7 Best Presentation Skills a Product Manager Need in 2023

Let’s face it: product management is complex. 

Getting caught up in product management’s pace, bustle, and stress, interacting with different teams, managing release dates, prioritizing customer pleasure, pushing the mobile product plan, and endless other duties are not accessible.

Today’s tools, technology, and skills for developing breakthrough new items are more plentiful and accessible than ever.

So, what should product managers do if they have to compete with ever-more competitive offerings entering the market?

Our recommendation is to improve your product management skills and return to the primary premise of product management: find innovative methods to add value to your consumers.

This article highlights numerous facets of product management, the most essential of which is the need for talent.

Let’s Start and Attempt to Answer the Questions:

What Is the Definition of Product Management?

Do you watch your favorite movie on a streaming service or start a chat with a coworker on your company’s messaging system? Have you ever pondered on who helped design these digital experiences?

A precise response is that many distinguished persons were involved in the development of each product through the process of product management.

Product management is critical for bringing new ideas to market and accelerating business growth. It’s a crucial organizational job that’s gaining traction.

Product management is an organizational role that directs every step of a product’s lifecycle, from development to positioning and price, by focusing first and foremost on the product and its users.

Product managers advocate for customers within the firm and ensure that the market’s voice develops the most excellent possible product.

Product management is ideal for those who want to start their own business. Product managers can often work independently, collaborate with various organizations, significantly impact corporate success, and develop skills that will last a lifetime.

Product teams consistently offer better-designed and higher-performing products due to the customer-centric focus.

In the tech industry, where newer and better ideas quickly uproot entrenched goods, a deep understanding of customers and the capacity to design customized solutions for them is more important than ever.

This is where product management enters the picture.

Who Is a Product Manager?

The product manager is agile’s past, present, and future pal.

A PM’s primary focus is on the product’s end-user. As a result, a product manager spends a significant amount of time performing and reviewing market and user research, either in collaboration with specialist research teams or on their own, depending on the size of their company.

The lack of familiarity with the function of a product manager is likely due to its newness.

This is because practitioners have improved their abilities, established crafts, such as design and engineering, have been able to segment themselves by specialization, and product managers are still defining their function.

There are many memes about product managers on the internet, which are quite a fun and exciting read.

The role of product managers can be amusing at times, but that’s because different people define the role differently.

Product managers have a reputation for being irritable and demanding. Meanwhile, their requests are frequently regarded as unattainable or incomprehensible objectives.

Product managers frequently joke about how others think they know more about the product than the PM. This is because internal and external stakeholders and customers often offer proposals for changes, most of which need to be more workable.

As a means of avoiding such discussions, this led to the concept of a product backlog. If someone suggests an upgrade or feature, PMs tell them it will be added to the backlog.

But, product managers know that the idea will not be added to the backlog. Random enhancement recommendations are ineffective for product managers who must adhere to a rigid product roadmap and strategy.

PMs must follow the protocol even if the recommendation is good and improves the user experience.

If you want to know more about who a product manager is, visit the Chisel Labs website and read some of their blogs. They are pretty insightful!

Why Are Skills Essential in the World of Product Management?

Product managers are individuals responsible for guiding a product’s development from conception to completion. Their responsibilities may necessitate a combination of abilities.

Product management is a crucial position at the crossroads of several functions. This requires a particular set of talents for good project managers to succeed.

Knowing everything, there is to know about your product is only one part of developing your product management skill set.

Only having technical knowledge of a product will not get you far in SaaS if you want to be a respected and valued product manager who knows how to work as part of an organization and as a team leader. 

If you didn’t know anything about music, you wouldn’t be able to become a singer.

To become specialists, product managers (or PMs) research —the facts about a company’s products. However, technical talents aren’t the only thing a PM can do. The most successful companies also invest in their people skills to develop more efficient procedures and capable team members.

“New abilities open up new possibilities.”

Because the world is constantly changing and developing, discoveries in industry and people’s lives are virtually dealt with daily. Employees and professionals may be left behind if they do not convert.

Take, for example, virtual life and social media’s current impact on communication. It is no longer fashionable to send letters from one location to another, and this long-term transformation can significantly affect how customers and employees perceive a company.

Whether you’re a recent graduate looking to break into the corporate world or a mid-career professional looking for the next promotion, you’ll need an up-to-date skill set.

Learning gives you the ability to gain skills. Skill training assists people in identifying, developing, and nurturing their intrinsic aptitude in a particular sector.

Skills enhance your ability to expand your professional network.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the essential core product management abilities and other presentation skills you probably didn’t realize you required as a product manager.

General Important Skills:

A Fundamental Knowledge of Data

Although you can be an experienced mathematician or statistician, having a fundamental understanding of analyzing and interpreting data is crucial.

It’s much more critical for SaaS product managers to evaluate and comprehend data because SaaS products create massive amounts of data. In this circumstance, you need to become a data-driven SaaS product manager and lead the way in digital transformation.

