产品负责人如何建立软技巧

Welcome, Rich. Some people are confused about the whole concept of hard skills vs. soft skills. How would you define these two categories?

有些人对于硬技能和软技巧有些困惑，我们怎么划分这两种类型的能力？

First of all, I might not have chosen those labels, but that’s what everybody uses. When I think about hard skills on the product management side, they tend to be skills that are transactional and easily measured. So, we write user stories, we pull data down to check usage, we do business cases. These things are more factual. They’re more data- and content-driven. In some sense, they are process recipes. You can’t be a product manager without doing that stuff.

首先我可能不会选择这两个很多人会用的标签。当我考虑产品管理上的硬技能时，就是那些交易或者易于衡量的技能。比如说我们写用户故事，我们记录使用数据，我们做商业案例，这些事情比较实在。同时更多是数据或者内容驱动的。某种角度这些都是过程的收据。这些事情不做你不会是一个产品经理。

Soft skills are all about the interpersonal stuff, the people skills. They’re a little more subjective and emotion-based. They tend to be very situation-specific or situation-dependent. It’s how we communicate with different kinds of people, how we manage stakeholders. It’s networking, leadership, and how we show ownership for our stuff. It’s how we generate emotional support and love among our developers so that they really care about our users and products.

软技能都是关于人际关系的东西，人际关系的技能。它们更多的是主观的和基于情感的。它们往往是非常特定的情况或情况依赖性。它是我们如何与不同类型的人沟通，如何管理利益相关者。这是网络，领导力，以及我们如何显示我们的东西的所有权。软技巧是我们如何在我们的开发者中产生情感上的支持和爱，使他们真正关心我们的用户和产品的东西。

Soft skills are all about the interpersonal stuff, the people skills. They’re a little more subjective and emotion-based. They tend to be very situation-specific or situation-dependent.

软技能都是关于人际关系的东西，人际关系的技能。它们更多的是主观的和基于情感的。它们往往是非常特定的情况或情况依赖性。

Those are all really important skills, but they’re hard to quantify. The higher people move up in an organization, the closer they get to the executive suite, the more critical those soft skills become. I’m able to delegate most of the transactional tasks back to the product management team.

这些都是非常重要的技能，但它们很难量化。在一个组织中，人们越是往上走，越是接近顶层位置，这些软技能就越是关键。管理者可以将大部分事务性工作放回产品管理团队。

You mentioned earlier that you might have chosen a different name than soft skills. Why is that?

你刚才提到，你可能选择了一个与软技巧不同的名字。为什么会这样呢？

The term soft skills is sort of pejorative, right? Sometimes we say EQ – you know, emotional quotient. But when we call them soft skills, it sounds like they’re optional or not important – and that’s entirely contrary to almost everything I’ve experienced and helped with over the last couple of decades.

软技巧这个词有点贬义，对吧？有时我们会说EQ--你知道，情商。但当我们称它们为软技能时，听起来就像它们是可有可无的，或者不重要--这与过去几十年来我所经历和帮助的几乎所有事情完全相反。

“When we call them soft skills, it sounds like they’re optional or not important – and that’s entirely contrary to almost everything I’ve experienced and helped with over the last couple of decades.”

'当我们称它们为软技能时，这听起来像是可有可无或不重要--而这与过去几十年来我所经历和帮助的几乎所有事情完全相反。'

As far back as 1918, research funded by the Carnegie Institute of Technology found that 85% of job success was down to interpersonal skills. Why do you think we’re still struggling with this topic?

早在1918年，由卡内基理工学院资助的研究就发现，85%的工作成功都归结于人际交往能力。为什么你认为我们还在为这个话题而苦恼？

Everywhere I go in the world, I find that there are two tribes in almost every technology company. There’s the maker side – the developers, designers, and product managers – the folks who are heads down, putting stuff together. Then there’s the go-to-market side. And there’s a huge communications gap between those folks, with different styles of discussion and exposition, different ways of arguing.

