Main Responsibilities and Required Skills for Principal Product Manager

A Principal Product Manager is a senior professional who translates product strategy into detailed requirements and roadmap. They lead and align product strategy and development, set priorities, and manage backlog. In this blog post we describe the primary responsibilities and the most in-demand hard and soft skills for Principal Product Managers.

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Main Responsibilities of Principal Product Manager

The following list describes the typical responsibilities of a Principal Product Manager:

Assess

Assess new market opportunity and strategic areas of growth.

Assist

Assist the Documentation group in developing released documentation and on-line help.

Balance

Balance technical and business insight.

Build

Build alignment across product teams, cross-functional partners and Leadership / Founding team.
Build and create narratives for cross-functional teams.
Build and execute unit tests and unit test plans.
Build a team of thoughtful, entrepreneurial and customer-obsessed product managers.
Build a vision, strategy and own a multi-year product roadmap.
Build effective monitoring to monitor the health of the systems (we use Datadog).
Build, measure, and iterate rapidly.
Build new products and development tools.
Build out the product management team, processes, and frameworks.

Close

Close interaction with Engineering, Data Science, BUs, and customers.

Collaborate with

Collaborate to develop a go-to-market plan for the product, and guide it to initial launch.
Collaborate with product team members and leadership to build consensus on priorities.
Collaborate with researchers and designers on defining and testing innovative ideas.
Collaborate with the open-source community, technology & solution partners.
Collaborate with the QA team to ensure high-quality software is being released to end-users.
Collaborate with UX, Engineering and WW stakeholders to develop, test and launch features.

Collect

Collect and prioritize product requirements.

Communicate

Communicate the roadmap to the user community, game team partners, and senior leaders.
Communicate with QA and porting engineering to discuss major changes to functionality.

Complete

Complete post-mortems to ensure proposals are successful and / or refine.
Complete research to determine which.
Complete research to determine which services or.

Conduct

Conduct competitive analysis.

Confirm

Confirm the request conforms with laws and regulations governing revenue recognition.

Connect

Connect the work of researchers to product opportunities and value propositions.

Create

Create alignment with other business units.
Create basic mockups and wireframes for feature concepts.
Create buy-in for the product vision both internally and with key external partners.
Create compelling market validated use cases and lead ideation.
Create feature plans for each release, including acceptance criteria, use cases, etc..

Define

Define and develop product strategies, success metrics, and results.
Define and drive short-term and long-term delivery roadmaps.
Define and prioritize features, functionality and opportunities within your product area.
Define and secure executive buy in for new products' business cases.
Define business metrics and guide the broader display business with data.
Define high-quality roadmaps based on team strategy and vision.
Define, measure, and monitor key KPI's for product specific features.
Define product goals and build the experiments to rapidly evaluate their success.
Define product strategy and direction.
Define roadmap and solution dependencies for new and existing products and concepts.

Determine

Determine monetization strategies for new services.
Determine the profitability and viability of new products or product enhancements.

Develop

Develop a / b testing plan with analytics where appropriate.
Develop and conduct qualitative customer research.
Develop and present a big picture solution that is ground in research and customer validation.
Develop and present business cases to justify investment in the new opportunities.
Develop and protect intellectual property.
Develop a plan with well-defined launch milestones.
Develop high quality reporting for executive leadership.
Develop materials to communicate progress and challenges to executive leadership.
Develop plans to support growth and scale the business efficiently.
Develop positioning and messaging.
Develop pricing, packaging and licensing for new products.
Develop product documentation, product presentations and other content assets to describe the work.
Develop product mastery by working with Customer Success, Engineering and Support.
Develop the product roadmap and build consensus on prioritization which drives product execution.

Discover

Discover and define business cases for new market opportunities.
Discover important problems to solve and validate them quickly.
Discover, validate, and document requirements.

