A few years ago I wrote a post where I claimed that 45% of the product manager’s job is communication, 45% is identifying the value and the 10% left represents the rest of the product manager’s work. You can find this post here).

Since then I was asked several times by mentees why I give so much weight to the communication aspect of the job.

The answer that I give my mentees is that I was wrong. I’ve learned something important over the years. I’ve learned that communication is more like 90% of the job…

At that stage they usually wear a puzzled expression on their faces. Some of you are probably puzzled too.

In this post I will provide my thoughts on this. I will explain why I think the communication aspect is so critical for product managers, and how it is different from other roles which also rely heavily on communication.

Let’s go.

Why is communication so crucial for product managers?

Let’s look on the product manager’s responsibilities:

1. Writing PRDs (specs)
2. Interviewing customers and users
3. Conducting discovery processes from time to time
4. Managing sprints and orchestrating the product delivery process
5. Solving day-2-day priorities conflicts
6. Coming up with a quarterly plan
7. Building a product roadmap
8. Building a product strategy
9. Getting buy-ins for new ideas and initiatives for the product
10. Working on product launches & releases and go to market strategy (GTM)
11. Joining occasionally CS & sales calls
12. Analyze features performance and track the companies KPIs
13. Going over the backlog and analyzing feature requests

And I can list a few more, but I think those are the main ones.

Out of the list above – the great majority of the tasks require you to be involved in some sort of communication with other people, whether it’s a verbal or a written one.

In fact, only bullets 7, 8, 12 and 13 may be accomplished with little or no communication involved.

The Diversity of Communication Types

Now, what is unique about product managers is not only that their daily work involves a lot of communication, but also the fact that the communication types that they need to be involved with are very diverse.

Meaning, if you wish to excel at your job you need to quite good at:

• Communicating your ideas (both verbally and in writing)
• Extracting information from people without them feeling like they are being interrogated
• Getting buy-ins and commitments from people without them feeling scammed or aggressively pushed
• Lead without authority
• Delivering presentations
• Talking in front of an audience
• Mediate between different stakeholders (for example – mediate a request from customer success to the data analysts team)
• Respond to challenges and emotional reactions with calm and concrete communication
• Navigating office politics while staying above the childish power games
• Solving conflicts in a respectful manner

And I can go on…

That’s quite a bit of a challenge.

But isn’t it true to most professions?

That’s often the follow up question I’m getting after explaining the above.

And the answer is ‘no’. You don’t need to be a great master of communication in most of the other roles.

Let’s take a few examples:

• A software engineer – you can write great code and develop complex algorithms without talking to too many people. In extreme cases your connection to the real world can even go solely via your team leader, while you are focused on killing Jira tickets like crazy. You don’t need to communicate much to excel in your job.
• A marketing manager – You write great posts to social media and/or tell a story to the world about the product you’re trying to promote. So definitely you’re good at some sort of communication. However, the communication you’re dealing with is mainly written, and it’s focused on short stories which deliver great messages. It’s definitely important, but it doesn’t mean you can interact well with other people, and it says nothing about your verbal communication skills. 
• If you’re in sales – then you definitely need to know how to tell a good story (for the avoidance of doubt, I see this as a great professional quality), and since you’re doing this for a living you could say that most of your day is around communication. While that being true, this sort of communication is very narrow and focused and it’s mainly about telling stories and closing deals. It doesn’t mean that you are good at writing or communicating ideas. It doesn’t mean that you can lead without authority. It doesn’t mean that you can navigate office politics successfully and so on. You are not required to do any of those in order to be successful at your job.
• If you are at customer success – then definitely your role is about communication as well. You’re utilizing both verbal and written communication all day long, while having one leg with the customers and one leg with the internal stakeholders, trying to promote solutions to the customers needs. This role is very close in competition to the product manager’s in terms of communication versatility. However, I do think that product managers do win in this case as well, because they need, in addition to all these sorts of communication, to be able to properly communicate their ideas, get buy-ins for new initiatives and lead the engineering team without a formal authority.

Hence, although product managers are not the only ones who extensively leverage various sorts of communications for promoting their goals, on a daily basis, I do think they are the ones who need to excel on the most communication channels among their peers.

