10X Your Product Management Capability With Stronger Human Skills (Part 3— Curiosity)
Following on from previous posts about the important skills of communication and empathy, next up is curiosity. Curiosity is yet another one of those human skills which can 10x your capability as a product manager.
But if you ask a product manager how good they think they are at being curious, they are highly likely to either under or over-rate themselves. Their peers and leaders will do the same.
So how might you objectively assess your ability at being curious or better still, ask how are you curious?
Using a scale of 1–5 where 1 is never and 5 is always, here are some questions to consider:
💡How often do you engage in a conversation with someone you don’t know? This could be at an event, in an elevator/lift, during a flight, at a bus stop, or anywhere else you may go.
💡When going somewhere you regularly go (e.g. commute, dog walk, friends house, shopping) how often do you take a different route for no particular reason?
💡You are doing a customer interview and toward the end, the customer mentions a bug that is a common complaint. How often would you genuinely try to dig deeper to understand their complaint?
💡You are having a conversation with a colleague in customer service and they suggest a feature that will fix a problem. How often would you ask questions to understand their deeper emotions for solving that particular problem?
💡How often do you approach conversations with your customers with humility, and check your biases? For example, you don’t assume you know what their needs are and don’t judge them based on what you see.
And one final question…
💡Thinking back to all the content you read, watched, or listened to over the last 3 months, how different and diverse were the topics of that content?
These questions are designed to not only assess how often someone does something but also how well they do it too. What do you think? And are there others we should consider?
This is the third in a series of posts we’ll be writing about the concept of more objective capability assessments. At NLPC we’re currently prototyping a potential solution that aims to help measurably lift the capability of product managers globally. Get in touch if you would like to be part of our early testing.
