These 8 skills skyrocketed my product manager career

This detailed guide explains 8 things great product managers do, and what you can do to practice.

These eight product manager skills separate the weak from the strong. I wasn’t great at any of these skills on day one. I had to learn them over a long, long career, usually the hard way, through lots of mistakes. (Who am I? More about me here.)

No one is great at all eight from the get-go, but nevertheless, these are the typical skills you’ll be evaluated on in PM interviews and performance reviews. So, it’s best to get a jump start.  

This post is your guide no matter where you are in your product career. But you can’t just read about these skills. You have to do the work and gain real-life experience. I’ll explain each skill, why it’s essential, and what you can do to practice your way into product management greatness. 

The eight essential product manager skills

• 8. Dealing with ambiguity

• 7. Data fluency

• 6. Clear communication

• 5. Strong execution

• 4. Influence without authority

• 3. Strategy

• 2. Product sense

• 1. Customer focus

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#8 Dealing With Ambiguity

Great product managers navigate ambiguity with ease.

You’re usually going to be the final decision-maker for your product, and often there will not be a clear, correct answer for the decisions you have to make. Great product managers can make decisions in the midst of uncertainty. 

You have to acknowledge what you don’t know and find ways to collect enough data to make the best decision possible with the info that’s available.

This skill was the hardest one for me to develop. Early in my career, I’d often get stuck in “analysis paralysis” because I am a recovering perfectionist and over-analyzer. There was even a time when I didn’t get a job precisely because I was weak in this skill, but that’s an upcoming video/post. 

Here’s how I became comfortable with the unknown and learned to reduce uncertainty whenever possible: 

For every project or decision, write down your assumptions and open questions. This is acknowledging what you don’t know. 

Now take those unknowns, and figure out ways to reduce uncertainty.

• Who can you ask in your company who might know the answer or have an opinion about the decision?

• What data can you review? If you don’t have the exact data, what proxy or related data can you look at instead?

• What research can you do?

• Do you need an outside expert, like a lawyer or consultant?

These are just examples. The point is to make an exhaustive list of the places where you may find additional info, whether it’s from a database, a co-worker’s expertise, or even someone outside of your organization, and write it down. Then seek out that info. Reduce the uncertainty. And finally, make the decision.

This process has helped me make decisions with confidence.  Great product managers can always articulate the sound reasoning behind their decisions and most importantly, they make the decision. They don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. 

How to practice dealing with ambiguity

• Acknowledge what you don’t know. For every project or decision, write down all the unknowns. I like to categorize the unknowns as “assumptions” or “open questions,” and I have sections for each in every PRD or project doc. Check out my Template for dealing with ambiguity to get started. (Go to “File” → “Make a copy” to create an editable copy)

• Reduce uncertainty by collecting more info. Looking at your list of assumptions and open questions, plan how you can get info to test your assumptions and answer your open questions.

• If you have a lot of unknowns and can’t get to all of them, focus on the ones that have the biggest impact on the decision you need to make.

• When making a big decision, it’s ok to ask for help. Share with your manager, engineering counterpart, and team – tell them what direction you’re leaning in, explain your thinking, and then listen to their feedback. What can you learn from them?

• Mitigate risks. Have fallback plans. For risky decisions, think of all the things that could go wrong (the risks) and have a mitigation plan in advance for each one. For example, to mitigate risk, can you roll out your feature slowly to observe its performance before launching it to 100% of customers?

• Make a decision and be clear about what information you used to make that decision. Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis!

• Don’t be afraid to rethink your decision. If you get new information later, take that into account. It’s ok to reassess and change direction if you have to.

More stuff to read on this topic:

• Avoiding Decision Paralysis in the Face of Uncertainty by Patti Johnson, Harvard Business Review

• Thinking in Bets | Annie Duke | Talks at Google, on Youtube

• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant

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#7 Data Fluency

Great product managers are fluent in data.

You must understand how people are using your product and the impact your product has on your company. You probably have a data team doing the actual work to track and report on data, but you have to be comfortable reading those reports. The data team will tell you what the data says; they probably won’t tell you what to do with it. 

As the product manager, you have to be able to interpret the data, understand the nuances, and draw conclusions. Nowadays, data is everything. You have to be fluent.

I’ve been fluent in data for a long time. I graduated from MIT, am a former data analyst, and was a PM at Looker, one of the best data analytics companies. I think the key to data fluency is curiosity. Being curious about what you can learn from data, and exploring those questions, naturally leads to familiarity and comfort with your data. 

To practice, get access to whatever data analytics tool your company uses and start exploring the data. 

1. Ask a question and dig into the data yourself to find the answer. E.g. What was our purchase conversion rate last month?

2. Then ask a follow-up question. E.g. Was the conversion rate higher for organic traffic than paid traffic?

3. Ask another question. E.g. How does the conversion rate compare on mobile vs. desktop?

4. Repeat until your curiosity is satisfied.

Digging deeper is how you will develop intuition around your product’s data. 

Hopefully, your product does spark your curiosity, but if it doesn’t, find something that does. I’m not talking about quitting your job. Find some non-work data that does interest you.

There are tons of public data sets, like sports data, video game data, etc. Whatever you’re interested in, be curious, ask questions, find the data, analyze it, and practice. You can practice telling stories with your fun data, practice creating visualizations, or mess around with advanced Excel formulas. Then take those data skills back to the office. 

Now as a product manager, you want to review all your metrics frequently and dig into all those metrics. Be curious. Ask more questions. 

Data fluency is critical for product managers. Data will gift you with insights that lead to product innovation, and you’ll build stronger arguments and tell more compelling stories when you back everything up with data.