Drive

Drive continuous solution improvements.
Drive execution and handle multiple tasks simultaneously with efficiency and effectiveness.
Drive innovation with a deep understanding of customer workflows.
Drive international growth, product strategy and execution.
Drive root cause analysis on KPI performance.
Drive technical integration opportunities with storage partners such as Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft.

Engage with

Engage with Press and Analysts to communicate company, product and technology strategy.
Engage with the Frostbite production systems team and be an advocate for their ideas.

Ensure

Ensure design and technology approach meets user needs and addresses value opportunity.
Ensure optimal performance across all commerce experiences & systems.
Ensure team alignment on strategic rationale, commercial strategy, financial valuation.
Ensure that all requests received make sound financial sense, and don't introduce undue risk.
Ensure that the right user personas are identified and validated.
Ensure the right steps are being followed from conceptualization through to feature launch and use.

Escalate

Escalate issues as necessary.
Escalate problems and issues to other departments when needed.

Establish

Establish and lead cross functional teams across multiple time-zones as necessary.
Establish and maintain metrics for product performance that align to business goals.
Establish services and support approach.

Evaluate

Evaluate competitor experiences.
Evaluate new technologies and make recommendations to pursue in future products.
Evaluate open source and partner technologies.
Evaluate that the request is in alignment with overall monetization strategy for the product family.

Evangelize

Evangelize product / applications at trade shows, webinars and user group meetings.
Evangelize product to internal and external stakeholders to create awareness and build mindshare.

Execute

Execute on a high velocity testing program for new feature development.

Executive

Executive communication presence (written, spoken, presentations, etc.) is fundamental to the role.

Help

Help drive future innovation at BlackBerry.
Help manage the technical and commercial aspects of partnerships with third parties.
Help us define and drive the product vision and roadmap.

Identify

Identify continuous improvement opportunities for Product Management processes.
Identify and prioritize a backlog for your product.
Identify the biggest problems to solve.

Improve

Improve market penetration via refined segmentation.
Improve service delivery and contain costs / increase margins.

Launch

Launch improvements and own feature sets within the core portfolio.

Lead

Lead and align product strategy, roadmap, and development.
Lead cross-functional teams to bring new products to new or adjacent markets.
Lead cross-functional teams to define product and roadmap using Agile methodology.
Lead development of go-to-market strategy, value proposition and key claims.
Lead extensive framework of experimentation in order to drive customer impact.
Lead launch initiatives both internal and user-facing paired with product marketing.
Lead market assessment and business case development.
Lead the development of stories and requirements used to create product specifications.
Lead the engagement with the banks in the US as first priority.
Lead user conference sessions and general industry topics.

Make

Make strategic recommendations that have a significant financial impact.

Manage

Manage and assign tasks to several product managers in the team.
Manage full product life cycles including.
Manage product lifecycle from concept to End of Life.
Manage the production of interactive prototypes and user testing around them.
Manage the resolution of escalated customer problems.

Mentor

Mentor and grow other PMs, designers, and software engineers at Endpoint.

Monitor

Monitor and report on product KPIs and team milestones.
Monitor customer feedback, response and metrics.

Optimize

Optimize product configuration.

Own

Own key metric to monitor the business objectives, including storage quotas, costs and growth.
Own market and financial analytics, including market models, financial proforma, project valuation.
Own pricing and P&L for your product line.
Own strategy for your product area.
Own the roadmap for one of our squads (Security, Privacy and Ethics).
Own the strategy, roadmap, and execution to create sustainable differentiation.
Own the vision, strategy, and execution for Aspiration's first credit card.

Participate

Participate in contract negotiations whereby focus is on the technology component.
Participate in reviewing and contributing to product plans and roadmaps.

Perform

Perform detailed analysis of competing game engine technologies.
Perform outbound marketing and launch activities in collaboration with product marketing.
Perform statistical analysis on empirical data (sales, usage, etc).
Perform system acceptance and manage the UX for the product.
Perform win / loss analysis.

Plan

Plan, implement and maintain roadmap strategy and scheduling.