无论我走到哪里，我发现几乎每家科技公司都有两个部落。一种是制造者--开发人员、设计师和产品经理--他们低头把东西组装在一起。还有就是走向市场的一方。而这两拨人之间存在着巨大的沟通差距，有不同的讨论和论述风格，不同的争论方式。

For people who have come through the engineering side, particularly those who studied technology in school, the classes are all about getting to the right answer. Often, they’re solo projects or problem sets. Engineering and business schools are now emphasizing a lot more group work and collaboration, which is really important. But if I grew up thinking that the way to succeed is by getting the best answer in the class and having the teacher give me a gold star – none of that helps me understand how to work with the rest of the people in my company.

对于工科出身的人来说，尤其是在学校学技术的人，上课都是为了得到正确的答案。往往都是单独的项目或问题集。现在工程学院和商学院都强调更多的小组工作和合作，这真的很重要。但是，如果我从小就认为成功的方法就是在课堂上得到最好的答案，让老师给我一颗星--这些都不能帮助我理解如何与公司里的其他人合作。

“If I grew up thinking that the way to succeed is by getting the best answer in the class and having the teacher give me a gold star – none of that helps me understand how to work with the rest of the people in my company.”

'如果我从小就认为，成功的方式就是在班上得到最好的答案，让老师给我一颗金星--这些都不能帮助我理解如何与公司里其他的人合作。'

So some of it is down to education. But also, we all want to think of the world as full of people like us. The part of the world that loves Slack believes that everybody should be on Slack, and the part of the world that hates Slack and doesn’t want anything to do with it thinks those other folks are bizarre. And it’s not that one is better. It’s that we have to understand that we’re going to reach across the aisle a lot, and we’re going to work with people who are not like us.

所以，有些是归结于教育。但同时，我们也都希望认为这个世界上充满了和我们一样的人。世界上喜欢Slack的那部分人认为每个人都应该在Slack上，而讨厌Slack、不想和它有任何关系的那部分人则认为其他那些人都很奇怪。而这并不是说哪个更好。而是我们要明白，我们要经常去接触对面的人，我们要和那些和我们不一样的人合作。

Go back to Myers Briggs, or go back to Dale Carnegie’s famous book, How to Make Friends and Influence People. This problem isn’t new, but somehow it’s not strongly emphasized on the way up.

回到迈尔斯-布里格斯，或者回到戴尔-卡耐基的名著《如何交朋友和影响别人》。这个问题并不新鲜，但不知为何在成长路上没有强烈强调。

Rich and his administrative assistant.

Yeah, I recently moved from a product-centric role to a consulting role, which has given me a completely different perspective on things like customer success, for example.

是的，我最近从一个以产品为中心的角色转到了一个咨询的角色，这让我对客户成功等事情有了完全不同的看法。

Yeah, it’s really important when you’re in the product seat, and you’re sitting down with somebody in customer success, to deeply understand how they’re motivated and what they care about.

是的，当你在产品的位置上，和大客户销售人员坐在一起时，深入了解他们的动机和他们关心的事情是非常重要的。

Customer success folks, particularly in the enterprise world, are often attached to a couple of big accounts. They see the world through those big accounts – what they want must be the most important thing in the universe. And they don’t understand why people over on the product side keep asking how many more customers are going to use the feature other than just those three huge ones.

成功获得客户人士，尤其是在企业界，通常都是和几个大客户联系在一起的。他们通过这些大客户来看待世界--他们想要的东西一定是宇宙中最重要的东西。而他们不理解为什么产品那边的人一直在问，除了那三个大客户，还有多少客户会使用这个功能。

They don’t understand the sense of urgency. And when we put the product hat on, it’s vital that we respect and honor their viewpoint, even though, for the most part, we’re not going to give them what they want.

他们不明白这种紧迫感。而当我们戴上产品的帽子时，至关重要的是，我们要尊重和尊重他们的观点，即使在大多数情况下，我们不会给他们想要的东西。

In the book Product Management in Practice by Matt LeMay, he notes that many PMs get hired based on hard skills that have little to do with the day-to-day work that they will be expected to perform. Why do you think this pattern exists?

