5 Crucial Skills for Nonprofit Product Managers

Managing a technology product is a complex role, especially at nonprofits.

It means markedly different things at different organizations and can change with each stage of a product’s development — sometimes even with each passing day, says Nathan Ranney, product manager at Moneythink, a nonprofit that works to help students from low-income families gain financial literacy.

Whether product managers are working on an internal database or an external website, they may find themselves conducting user and market research, defining the problem the product is trying to solve, testing solutions, leading developers, analyzing metrics, setting web-development priorities, even helping with tech support.

And there are meetings. Lots of meetings.

In interviews with product managers, nonprofit leaders, and consultants, however, five basic attributes and skills emerged as the keys to success in the role.

Learning

Almost every aspect of a product manager’s job comes back to a hunger to learn, whether through interviewing users or looking at web analytics. Many experts said this trait is the most important — trumping even technical expertise — because a nonprofit product manager needs a deep understanding of the organization, the people it serves, its goals, and the motivations of its staff.

That may be why a lot of them come from a liberal-arts background, says Jacob Worrell, chief digital products officer at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The former Army sergeant majored in economics and philosophy in college.

Ananda Robie, data-systems manager at the Center for Action and Contemplation, a Christian nonprofit, has a degree in film and previously worked for Invisible Children, a charity that aims to stop the abduction of child soldiers in Uganda. She helped spread Invisible Children’s message on the road and later became an administrator for its Salesforce system.

“If you listen to people and develop that idea for what the vision [for the product] could be, you develop the tech or IT skills you need,” she says.

It’s important for product managers to recognize the limits of their knowledge and ask for help when they need it, “just like you would for finance or other areas of specialization,” says Kevin Barenblat, a software entrepreneur and founder of Fast Forward, a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits adopt new technology.

Communicating

The role of product manager is also about distilling information into a coherent vision that can be spread through the organization to ensure everyone is working toward the same goal — all while being outside of any one department.

“Your role is really to get everyone to a common vision of success — even though you aren’t in charge of anybody,” Mr. Ranney says.

That puts a premium on communication skills. Product managers have to talk about “not just the why, but the how,” Mr. Worrell says. They need to guide people through what to do next and explain why doing it will help advance a product, project, or mission.

As a starting point, it’s good to get to know everyone in an organization.

Before she formally started at the Center for Action and Contemplation earlier this year, Ms. Robie did 30-minute interviews with staff members to understand their needs and problems. As she oversaw the transition of the group’s customer and donor databases to a new system, she wanted to show her colleagues that she was there to work for them.

“Invest in getting yourself in with each of the teams,” Ms. Robie says. “If you listen to them and get them on your side, it will make your job a lot easier.”

Translating

Product managers work among groups of people with vastly different experiences and lexicons. They must be able to successfully communicate with executives, engineers, and program experts who may not be able to see beyond their own parts of the organization, Mr. Worrell says. It can be a challenge to explain the motivations and priorities of each group in terms others can understand.

There are ways, though.

Mr. Ranney says he defines everything the development team at Moneythink works on in terms of “user personas,” or profiles of fictional individual users that represent important user groups based on demographic and behavioral data. That helps the organization focus on what a program participant would get from the work — for example, helping a student who uses the nonprofit’s financial-education app save money for a basketball camp.

He also brings students taking part in Moneythink programs into the research and design process so his team can hear directly from the people they serve. Individual team members may have different ways of looking at a problem, but their approach must relate back to what program participants say they need.

Prioritizing

All of the listening, communicating, and translating leads to the core of a product manager’s role: determining which new tools will bring the biggest benefit to the organization and the people it serves.

“It’s a big job, figuring out what to prioritize based on the wishes of so many people inside and outside the organization,” Mr. Worrell says.

Doing so, product managers say, requires a combination of interviews, feedback, and data about how and when a product is used — then looking at what it would take to add a new feature to a product and what the organization would lose by not addressing another improvement first.

It may also mean making a case to leadership for why priorities should shift.

Ms. Robie’s initial meetings helped her change the priority of the work when she started. She discovered that the customer-service department — which had been slotted to move to the new database last — was most in need of a new system.

She spotted a quick win, and customer service jumped to the front of the line. The changes that were implemented have cut in half the time the department spends on each customer inquiry.

“I think that was a really, really wise decision, and I’m glad the executive management team was open to it,” Ms. Robie says.

Celebrating

The wins that come with product management are constant and meaningful, but they are also small. They aren’t greeted with confetti and streamers like the giant, once-every-few-years projects common at many nonprofits.

“Your innovations are sometimes so incremental that it’s not like getting a shiny gift on Christmas anymore,” Mr. Worrell says.

Mr. Worrell combats this by celebrating changes not when they launch, but when they demonstrate success in improving key metrics. Showing the impact of a new tool or tech feature is more important than the product itself.

Mr. Ranney holds regular demos of new features for the staff to make sure everyone knows about successes. That also brings everything back to the people that product managers and their teams serve. Completing a feature isn’t about keeping the boss happy, he says; at Moneythink, it’s about making sure students the nonprofit works with “will be able to do this thing they never dreamed of.”

Of course, the launch celebration doesn’t hurt. On the day the first department at the Center for Action and Contemplation switched to the new database system, Ms. Robie brought cupcakes. Confetti, too.