Fine, so I need to communicate a lot during my work time. I’m good with people, therefore I’ll be ok.

If that’s the thought that is passing through your head right now, then I’d tell you it’s a fair statement, and I understand why you say that.

Definitely, being good with people is a great start. But is ‘being ok’ your true goal? If so – then fine, you can stop reading at this point.

However, if you wish to be great at what you do – that won’t cut it. I’m claiming that in order to be great at your work, you also need to be great with your communication skills. Let me give you just one example of a case that make a difference between ‘being good’ to ‘being great’ (this case is based on reality, one among plenty):

The scenario

Your engineering team is getting frustrated with the customer success team. The customer success team keeps submitting tickets and these tickets generate a very high work load for the team. Most of the tickets are justified, but could have been better submitted (in terms of details). This requires a lot of back and forth communication between the sides. Also – some of the tickets are being assigned with the wrong priority and sometimes small issues are being escalated too fast.

The team complains to you and expects you to fix this. However, the bottom line is that while the customer success team can apply some things for improving the overall process, your team does need to work on these tickets, because, again, most of them are justified.

Here is how you could approach this:

An ‘ok’ answer:

[Before replying to the team you had a 10-minute chat with the head of customer success. She promised she’ll make an effort to improve the process, though you didn’t agree on the details.]

You [to the engineering team]: “Hey guys. I understand your frustration, but that’s our job. We need to provide those stakeholders with a great service, so as much as it frustrates you, there is no choice but to do this, as these tickets are justified. However, I did talk to her and she said she’ll do our best to reduce our load, so hopefully, the amount of requests will be reduced over time. Now, let’s get to it.”

A ‘Great’ answer:

[When your team complained, you sensed their frustration and set up a 45-minute meeting with the head of customer success. You described your team’s frustration and you both discussed the right process that should improve stuff. You reaffirmed her that you are obligated to provide her with a great service. She reaffirmed you that she heard your team’s frustration and she will make sure the process you agreed on will be applied. Now it’s time to get back to your team]

You [to the engineering team]: “Hey guys. I totally hear you, but look – there are two sides to each story. From your side – you are frustrated because the requests keep piling up, and you feel like you are serving only a single department instead of serving others or fixing the infrastructure. So, I totally get it.

On the other hand, the customer success team showed me some data, and their tickets indeed linger for quite too long on our side. I did explain to her that her team is not submitting the tickets properly and showed her how to do it right. We also agreed on a better escalation process and she’ll assign someone from her team to serve as the single escalation point and hopefully this person will filter most of the junk out. We need to give it a chance, but I’m truly optimistic because she definitely heard our pain, and wants to work with us to reduce the load. So I kindly ask you to give it some time and trust the process. And now – let’s go and kill those tickets.”

As you can see – in order to be able to provide the ‘great answer’ we had to do some additional work behind the scenes. A great product manager will understand that if the relationship between the two departments is not going to improve things are going to collide, escalate and get out of hand quite fast.

In order to prevent this collision – a great product manager will present a similar case to the head of customer success, representing the other side and their frustration and already agree on a process to make things better, before going back to their team.

In my reality – similar cases happen all the time. It requires empathy to both sides, sensitivity to what’s happening in front of your eyes and applying your communication skills with each stakeholder in order to create trust and a productive environment. If you think there is another responsible adult who is going to do this instead of you – then you are simply wrong.

To summarize

When I say that 90% of the product manager’s role is about communication, I mean that 90% of your tasks require you to utilize one or more of your communication skills and those skills are quite diverse.

There are several takeaways from this:

1. If you don’t like communicating with other people and prefer to be a lone wolf – then you’re probably in the wrong job.
2. Honing your communication skills should be one of your first priorities as a product manager. Leverage any such an opportunity that you can, and even proactively ask for courses/training about this.
3. Neglecting or dismissing the importance of your communication skills will result (almost guaranteed) in trust issues, being outplayed by office politics, failing to get buy-ins for your initiatives and overall ineffective and maybe even toxic work environment. Don’t do that.

And that would be it for this post.

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