在马特-勒梅（Matt LeMay）所著的《实践中的产品管理》一书中，他指出，许多PM是基于硬技能而被聘用的，而这些硬技能与他们将被期望执行的日常工作关系不大。你认为为什么会存在这种情况？

I think the first things inexperienced PMs learn are those easily observable, easily quantifiable, transaction-style skills, like how to write a user story. I think we start at the bottom with those hard skills.

我认为，没有经验的PM首先学习的是那些容易观察到的、容易量化的、事务式的技能，比如如何编写用户故事。我认为我们从最底层开始学习这些硬技能。

Also, HR always wants some checklist or rubric where they can say, “Oh, you can get promoted to the next level if you’re doing more than four customer interviews a month and all your tickets are in on time.” You know, something that’s observable.

另外，HR总是想要一些检查表或评判标准，在那里他们可以说：'哦，如果你每个月做了四个以上的客户访谈，并且所有的票据都能按时送达，你就可以晋升到下一个级别。' 你知道，一些是可观察的指标。

Unfortunately, that’s not what turns a junior product manager into a senior product manager. Instead, it’s judgment, strategic insight, the ability to move along all the stakeholders. So I see the focus on hard skills as the default either for people who don’t really understand how product adds value or who need something to put on a scoresheet.

不幸的是，这并不是把一个初级产品经理变成高级产品经理的原因。而是判断力、战略洞察力、调动所有利益相关者的能力。所以，我认为那些不真正理解产品如何增加价值的人，那些需要在成绩单上写点什么的人对硬技能的关注是默认的。

In the work you do with product leaders, how do you diagnose where they are on that spectrum or journey?

在你与产品领导者的交流中，你如何诊断他们在这个光谱或旅程中的位置？

I spend a lot of time talking with the people I coach about the different functional groups and how they’re motivated, measured, and rewarded. We talk a lot about trying to find the generosity in our hearts for the people who aren’t aligned with how we want to do things.

我花了很多时间和我指导的人讨论不同的功能组，以及如何激励、衡量和奖励他们。我们经常讨论如何尝试为那些与我们想做的事情路线不一致的人发现我们内心的真诚。

So again, with customer success or sales teams, they want what they want. And my explanation for why they’re not going to get it doesn’t actually solve their problem. So there’s a lot of emphasis on negotiating skills. There’s a lot of game-playing and role-playing. It’s like, OK, for two minutes, pretend you’re my head of sales and act the way that your head of sales is acting.

所以同样，对于客户成功或销售团队，他们想要的是他们想要的。而对他们为什么得不到某个东西的解释并不能解决他们的问题。有很多人强调谈判技巧。比如说尝试的角色扮演。就像，好吧，两分钟，假装你是我的销售主管，用你的销售主管的方式来行事。

“I find that the hard skills, the transactional skills, are what most of the product leaders get and understand. But how do we deal with unreasonable CEOs who have a new request to put in the queue every two to four hours? We role-play it a couple of times so that we don’t get angry, and we don’t act out. We think about what the right responses are.”

'我发现，硬技能、交易技能，是大多数产品负责人都能理解和掌握的。但如何应对不讲理的CEO，每隔两到四个小时就有一个新的需求放到需求队列中？我们可以角色扮演几遍让我们自己不要生气，或者不表现出来。我们会思考正确的应对措施是什么。'

How can PMs shift their focus from hard skills and force themselves to spend more time and energy on soft skills?

PM们如何将重心从硬技能转移到软技能上，逼迫自己花更多的时间和精力？

Well, along the way, we don’t actually get to stop doing any of the other things. But I think that product managers should go out on the road and spend three days not speaking and just listening to how salespeople sell. On the one hand, you’ll get deep empathy. On the other hand, you may spot a whole bunch of things that you can do to help them sell better.

好吧，在这个过程中，我们其实并不能停止做任何其他的事情。但我认为，产品经理应该出去走走，花点时间不说话，只听销售人员如何销售。一方面，你会得到深刻的共鸣。另一方面，你可能会发现一大堆可以帮助他们更好销售的事情。

So when you observe those things and help in terms of positioning, fixing docs, or whatever, suddenly you have their attention and some of their goodwill. Whereas criticizing them for doing the wrong thing isn’t so successful.

