How can a manager improve their interpersonal skills?

What is better for my product career- focusing on fundamental skills and processes at a low visibility company or moving on to a high visibility, risky project?

• Have been a product manager for 8 months at a small B2B company that dominates its niche (this is my first product position).  After success on my first project, I now run the company's major projects (web application, ipad, ecommerce)- I manage the feature set and backlog, come up with ideas, validate ideas with customers, do wireframing, perform customer surveying, etc.  I feel like I can still improve fundaments- story writing, managing my work flow, estimating timelines.  I can also work on setting up a proper agile product development process. I've been offered a product owner position at a major retail brand that's trying to redesign and relaunch their ecommerce site.  They're putting together a brand new team and I would be the only product manager on the project.  This is a brand that everyone knows and the project has many resources devoted to it.  My concerns are threefold- one, I need to improve my fundamental skills and learn more; my current gig is a safe place to do so. Two, the big brand will have trouble recruiting top dev talent due to their compensation offering and lack of benefits for first 90 days.  Three, their marketing team is used to dictating a feature set and will require a change in mindset to work in an agile environment (they're trying to introduce agile).  So do I play it safe, focus on fundamentals at a company that no one knows or do I take the high visibility, high risk position at big co?  My long term goal is to work for a web startup.

• Answer:

  It is surprising to hear that the compensation & benefits at the big name brand company is not attractive. If your end goal is to run a web startup you will need to impress investors & employers by your track record. They would expect: Priority #1: Some success at small companies. Priority #2:  Some experience working with large corporations, learning how to build large scalable systems Since you've been with the young company only 8 months I would suggest you stay put and continue to push the company forward. Take it as far as you can with your expertise and learn new skills along the way, there will be other big company opportunities in the future. Good Luck !!!