Prepare

Prepare, maintain and evangelize the product roadmap for both short-term and long-term releases.

Prioritize

Prioritize feature opportunities and develop annual backlog.
Prioritize the initiative and feature backlogs to maximize the impact and value.

Provide

Provide initiative rollout status & monitor impact of each initiative launched.
Provide input to QA for creation of test plans and certification criteria.
Provide leadership and drive market differentiation of the products you manage.
Provide overall direction for product enhancements and general product development requirements.
Provide periodic project updates to executives and product leadership.

Recommend

Recommend and justify major changes to existing products / services / processes.

Report

Report on performance and present your roadmap on a quarterly basis.
Report to senior leadership on the state of the business.

Represent

Represent the company by visiting customers to solicit feedback on company products and services.
Represent the customer's voice to the technology and user experience design team.
Represent the quality and growth of creatives in organization-wide business reviews and documents.

Research

Research and analysis (both primary and secondary research).
Research beyond the stated requirements and evaluate its need across industries.

Review

Review and prioritize customer feedback and transform it into product requirements.
Review integration and regression test plans created by QA.

Run

Run user research, usability studies, data-driven experiments to inform product direction.

Scope

Scope and prioritize activities based on business and customer impact.

Search

Search for opportunities for growth in these products and analytics broadly.

Seek

Seek out and manage partner relationships that aid in the selling and delivery of the product.

Set

Set goals that align cross-team contributions and measure progress towards achieve the vision.
Set guidelines for direct sales, develop sales plays and training as appropriate.
Set high standards for yourself and your team.
Set priorities and manage backlog of innovative features.

Simplify

Simplify and solve complex, inter-dependent, customer and business opportunities.

Specify

Specify, design and implement moderate changes to existing software architecture.

Suggest

Suggest and justify product directions and specifications.

Support

Support Sales / Customer Services / Global Services in regards to critical escalations.
Support Technical Marketing in setting up products and applications demo environments.

Synthesize

Synthesize findings into tests.

Track

Track historic sales and forecast future sales.
Track market trends and market share.

Translate

Translate product strategy into product capabilities and manage them from concept to delivery.

Travel

Travel in support of partner engagements and program initiatives as required is expected.
Travel worldwide in support of partner engagements and program initiatives is expected.

Understand

Understand needs around data and privacy compliance in products, services and platforms.
Understand the current market landscape.
Understand user and business needs to identify and define product requirements.

Use

Use analytics to constantly refine and improve strategy.
Use this framework to guide the backlogs and work done by partner teams.

Visualize

Visualize and conceptualize new ideas and solutions.

Work with

Work closely with customers and development partners to drive ongoing validation and learning.
Work closely with engineering and partners teams to deliver product to market.
Work closely with engineering leadership to make sure we meet and exceed our customers expectation.
Work closely with engineering teams and program management to deliver products to market.
Work closely with engineering teams to deliver with quick time-to-market and optimal resources.
Work closely with the engineering team to identify opportunities to grow customer value.
Work collaboratively with engineers and cutting edge technologies.
Work with Business leadership to identify key growth drivers and establish measurements for success.
Work with engineering during feature development to ensure feature objectives are maintained.
Work with Experience Designers to design workflows and UI.
Work with other functions to finalize product specifications.
Work with the marketing team to develop messaging and channel strategies.

Most In-demand Hard Skills

The following list describes the most required technical skills of a Principal Product Manager:

Most In-demand Soft Skills

The following list describes the most required soft skills of a Principal Product Manager:

Written and oral communication skills
Analytical ability
Leadership
Presentation
Problem-solving attitude
Attention to detail
Negotiation
Creative
Interpersonal skills
Self-starter
Adopt process approach to solve a problem
Build close relationships
Handle ambiguity and change
High on aptitude
Logical thinking capabilities
Obsession with deadlines
Present new ideas
Prioritization of features and issues
Priority management
Innovative problem solving