所以，当你观察到这些事情，并在定位、修改文档等方面提供帮助时，突然间你就会得到他们的关注，也得到一些好感。但是如果你批评他们做的不对 ，则大概率得不到好的反馈。

I think it’s about going to different departments, shutting up, observing what they do, and pitching the roadmap in terms of value instead of deliverables. Nobody cares that we’re about to deliver version 6.35, code-named Scorpio. They care that we’re adding a bunch of new features that will let our customers integrate with some back-end finance systems that they’ve been screaming about.

我觉得就是要去不同的部门体验，少说多看，观察他们的工作，用价值而不是交付物来推销产品路线图。没有人关心我们即将交付6.35版本，代号为天蝎座。他们关心的是，我们增加了一堆新功能，这些功能可以满足他们一直嚷嚷的让客户与一些后端财务系统进行连接。

So when we’re dealing with the go-to-market side, we need to start by talking about benefits, customers who care, target segments, and little vignettes that when salespeople repeat them word for word, people are going to sign purchase orders. We’ve got to go out there and walk, if not a mile, then at least a few yards in their shoes.

所以，当我们在处理产品市场落地的问题时，我们需要从谈论利益、关心的客户、目标细分市场和其他细节开始，当销售人员一字不漏地重复这些内容时，人们就会签署采购订单。我们要走到市场前端接近用户，即使不走一英里，至少也要穿上他们的鞋子走一小段。

You’ve been in the product world for a long time. I’m curious about your transition through this. Was there a lightbulb moment when you went, “Oh, that’s what it’s all about!” in relation to these soft skills?

你在产品领域已经有很长一段时间了。我很好奇你在这其中的转变。有没有一个灵光乍现时刻？，'哦，这就是我要去关注的，这些与软技能有关的点!'

Sure. I graduated with an MBA a long time ago, and I lasted about a year and a half in my first job, as did almost all of my MBA classmates, because we had this huge chip on our shoulders.

当然，我很早以前就拿到了MBA学位，我在第一份工作中坚持了一年半左右，几乎所有的MBA同学都是如此，因为我们肩上有一个巨大的筹码。

We’d spent two years reading cases that all started with the phrase, “You are the CEO of…” So when I went to my first job, which happened to be at a commercial bank, I came in swaggering. But I knew nothing. And people who’d been in the banking business for 20 years had to give me a talking to about reinstalling some humility.

我们花了两年时间阅读案例，所有的案例都是以 '你是... ...的CEO '开头的。所以当我去找第一份工作的时候，恰好是在一家商业银行，我什么都不懂就大摇大摆地进来了。那些在银行工作了20年的人不得不给我讲讲如何重新建立谦逊的态度。

I didn’t stay there very long, but I was as impolite and offensive as anybody who comes out of business school. It took me a little while to relearn. It wasn’t until my third or fourth time as a Director of Product where it finally became clear that it wasn’t my job to convince everyone that they cared about product management, and that being the person who said no all day long wasn’t making me any friends.

我在那里呆的时间不长，但我和其他从商学院出来的人一样，没有礼貌和富有攻击性。我花了一点时间重新学习。直到我第三次或第四次担任产品总监的时候，我才终于明白，我的工作不是说服所有人他们应该关心产品管理，并且做一个整天说 '不 '的人不会让我有任何朋友。

Do you have any similar examples where people you have worked with have shifted in their approach to product management?

有没有一些你共事的人在产品管理方法上有大转变的例子？

One thing I run into a lot is what Melissa Perri calls feature factories in her book, Escaping the Build Trap. I see a lot of the go-to-market side delivering demands in the form of mediocre-to-poor technical requirements that don’t work, don’t support the product, and aren’t strategic, but which somebody asked for. And the product side is told that they’re in charge of making engineering more productive, instead of building the right things.

我经常遇到的一件事是Melissa Perri在她的书《逃离构建陷阱》中所说的功能工厂。我看到很多走向市场的一方以平庸甚至低劣的技术来交付需求，这些需求没什么价值，不能支持产品力，也不是战略性的，但是有人要求这样做。而产品方则被告知，他们负责让工程师们产出更多，而不是构建正确的东西。

That’s a vicious cycle where there’s no trust. So what I usually start with is a little analysis with the Head of Product where we look back a quarter or two and see what we actually spent our engineering hours on.

