Curiosity: The Product Manager Skill I Can't Teach

When I show product managers the four pillars of product management for the first time, they often get overwhelmed. The reaction is usually some version of "oh, I have to do all the things." I understand it, because the job covers far more than the title suggests.

So for anyone who came looking for a list of product manager skills, the short version comes first. A product manager needs to be able to work in four areas: product strategy, product delivery, customer experience, and adoption and growth. Strategy narrows every possible thing you could build down to a single customer problem to bet on. Delivery expands that bet into a solution and measures whether it had the impact you expected. Customer experience makes the result easy to use, easy to onboard, easy to support, and easy to buy. Adoption and growth puts it in front of the market, so that you find out whether you were right and feed what you learned back into strategy.

Those four can be taught, and I teach them (my course spends most of its time on the first one). Underneath them is one skill that I tell students I can't necessarily teach. That skill is curiosity. It comes before the other four, and you can practice it even though I can't hand it to you.

Product manager skills, sorted into four pillars

The pillars run in a circle, and each one either narrows or expands what came before it. Strategy and adoption and growth face the market, where all the possibilities are. Delivery and customer experience face inward, toward the team and the product. Most of the product managers I meet have one pillar mastered. For most of them it is delivery, because that is where they started and where they stayed.

The mistake at this point is reading the four pillars of product management as a checklist and trying to master everything at once. Don't. The job is choosing where your time will have the most influence right now. Some quarters that means three months of making sure your sales team is effective. Some quarters it means researching the market before anything gets built. And some quarters you put your head down and build. You prioritize your own time the same way you prioritize the features that go into your product, and that choice is a decision you can't make with nothing to go on.

Why curiosity comes before the other skills

When I describe the approach of great product leaders in my course, it runs in a fixed order: observation, decision, and influence. You observe first. That takes the mindset of being passionately curious as a problem seeker, someone always looking for trends in how customers behave and where the market is moving. Then you decide. Then you influence people to follow the decision, because making one does not mean anyone will come along.

The order matters because of what happens when the first step gets skipped. If nobody in the meeting has evidence, then opinions are all that is available, and the opinion that wins belongs to whoever has the most authority and the loudest voice. A product manager who has not observed anything has nothing to decide with, so the decision gets made for them.

So I put curiosity upstream of every pillar. Strategy cannot narrow down to one customer problem if you never went looking for problems. And you cannot explain how the value you create for a customer becomes revenue for your own company if you never asked what the problem costs them today.

The wrong version of observation has a name inside most companies. It is called gathering requirements, and I don't like the word. If I go out to gather requirements, then I have already decided that whatever I am told is truth, fact, gospel, and the right thing to build. So I write it down instead of wondering about it.

What I tell students instead is to choose sincere curiosity. I can't necessarily teach you how to be curious, but you can remind yourself "I am a curious person" before you walk into a conversation, and then change your identity to match it.

What a researcher noticed in a hospital hallway

A researcher booked a mentorship session with me because she wanted to move into product management and didn't know how employers would see her. Her background was research (the way she put it, she "just" had a research background). Part of that work had been shadowing nurses in a hospital, so I asked her what she discovered in the shadowing.

She told me that almost 30% of a nurse's 12 hours on the ward went to taking notes, calculating vitals, and writing all of it into the patient's file. I asked whether that surprised her. She said yes. So I asked what she had assumed beforehand. She had assumed the readings were all on the monitor, that there was probably some feature carrying them into a central platform, and that the nurses spent most of their time with the patient.

Then she told me about a family member. She had stepped out of the unit, and a man waiting outside took her for a doctor. He gave her the patient's name and asked how the patient was doing. He was asking everyone who came out, about once an hour. It would have been easy to feel sorry for him and keep walking, but she wondered why he kept coming back with the same question. Her first guess was a communication problem, since the doctors only met with families at specific times. She kept having conversations with the different people involved, and that first guess did not fully explain it. Then she got to the question I wish more product managers asked: why is nobody solving this, and am I the only one who has noticed it?

I told her that what she had just described is what a product manager is meant to do. You find an opportunity, you figure out what is holding people back from solving it, and you work out whether you could be the one to remove the blocker. She had come in worried about the product manager skills she didn't have. I told her she had already been doing product management. She was ahead of most people who have held the title for a few years, because most of the time somebody else decides what they should build and their job is to make it happen.

All I did in that exchange was ask two plain questions, and she supplied the third one herself. Surprise is the evidence that you were carrying an assumption, and most of us feel it for about a second before we explain it away. The practice is to stop on it and ask yourself what I asked her. Did that surprise me? What did I assume before I saw it? And then her question, which is why nobody has solved it already.

The second answer tells you what you (and probably your whole company) believe about the customer that isn't true. The third is where the product opportunity is, because a problem that is big and still unsolved has something holding it in place. Whoever finds out what that is gets to build the thing customers will pay for. That is how something you noticed in a hallway ends up in your company's revenue. (How you word the questions you take to other people afterward is its own skill, and I wrote about it in the post on asking better questions.)

What to do this week

Pick one thing from the last week that surprised you. It might be a customer doing a step by hand that your product is supposed to handle, a number on a dashboard that moved the wrong way, or a stakeholder request you didn't see coming. Write one sentence for what you saw and one sentence for what you had assumed beforehand. Then take both sentences to one person who would know. Ask them why it works the way it works today, and ask what you are not seeing. Don't bring a solution with you, and don't call anything they tell you a requirement.

If nothing surprised you, don't take that as good news. It probably means you spent the week with your head down in delivery, so point the assignment forward. Before your next customer or stakeholder conversation, remind yourself that you are a curious person, write down what you expect to hear, and check afterward where you were wrong.

The four pillars will still look like all the things. But the work in each of them begins with somebody noticing that what they saw did not match what they assumed, and by Friday that somebody can be you.

-Brennan

Want to practice this on YOUR product with a coach? The Influential PM is a three-week live cohort on Maven with six live lessons and three optional office hours. Join The Influential PM.