The ability to create a product plan is a valuable skill

It’s worthwhile for product managers to improve their map-making abilities—at least, their product roadmap-making abilities.

You are enforcing your product’s law, which is the product plan. You’ll need to communicate with other departments to keep everything on track. Most inquiries may be answered by referring to your product roadmap, which can save you many hours presenting already-known topics.

A product roadmap outlines your product strategy and serves as a roadmap for product development, release, and expansion. Teams should refer to this timeline when questions about new procedures and solutions construction occur.

Thinking Strategically

This is related to having a thorough understanding of the market and competition. As a product manager, you must contribute to the definition of the company’s vision and then work toward that vision with realistic and achievable goals.

Product strategy necessitates both short- and long-term objectives. You’ll have to make quick decisions based on these goals all the time, and you’ll have to be able to back them up. You keep track of the company’s overarching goals and user needs, which necessitates asking big questions and coming up with significant answers, such as:

• What should the overarching direction of your product be?

• What should be the order in which you prioritize distinct product features?

• Which of the two high-priority problems should you address first?

Excellent Organizing Skills

As a product manager, you’ll frequently have to switch back and forth between a strategic and tactical focus.

For example, discussing your product at a high level with an industry analyst or your CEO in the morning and then diving into a detailed discussion of feature priority with your developers mid-day.

To be effective in both situations, you must stay organized at all times, keeping your strategic, high-level information and up-to-date information regarding features and other product details on hand.

Is It Necessary To Have Good Presentation Skills?

‘Essential.’ It’s the equivalent of questioning how crucial tires are in an automobile.

Product managers are the product’s “brains, eyes, and ears.” While there are many parts of a product manager’s life to learn to be successful, one of the most important is ‘Presentation Skills.’

These are one of the most critical components of the ‘Product Management Toolkit’ that any Product Manager requires to succeed.

Whether you like it or not, public speaking and presenting are essential for a product manager. When you stand up and talk, you may have to fight your imposter syndrome, but mastering these skills will ensure you can communicate successfully.

Keeping Your Audience’s Emotions Under Check During Your Presentation

You’ll need to strike a balance between being unpredictable and messy. For instance, in music, the melody of a song requires some predictability so that you can sing along.

But excessive predictability leads to a monotonous tune. On the other hand, unpredictability leads to confusion and disorientation. 

Strike a balance so that your viewers can guess what’s coming next sometimes, but not always.

Make a map of your presentation’s directional travel to see how predictable it is.

Considering the Audience

The presentation’s flow, inventiveness, substance, and messaging should help tailor it to the audience for whom it intends.

The level of expertise and originality used will likewise rise in tandem with the audience’s seniority.

In the case of client pitches, the presentation should include the client pain points that the product/solution intends to address, the offering’s USPs, and much more.

Decide What You Want To Say

Before you begin any formal communication, especially the essential one, you must decide what to say.

People enjoy hearing things in groups of three. 

Begin by listing three critical takeaways you want your audience to remember from the presentation, and then build your presentation around them. 

The majority of people have a limited attention span. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that what you say is so revolutionary that it will escape the average person’s attention span. Most of us have a span of 30-45 minutes. 

We’re just human, after all.

Pay Close Attention to the Details

While it is understandable that one would be extra cautious with the details of what is at stake (business opportunity/team perception/opportunity for additional investment, and much more ), this is a critical aspect of any presentation.

It can detract from its impact if any factual inaccuracies, color–combination issues (leading to the audience not viewing any slide properly), grammatical errors, and so on are present.

To avoid errors on the ‘Presentation – day,’ it is necessary to use a ‘four eye’ method, in which at least two persons go through the more nuanced aspects.

Choose Your Medium

A deck of materials is a big no for every presentation.

You can also give presentations in unusual ways, such as:

• Pre-recorded videos

• Annotated slideshows

• Drawings in real-time

• Audio notes in documents

However, could you make every effort to keep it engaging?

Graphs

They are critical in communicating a message, particularly in financial performance reviews.

The graph should convey the messages; in the case of relative performance, the period chosen should be optimal, i.e., both too short to provide an adequate representation and too long to make the graph appear stretched.

Defining the Presentation’s Flow

The presentation should flow smoothly; like a skilled painter’s brush on canvas, the slides should convey the message clearly and in the correct order – transitioning from one part of the presentation to the next should be seamless. 

The presentation should be a story with a compelling beginning, strong storyline, and logical conclusion.

Visuals become vital in client pitches and should be appropriately used to engage the audience.

Conclusion:

A product manager’s communication skills include the ability to present. 

It’s all part of communicating the product strategy to the business and the product development team. It’s also an aspect of customer communication – especially in a B2B organization, where product managers are frequently needed to aid sales teams in talking to customers as product experts.

“Most businesses believe that product is essential, but even the best product won’t make the firm successful without outstanding leadership and presenting abilities.”