这是一个没有信任的恶性循环。所以，我通常会先和产品负责人做一个小小的分析，让我们回顾前一两个季度，看看我们到底把工程人员时间花在了什么地方。

Perhaps we had an idea that we were spending a third of our energy on bug fixes, a third on features, and a third on scalability and infrastructure. But when we look at it, we find out that 20%, 30%, or even 50% of the work was on individual special requests for deals that didn’t close. That’s important because instead of going back to the other side of the house and saying, “You guys are dumb,” we bring back the list of interrupts.

也许我们有一个想法，我们把三分之一的精力花在错误修复上，三分之一花在功能上，三分之一花在可扩展性和基础设施上。但是，当我们重新审视它时，我们会发现，20%、30%甚至50%的时间是花在甚至没有完成个别特殊请求上。这一点很重要，因为我们会带着中断任务列表和需求方沟通而不是直接和他们说：'你们是一群蠢货'。

So we can say, “Here are the names of the 18 most recent interrupts that weren’t in our roadmap for the quarter, and for which somebody applied enough political leverage to displace something that we had promised.”

所以我们可以说，'这是最近18个中断的需求的名字，这些中断需求其实不在我们季度的路线图中，但是有人运用了足够的政治影响力，取代了我们原先承诺给客户的东西。'

That sets us up to have a grown-up trade-off discussion. We can say, “OK, we can do that next thing you’ve asked for. But here are the features we’re going to have to throw out this quarter as a result.” Instead of being the folks who always say no, we are the folks who bring hard choices forward.

这让我们可以有更成熟的权衡讨论。我们可以说，'好吧，我们可以做你要求的下一件事。但我们这个季度要因此而不得不扔掉某个其他功能。' 我们不是总是说 '不 '的人，而是提出艰难选择的人。

This reminds me of a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it’s taken place.”

这让我想起了萧伯纳的一句话：'沟通中最大的问题，就是沟通已经发生的错觉。'

That’s right. And the idea that I, as the head of product, am going to convince everybody else in the company to behave differently than they’re used to – it’s just backward.

这句话说的没错。作为产品负责人，要说服公司里的其他人，让他们的行为与他们习惯的不同--这种想法实在是太落后了。

On the product side, we have to figure out how to communicate in ways that people can hear, appreciate, and understand. Otherwise, we’re wasting our time and energy. It isn’t useful to complain about how sales or marketing aren’t getting it.

在产品方面，我们必须想办法用人们能够听懂、欣赏和理解的方式进行沟通。否则，我们就是在浪费时间和精力。抱怨销售或营销同仁什么都不懂是没有用的。

“On the product side, we have to figure out how to communicate in ways that people can hear, appreciate, and understand. Otherwise, we’re wasting our time and energy. It isn’t useful to complain about how sales or marketing aren’t getting it.”

在产品方面，我们必须想办法用人们能够听懂、欣赏和理解的方式进行沟通。否则，我们就是在浪费时间和精力。抱怨销售或营销同仁什么都不懂是没有用的。

How do you think soft skills evolve as we move from being individual contributor product managers to sitting in that product leader seat?

当我们从个人贡献型的产品经理转变成产品负责人时，你认为如何发展对应的软技能？

I think they are always there, and good individual contributor PMs have a lot of them already. But again, I think individual contributor PMs are mostly judged on the success of their product and their ability to get through transactional work with their development teams.

我认为它们总是存在的，优秀的PM已经有很多。但同样，我认为一般PM主要是根据他们产品的成功和他们与开发团队的事务性工作的能力来判断的。

As you move up into the product leadership roles, you’re doing less and less of the actual strategy, product management, pricing and packaging, and customer interviews. You’re now the exponent, the representative, the champion for product managers doing their jobs and succeeding. The Head of Product has to spend a lot of time showing the rest of the company that product, engineering, and design are successful – that they are heroes.

