Atlassian’s Four Pillars of Great Product Managers (Podcast)
I just had a great conversation about what makes the essential elements of a Product Manager’s skillset — the conversation was with Atlassian’s Head of Product, Steen Andersson and he shares plenty of insight.
I’ve posted it as a podcast on Soundcloud and you can get the transcript here.
Underpinning most of Steen’s thinking is the result of an internal company project to drive consensus around these “Four Pillars of Great Product Managers”.
What are the Four Pillars?
This is what Steen had to say:
ONE: is “leads and inspires”. So a great PM needs to be able to lead a team, inspire a team.
TWO: The Second thing is being a “master of the PM craft”. So thinking about all the tools in your kit bag to help you understand your role, how to think about roadmaps and prioritization. How to think of creative ways to drive a team through particular challenging process to come out the other side; How to ship with velocity; all these techniques to operate and be a great PM.
THREE: The 3rd one is “delivering outcomes” and delivering comes back a lot to things like metrics, understanding what are the key levers we have to play with and how to appropriately use those to drive business outcomes like driving MAU or driving revenue or innovating in a way that’s really differentiating.
FOUR: And the last one is “being a great communicator” and the meaning of that is really key. When you meet great PMs you’ll tend to find a common pattern that they really grab you with the way they talk about the problems they’re working on and just how they think about their space and all things in their world. So being an awesome communicator but written, verbal and presenting are critical.
Drilling In
These pillars are great to have teased out. In the podcast, I drill in a bit more to understand what’s contained in the industry-specific elements of “TWO”, I won’t cover them here its worth reviewing.
Why defining the pillars matters
On the surface, some people may read these Four Pillars and feel underwhelmed because in retrospect they may seem non-controversial or just plain obvious — I disagree.
When we are in the trenches, we barely get to define anything more than the common boundaries of our job with other roles — we use the best tools we may have used in other roles along our career (spreadsheets, kanban, user stories, analytics, surveys etc) — its a hodge podge of tools just to get the job done, but rarely we know whats Best Practice.
The reason for this is that role of Product Manager for SaaS companies is still evolving, so the tools and skills are in flux.
What is great here is that Atlassian, stopped (in the sense of Steven Covey’s 7th Habit — “Sharpen the saw”) and defined what was important to them. This gets all departments on the same page in what a PM actually does, Steen summarizes:
So thats how we think about what makes a great PM and it’s exciting to have some of that clarity and alignment in the organization now to allow everyone to work on those things and help grow their teams and hire a common lens…
Other Pillars?
I quickly Googled to see if Atlassian had previously published these insights. I didn’t find any but interestingly I found another set of “four pillars” by Daniel Elizalde. They are:
- Soft Skills
- Business Acumen
- Domain Knowledge
- Technical Skills
So this is an interesting contrast to the Atlassian model. Specifically the Business Acumen is strongly contrasted — I think this is a profoundly important characteristic for:
a) more senior Product Managers
b) Product Managers at startups where everyone needs to have close connection to business imperatives.
I don’t think Atlassian has neglected this, its potentially covered within the OKR framework that we discuss around 00:28:41.
The other aspect is “Technical Skills”. Daniel is probably biased from the fact that he is in a very technical space, IoT. This would be very different to being a Product Manager of a photo-sharing App, but he makes a very cogent point:
Improved communication (and trust) from your development team.
Overall, Daniel’s post is definitely worth a read as it goes deep, very deep into his reasoning behind is Four Pillars.
