, each with a single modification. It allows you to identify the root of the performance changes once you make a change in a specific component.

Testing enables you to evaluate various UX and UI improvements that result in higher conversion rates, completion rates, or anything the customer needs. Arrange the data over a realistic time if there is a wider user base.

Prototyping 

Prototyping is the major design verification step in the software development process. The prototyping process includes developing the UI/UX design, demonstrating its capabilities, and testing it in real-life scenarios. GPMs create the prototype guidelines by coming up with possible use cases, user personas, and product features.

Product Ideation 

The job of a product manager involves coming up with new product ideas and optimizing the existing ones. However, pre-production takes a long time without precise technical specifications. The engineering and designing staff must follow clear guidelines to provide technical specifications, requirements, and product features.

3. Business and Marketing Knowledge

Conducting Market Research

Market research is essential when developing a new product. It helps to determine whether there is a market or audience for the product, how the product best serves that market, or how to tackle potential competitors of the product. It includes determining consumer needs, getting their opinion, conducting user interviews and surveys, and collaborating with a user research team.

Define your target market and your main competitors to perform a competitive analysis. Start by browsing relevant forums and social media platforms. Examine your competitors’ websites, blogs, and reviews while browsing the web to learn what their users are saying about their brands.

Marketing Knowledge 

Marketing is the process of gaining the attention of potential customers and demonstrating how your product solves their problems in a way that persuades them to pay for it.

As a person working in product, it’s better to consider how to sell the product you’re developing to your target audience.

When marketing and product teams collaborate, their jobs combine as product marketing managers. However, it is also important to understand sales and marketing, why the product you’re developing is selling, and how to promote it to the target audience. 

Strategy Skills

A successful product strategy includes formulating testable hypotheses. Making decisions is at the core of a good strategy. A strategy is a potent approach to deciding your company’s position, how you place yourself in the market compared to your competitors, and how you accomplish your objectives.

The product strategy canvas builds a product strategy by combining the product vision, challenge, current, and target conditions. This is a beneficial tool for communicating to the rest of your company how your strategy differs from your competitors in the market. Including the product strategy canvas in your strategy deck and a visual presentation of the product demonstrates your thorough understanding of the market in which you compete and why your product stands out from the competition.

Analytical Skills

Product managers must evaluate information and data and provide their teams with useful insight, and it helps them ensure that items are valuable to the company and its clients.

Product managers make strategic decisions daily. It is challenging to choose the best course of action without the capacity to do so. 

4. Possess User Management Skills

Knowledge of the User Life Cycle

You need to engage in each step of the user life cycle to excel in every aspect of a product life cycle. Use a user life cycle framework such as the Product-led growth flywheel. This flywheel involves four user segments: evaluators, beginners, regulars, and champions.

The evaluators are only interested in the product. Beginners are just starting to engage with the product. Regulars often engage with the product, and champions rely on the product all the time.

These user segments need to pass through a four-stage process to get proper growth.

  1. Activate: A user realizes the value of the product
  2. Adopt: Users start using the product most of the time
  3. Adore: Users always rely on the product and require more value, like a new feature
  4. Advocate: Users start recommending the product to peers

The Flywheel framework requires giving your consumers top priority. You accelerate the flywheel by guiding customers through the many phases of the customer experience and nurturing them from first awareness to your most devoted product enthusiasts. The outcome is a cycle of constructive feedback that promotes development and acquisition.

Handle User Onboarding 

New product managers start with user onboarding to master the Flywheel model. You know the best ways to onboard new users and transition them from evaluators to novices. Continue working your way through the flywheel until you have acquired all the necessary abilities and information to support users over their entire life cycle.

Understanding the fundamentals of user onboarding is one of the core competencies of a product manager. It makes or destroys a product. It is possible that users don’t like your product despite it being one of the best products. Furthermore, growing them into high-spending users is impossible if you don’t have any existing users.

 

Conclusion

Overall, a group product manager is critical in any firm. They need all the product management skills plus the ability to work with cross-functional teams to satisfy customer needs. Furthermore, this position is becoming more in demand in current competitive environments.

Develop your skills in many ways, such as participating in product management conferences, listening to podcasts, and reading specialist blogs.

Acquiring these skills simplifies your work, and better communication lessens misconceptions that stall progress. Coding expertise increases the time you spend working on an issue with engineers while reducing the time you spend discussing it.

Last but not least, spend a few hours each week honing your less-developed talents so that you profit from time and save stress.

 

Josh Fechter
Josh Fechter
Josh Fechter is the co-founder of Product HQ, founder of Technical Writer HQ, and founder and head of product of Squibler. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.