当你升到产品领导岗位时，参与具体落地产品策略、产品管理、定价和包装以及客户访谈的细节工作会越来越少。你现在是产品经理做好本职工作并取得成功的阐释者、代表者、支持者。产品负责人必须花大量的时间向公司的其他人展示产品、工程和设计是成功的。

Our entire role as product managers is to be catalysts for alignment and collaboration. Where do you see us falling down here?

作为产品经理，我们的全部角色就是成为协调和协作。你看到一般人在哪里跌倒了？

I think when somebody interrupts you and tells you they need something, one of the places we fall down is that we leap right into telling them why they can’t have what they want, without first having a moment to appreciate and thank them for taking time out of their day to come bother us.

我想，当有人打断你，告诉你他们需要什么东西的时候，我们的失误之一就是我们直接告诉他们为什么他们不能得到他们想要的东西，而没有先花点时间去欣赏和感谢他们抽出时间来打扰我们。

If we become the ogres, if we become the people that nobody wants to talk to, they’ll find some other way around us and go directly to our development teams. So we have to appreciate the requestor even if we’re not going to approve the request.

如果我们变成了讨厌鬼，变成了没有人愿意和我们说话的人，他们可能就会绕过我们直接去找开发团队。所以我们即使不打算满足提出者的需求，也应该表达感谢。

In a lot of the sessions I run, I talk about treating feedback as a gift. Would you agree with that?

在我参与的很多课程中，我都会说要把反馈当作礼物。你同意吗？

That’s right, even if you don’t want it. Even if we know that there are 847 other things in the product backlog that are never going to see the light of day, and we’re going to file this one in position 360, and it’s never going to pop up. Sometimes there’s a pattern that we can learn from, and even if we can’t, we owe them the respect to do that.

没错，即使你不想要它。即使我们知道在产品代办列表中还积压了847件几乎永远没法落地的事情，我们要把这件事归档在360号位置，它可能永远不会出现。有时候，有一种模式是我们可以借鉴的，即使不能借鉴，我们也需要尊重反馈。

I have many concerns and trepidations about the feedback I get from enterprise sales teams because I know it’s heavily slanted. But I have to remind myself that there are often important things in there.

Yes, it’s true that every sales rep tells me that good salesmanship is the reason we won a deal and that the fact we’re missing 50 or 100 features is the reason we lost a deal. But there’s still some goodness in there. And I have to hold myself in check and not chew them out. Because you know what? I might learn something.

Candor is a key ingredient in communicating effectively and working in teams. How can product leaders bring this skill to bear in their work? And should they approach this differently when speaking to a co-founder vs. someone lower down the ranks?

坦诚是有效沟通和团队工作的关键要素。产品负责人如何在工作中运用这一技能？在与联合创始人或普通员工交谈时，是否需要采取不同的方式？

The challenge with the co-founder CEO is that they can fire you. So it’s hard to convince them that they’re not an expert in the customer base and that they’re getting very biased information because they’re only on sales calls with big customers.

It’s tough to convince the person who founded the company that they have to give up, that they have to delegate a lot of decision-making to other people. I don’t always get it right, but you have to figure out how they individually think and what their basis is.

与联合创始人CEO们聊天所面临的挑战是，他们可以解雇你。一方面他们不是客户群的专家，另外他们只和大客户有销售电话来往所以他们得到的信息非常相对比较宅，所以很难说服他们。

If you look further down in the organization, I see a lot of folks who either lack the skills or lack good input. I think I’m a little less candid than I might be, and that’s OK because I want to encourage everyone that I think is a keeper for the company. I want to give them a hint. I want to point them toward a blog post. I want to walk them through the exercise a couple of times.

如果你再往组织图往下看，会看到很多人要么缺乏技能，要么缺乏好的输入。我认为我可能比我假象的更不坦率，这没关系，因为我想鼓励每一个我认为是公司需要保留的人。我想给他们一个暗示。我想给他们出一篇博文。我想引导他们进行多次练习。

In the book Product Leadership, the authors mention that experienced product people with strong soft skills are in short supply. What tips do you have for PMs who want to develop or grow into these opportunities?

