Key skills of a PM
If you’re fortunate enough to have been set up with a product-led organisation as described in my previous article Key ingredients of being product-led, you’re now ready to have a significant impact on the world via your product.
The good news is being a great Product Manager (PM) can lead you to be the most popular person in the organisation — Customer Support will love you because you’ve answered the customers’ questions before they get to them, Sales and Marketing will love you because you’ve made their jobs 10x easier and the CEO will love you because you’ve made him richer. Unfortunately, the opposite is equally true.
As is mentioned on just about every PM blog on the internet, there are an interminable number of skills needed to succeed in the role. However, these are some of the highest leverage skills that I believe you can focus on to flourish as a PM.
Be a ridiculously good interviewer
‘Interviewer’ may be the wrong word. But you need to be extremely good at conversing with customers and non-customers alike about your product and the market. These conversations can happen online, scheduled in person (or via video calls), or even unplanned in day-to-day life.
Not having these skills is akin to a batsman in cricket not having a solid defence — you might look good in lower grades, but you’ll get found out quickly at higher levels.
Almost every product book talks about interviewing customers, but The Mom Test is, in my opinion, the most complete resource. In summary: ditch strict scripts, talk about real past behavior, let them talk more than you do, and ask “why” a lot.
Learn rapidly
Product managing involves being an expert on your own product, competitor products, your business, and your market. This takes time — unless you drastically speed up your learning loop.
Learning rapidly is equally important on a micro level while speaking to customers, showing prototypes, or gathering feedback. The faster you understand users and dynamics, the faster you can propose solutions, test them, and iterate.
You will rarely get the perfect solution at first, but if you’re learning rapidly, it won’t matter at all — because each iteration gets dramatically better.
Aaron Levie sums this up well in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/levie/status/1581435416904728576
Be modest, assured and opinionated at the same time
Yes — this sounds paradoxical, but it’s necessary. You need strong opinions about the market, the product, and future trends. But you must also be humble enough to change your mind instantly when new information arises.
Can you confidently walk back into a room and admit a long-held, passionately defended idea is no longer viable — and you currently don’t know what the right solution is? If yes, you’re on the right track.
Be great at discovering information
Researching topics deeply and quickly is a massively underrated life skill — and an essential PM one. When given an outcome to achieve without a precise roadmap (a hallmark of a product-led company), you must know how to dig, discover, frame, and explore unfamiliar territory without hand-holding.
Speak to experts, users, stakeholders — but always after doing the groundwork.
Be comfortable handling unstructured situations
Being a PM is like entering a race where you’re only told the finish line — and everything between here and there is up for interpretation. Do you drive? Fly? Find an e-bike around the corner?
There is no objectively “right” answer. Your job is to maximize the likelihood of success under ambiguity and move confidently under uncertainty. Rapid learning (see above) becomes your main weapon.
Be able to apply structure when it’s beneficial
Comfort with chaos doesn’t mean behaving randomly. There are great frameworks and mental models for discovery, ideation, prioritisation, delivery, and validation. The key is knowing when and how to apply structure — not enforcing it for its own sake.
Be prepared to come up with solutions and be creative
Despite some narratives that PMs should only focus on problems, reality demands that you constantly generate possible solutions. Yes, discovery is crucial — but once the problem is known, your value comes from creative iteration and solutioning.
Creativity here isn’t about artistic flair — it’s the ability to connect unexpected dots and envision new possibilities.
Handy hint
Thinking in terms of bets is extremely powerful. Spotify’s DIBBs framework is useful here:
Data → Insights → Beliefs → Bets.
Be able to build relationships with people at all levels
You won’t usually have direct reports — yet you’ll be responsible for driving what may be the organisation’s most important outcomes.
So, you need: - Engineers and designers to build your vision, - Sales and marketing to champion it externally, - Support to understand customer issues, - Leadership to trust your decision-making.
To earn that trust, you must see the business through others’ eyes and clearly communicate why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Be open and clear about what you’re doing
Articulating your reasoning simply and frequently is critical. You’ll often need to repeat the same rationale dozens of times — only then will it truly stick.
Learn computer science
I believe everyone should learn to code. Coding trains structured thinking better than almost anything else. More importantly, if you are working with engineers on a software product, understanding how systems roughly work is invaluable.
Do great PMs exist who cannot code? Definitely. But for many, technical literacy is an accelerant to success.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many more traits, tactics, and nuances that can help you succeed as a PM in a great product-led organisation — but these should hold you in good stead.