In this blog, I’ll review three key product management skills.

The learnings in this blog post, come from my experience as a founder and product manager, and from seeing good PMs in action. So instead of a comprehensive laundry list of skills, I decided to focus on the 3 that I think are often overlooked.

As a product manager overseeing a SaaS product, your role is pivotal in shaping its success. However, success is multi-dimensional. Your product must stand out in the competitive landscape and also deliver excellent value to customers.

1. Strong Customer-Centricity

Often times, a product manager is measured by awareness of their technical and Agile project management skills.

However it is perhaps equally, if not more, important to be customer centric.

That is what differentiates a traditional project manager from a product manager. It’s not just a new name for an old role. These roles have always existed. The focus is intended to shift from “deliver” well to “define” well.

By deeply understanding your customers’ needs, pain points, and aspirations, you can ensure that the features and functionalities you prioritize align closely with the needs of the customers.

Then you can also balance the technical requirements such as scalability, performance, and technical debt.

Once you have your requirements defined like this, then it’s much easier leverage techniques such as stack ranking or MoSCoW techniques (must have, should have, could have, and won’t have) to prioritize features based on their importance and impact on customer satisfaction. After all, the quality of output is defined by the quality of the input.

Additionally, frequent testing with customers enables you to validate assumptions, gather feedback, and iterate on your product roadmap effectively.

Remember, never assume; always validate and measure your product decisions through direct customer interactions.

So the first skill is to be as close as possible to the customer, and let everything be driven from there.

2. Alignment with GTM Strategy

Your product success is ultimately measured by revenue performance and customer satisfaction. These come when product strategy meets the real test of product adoption.

Actively listening to feedback from customer service, marketing, and sales teams provides valuable insights. You can determine which features and integrations must be prioritized, and what would give you the best competitive positioning.

In addition, you also know which shiny features you have on your backlog, that should probably be deprioritized for now. Aligning your product roadmap with the go-to-market (GTM) strategy ensures that your sales and marketing activities are well supported and synchronized with the product’s capabilities.

By incorporating this into product development process, you can refine your product offerings to better meet market demands, ensure high customer satisfaction, and drive customer growth.

So the second skill is to keep revenue and CSAT (customer satisfaction) in the forefront and make decisions that will directly drive them.

3. Transparent Backlog Management

Transparency and collaboration within the product development team are important for successful product management.

Keeping your product development team well informed about the rationale behind the items in the backlog creates a shared understanding of product/customer priorities and objectives. It makes it easier to manage your backlog and keep up the morale.

So bring your insights to the meetings and empower team members to contribute ideas, provide feedback, and challenge assumptions. When diverse perspectives come together, we make more informed decisions.

Regularly review and refine the backlog as a team to ensure that it reflects evolving customer needs, market dynamics, and strategic goals.

Not only will this help you in defining the product roadmap, it will also ultimately result in the team proactively partnering with you deliver the key objectives. The constraints will be looked upon as opportunities.

So, the third skill is to truly manage the backlog collaboratively by sharing your customer centric thought process with the team.

Conclusion

By building these three product management skills and applying them as best practices—strong customer-centricity, alignment with GTM strategy, and collaborative backlog management—you can lay a solid foundation for building successful SaaS products.

Get in touch if you want to discuss in more detail