Most Important Skills in Product Management

Working as a product manager requires different skills from different fields. It is not a job that requires one, two or even ten skills. It is like starting your own business and you must have different skills from different fields. It requires Skills from marketing, creativity, technology, pricing and leadership, etc…

Always I do ask myself: “What is the most important skills working as a Product Manager?”. I decided to enter Linkedin and post a new discussion in a popular group called Product Management that have more than 9,987 members and in Telecommunications Product Development Group that have more than 869 from different industries and I had more than 79 comments from different professionals. They had highlighted different skills. Some of them mentioned one skill and others more than one skill.

The number one was Communication. 47 professionals say it is an important skill. Number two was Stakeholder Management (Managing Internal and external stakeholder). 33 professionals say it is an important skill. Number three was Market Understanding. 18 professionals say it is an important skill.

17% of the professionals say Communication is the most important skill. 12% was for stakeholder management. Stakeholder management is something similar to communication. That means both of them is 29%. Product manager should care about developing those two skills.

The important skills from 4 to seven are: Customer Understanding, Product Understanding, leadership, Project Management, creativity, analysis and delivering effective training.

Working as a Product Manager is a challenging job. Although I did not get one answer that a particular skill is the most important skill as Professionals have different opinion, I can say communication is very important skill working in the filed of product management. 

Product Design Differs in Gulf

Product design from region to region differs for many reasons. I have been working in this field for more than seven years and made lot’s of product design which I had learned many things. Would like to share my knowledge and experience with different professional working in the field.

Marketing Communication

The way to reach customers in gulf differs from USA and Europe. One of the examples is marketing through web sites. Customers do visit local web sites but will not buy online from a local web site. Same Customer will buy from http://www.amazon.com as he trust it as an international web site. Many customers in USA and Europe have high internet access. In gulf, Penetration of internet is low and speed is low comparing to Europe. You can not use the internet to show high quality videos to gain more customers. We use here different methods. For instance, in Oman Marketing for government sector through news paper is very successful as the newspaper is delivered to the employee daily.

Culture

The religion in Gulf is Islam. Providing the right messages and pictures is very important. People will not except some messages which does not respect Islam religion. Furthermore, the Arabic Language. Marketing materials in Business to Consumer need to be prepared in both languages mostly. A professional should consider that when developing the marketing materials.

Word of mouth is very successful method in the Gulf. People do trust them selves a lot here in gulf.

Awareness of Product

In gulf, we do have many foreigners from out the gulf region and they might have lot’s of information about the service and local citizens with no information and do not know about the product. Way of providing awareness should be considered that some people know a lot about the service. On the other hand, some other people need to be educated.

Market Research

In gulf when doing market research we have the challenge of the difficulties of there is lack of data. It is not easy to get data and information. Statistics is not much available. Many times in developing a market research I spend a lot of time developing reports. Very popular method many professional use is benchmarking. In gulf for the benchmarking they do compare between the six countries of gulf which are: Oman, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain & Kuwait.

Learning from Other Countries

Many professionals do see what had been succeed in other countries and try to implement it here in the Gulf. This is very populate here in the gulf. One advise I would like to give to professionals is that to customized the solution based on our region.

Vendors Developing the Service

In gulf in many industries such as Oil & Gas, Telecommunication and Information Technology do have local representative with companies outside the country. Many local representative are not establish in the country. We do keep this into consideration when developing the product. Sometimes, the vendor need to find a local representative do the work with the customer.

Here in Gulf, professionals trust a lot of companies who show them selves in a professional way. Also, providing business cases and portfolio that their product was successful. In Information Technology they do trust a lot Indians. In Telecommunications, they do trust a Chinese company called Huawei which is a leading global telecommunications solutions provider as it is saving a lot of cost to telecom operators.

Furthermore, after providing the service, the weekend in gulf is different from other countries. In Oman, our weekend is Thursday and Friday and outside the gulf is Saturday and Sunday. The days we share are three days per week which are Monday till Wednesday.

GDP is High in Gulf

The GDP of countries in the Gulf is High. In the CIA World Factbook two of gulf countries were in the top 10 which are Qatar and Kuwait. In World Bank Qatar & UAE was among the top 10. In addition, in International Monetary Fund Qatar was among the top 10.

This shows that GDP in Qatar, UAE and Kuwait is very high and customers are willing to spend to buy products. Through my personal experience, marking in Qatar depends a lot in Quality and they do have the cash to invest.

Request and Needs of Customers

Request and Needs of Customers in some product might be different in our region. This is something I would like by the end of my article. For example, our nature and environment is different from other places. Our nature is deserts and mountains. I had been in one of fiber to the home and the company considered that our region has deserts and mountains.

This are some of some points what makes product design in our country different from others.

Time to Market

Time-to-Market methodology is a popular methodology discussed worldwide in the market world. The first time I had heard this concept was with Orange from France. I liked it and in many services I try to implement it to make it successful service.

Time-to-Market is a methodology which is from the start of the idea till it is ready for selling it. Making the service ready from all the different directions. For example if a company needs to finish launching a project with three categories which are: Vendors tasks, commercial side and technical side. The Time-to-Market methodology target is to finish the project from the different categories. Time-to-Market not only focus on time. It also concentrates on the resources. It’s target it to reduce the resources. One of the resources is the amount of cost of vendors, buying equipments, services requested and others.

I want to tell you about one of the experience I had for one of the services in my work. Many challenges do employee who is responsible of managing and launching of the service of not get all the internal approvals. In addition, it may find many challenges that the service is getting to make the technical tasks ready. Time-to-Market targets too is getting the internal approval and make the service ready from the technical aspect.

Some popular technical tools are available online which some can use and others are desktop tools Time-to-Market. Online which is free from Zoho and desktop which is Microsoft Office Project.


Personally, I do feel it is nice concept to be followed to let the SMEs and big enterprises launch their services in the market and be happy that they had launched a new service.