在《产品领导力》一书中，作者提到有经验的、软技巧能力强的产品人员非常紧缺。对于想要发展或抓住这些机会的PM，你有什么建议？

First, if you’re an individual contributor PM and want to move up the stack, I would go to your current manager and say something like, “I’m interested in moving up. I’d like a job like yours someday. I’m not gunning for your job. I’m not trying to gaslight you or kick you out. What I’d really like is some input, some help on areas that I might need to work on. Can you give me a punch list?”

首先，如果你是一个个人贡献者PM，想往上爬，我会建议你找现在的经理，说：'我有意愿努力向上。我希望有一天能得到像你这样的工作。我不是要抢你的工作。我不是想气你也不是想赶你走。我真正想要的是您的一些意见，一些在工作领域可能需要的输入。您能帮我一起制定一个攻关清单吗？'

The other part is to look for opportunities to do the things that product leaders do that are different from what product managers do. Volunteer to be on a cross-functional task force. Spend some time with the sales team or the field team. Work on an announcement of your new product with marketing instead of throwing them a bunch of docs. If your support team has a second headset technology, spend a couple of hours listening in on calls to understand what they are going through.

另一部分是寻求机会去做产品负责人，做的与产品经理不同的事情。我是建议可以志愿性质加入一些跨职能的任务组。花一些时间与销售团队或其他现场支持团队一起工作。和市场部一起制定新产品的公告而不是把一堆文档扔给他们就了事。如果你的支持团队有第二种耳机技术，花几个小时打打电话，听听他们正在经历的事情。

“Look for opportunities to do the things that product leaders do that are different from what product managers do.”

寻找机会去做产品负责人所做的与产品经理所做的不同的事情。

If I’m the manager here, I might encourage my direct report to go to a bunch of staff meetings and present the group’s roadmap and see how that feels. It’s all about getting ourselves out of the transactional work and forcing some experience of what directors and product leaders do.

如果我是这里的经理，我可能会鼓励向我汇报的同事去参加一堆员工会议，了解集团的路线图，对于整体有一些感觉。这就是让我们自己从日常事务性的工作中脱离出来，强行体验一下总监和产品负责人的工作。

Then you can ask yourself, “Well, did that make me happier or not?” The increase in salary might, the more stock options might, but if you’re going to come into the office and feel miserable, maybe that’s not the job you really want.

然后你可以问自己：'嗯，这样操作做到底有没有让我更开心？' 薪水的增加可能，股票期权的增多可能，但如果你在办公室就觉得很痛苦，也许这不是你真正想要的工作。

What three things could a product manager do tomorrow to improve their soft skills?

产品经理可以做哪三件事来提高自己的软技能？

There are a lot of great books about coaching, mentoring, scrum mastering, and things that come out of the agile movement that aren’t specific to product management. They don’t mention product management anywhere, but they’re about how to get things done. So I might read up on them.

有很多关于教练、指导、迭代掌控的好书，还有很多从敏捷行动中输出不是专门针对产品管理的东西。它们在任何地方都没有提到产品管理，但它们是关于如何把事情做好，是关于如何搞定任务的。所以我会建议读一读它们。

It’s certainly worth reading about the Myers Briggs view of life if you haven’t already. It’s a bit pseudoscience, but it can help open your eyes to people who are not like you.

如果你还没有读过Myers Briggs的人生观材料，当然也值得一读。它有点伪科学，但它可以帮助你开阔眼界，让你看到和你不一样的人是怎么样的。

What else? There’s a woman named Karen Katlin, who has a site called Better Allies. It’s all about how to be a little more inclusive in the way we hire, in the way we treat people, and in the way we promote people. I found it eye-opening in terms of the things I might be doing that are off-putting to others but that I perhaps don’t notice.

还有什么？有一个叫凯伦-卡特林的女人，她有一个叫 '更好的盟友 '的网站。它的内容是关于如何在我们的招聘、待人接物的方式和晋升团队成员上更具包容性。我发现它让我大开眼界，因为我们可能做了一些让别人不爽的事情，但我们可能没有注意到。