As Product Managers, we need to ensure we're building great products to satisfy a user need or solve a problem. For this, we need to understand our users and stakeholders, make sense of data, understand tech and business implications, communicate and translate information across different teams. We need to speak the ‘right language’ in order to be successful PMs. But what does it mean? On one hand, through working on global products and platforms, as part of multicultural teams, I learned I was at an advantage for being multilingual. I was able to understand our users and align with them, be the voice of our users towards my teams and stakeholders, and ensure our products were of quality across different regions. On the other hand, as PMs, we’re the connectors between different people and roles: users, designers, senior management, engineers, data scientists and they each communicate differently.
My talk covers contexts in which PMs need to speak different languages, with practical examples, spiced with a few 'no-nos' and suggestions on how to adapt our language depending on the groups we’re interacting with. We’ll understand what 'speaking the right language' means for a PM and that it can be a 'make or break' our products.