How to practice data fluency

• Be curious! Ask questions and find the answers in the data.

• Review the metrics for your product area daily or at least weekly. If you don’t have reports or dashboards, work with your data team to set something up.

• Learn your data analytics tools – whatever software your company uses for data reporting and analysis – learn them inside and out. An excellent way to get familiar with them is to think of a question you want to answer and then figure out how to get the answer from the analytics tool. Look for training or documentation on the tool to get started.

• Learn how to use formulas in Excel or Google Sheets. When you get good at that, learn how to use pivot tables. 

• Learn SQL.

• Practice telling stories with data. Try various data visualization types and incorporate data into written and visual presentations.

• Find a public dataset that looks interesting and analyze the data. There are lots of public datasets available on the internet. These lists from Tableau and Kaggle can get you started.

More stuff to read on this topic:

• I’m Sorry, But Those Are Vanity Metrics with Lloyd Tabb, First Round Review 

• storytelling with data’s chart guide

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#6 Clear Communication

Great product managers are clear communicators.

In this job, some days you’ll be talking/writing/presenting all day long, so your communication game must be sharp. Product managers communicate with everyone. You’re the glue that holds everyone together. You will constantly need to adjust your communication format and style to meet the needs of your audience, so you’ll want to master every form of communication – written, verbal, and presentation – to get your messages across. 

You are the voice of the customer, the spokesperson for your team, and a representative of your company. You need to speak everyone’s language, communicate clearly with everyone, and translate between all these groups.

To improve your communication, focus on clarity. What is the key message you want to convey? Make sure to lead with that. Next, think about your audience and their preferences. For example, skip the tech jargon if your audience is less technical, or use a whiteboard to sketch if you’re speaking to someone who needs visuals to grasp complex concepts. 

If presentations or public speaking terrify you, just do it. Practice is the only way to make it easier. I was terrified of public speaking but got stuck hosting a weekly company-wide presentation. Every Tuesday, I woke up in a cold sweat, knowing I’d have to give a talk at noon that day. 

But then a funny thing happened. After months of consistent public speaking – to a growing audience because the company was getting bigger every week – I eventually got comfortable. So comfortable that I gave keynote presentations at our company user conference. 

It’s just practice, if I could do it, so can you. I had to practice public speaking, but all forms of communication are critical for PMs. 

You can conquer your own fears or just accelerate your communication effectiveness by practicing, and seeking out feedback. Ask each audience how you can be more clear in your emails, your memos, your presentation slides, and any other way that you communicate. 

Speaking of feedback, I just started using Grammarly. It tells me I use too many words and not enough active voice. My communication journey continues.

How to practice clear communication

• Focus on clarity. What is the key message you want to convey? Communicate that one key message.

• Consider your audience. What combination of communication format, style, and language will your audience prefer? Accommodate their needs to get your message across.

• Use “TL;DR” or “Executive Summary” sections to lead with the most critical points and follow up with additional info later.  

• Ask for feedback from your manager or a trusted colleague. My first manager reviewed my slides before every major presentation, and the notes she gave me helped me improve over time.

• Use Grammarly to make your writing better.

• Look for opportunities to give talks and presentations to practice public speaking. If you can’t find anything at work, consider taking a public speaking class or joining a club like Toastmasters, where you can practice and get feedback.

More stuff to read on this topic:

• Effective strategies to improve your communication skills, BetterUp blog

• Eight Things You Can Do To Improve Your Communication Skills, Harvard Professional Development blog

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#5 Strong Execution

Great product managers are stupendous at execution.

Execution is a fancy way of saying you know how to get sh*t done. Execution skills are about managing a project to finish on time, on budget, and meeting all the requirements. This is sometimes called “delivery.” It’s all the things that go into actually launching products and features, from breaking down the work into realistic milestones to managing the building process to handling all the details for launching something new and getting it into the hands of your customers. 

Execution is about collaborating and coordinating with all your partners and stakeholders to do the work and ship a product. 

Poor execution leads to missed deadlines, buggy features, and pissed-off teammates and customers. So, we do whatever it takes to avoid all those bad things and deliver the finished product on time and pleasantly. 

How can you practice strong execution? Stay organized. Write everything down. Goals, priorities, and milestones must be super clear to everyone on the team. Keep close track of “action items” to make sure they get done. Practice estimating dev effort with your team to build your intuition of what’s hard and what’s less hard to build in your product area. Hold team retrospectives to constantly improve your work and processes.  

As a product manager, you’re not doing the “work-work” to build and launch features, so strong execution for a PM really means keeping your team and stakeholders, who are doing the work, aligned and focused. 

And you want to do well at execution, because, what’s a product manager who can’t manage to launch products?

How to practice strong execution

• Make sure everyone involved with a project understands the goals, priorities, and milestones upfront. For projects that span many weeks or months, repeat the goals and review statuses often to keep everyone aligned and focused.

• Get organized. Keep team documents and project docs all in one place where everyone involved can easily find them. 

• Write down everything. Every meeting should have an agenda, notes on what was discussed and decided, and a list of follow-up tasks. Share the notes with everyone involved after the meeting ends.

• Keep track of “action items” (aka follow-up tasks). I like to keep a running list of incomplete action items and review the list with my team whenever we meet to ensure tasks aren’t forgotten.

• Every work task should have an “owner” – someone responsible for completing the task. If no one is accountable for doing the thing, the thing won’t get done.

• Practice estimating dev effort to build your intuition about how long it takes to build things. Do this with your engineering partners during roadmap planning, if not more frequently. On occasions when your team’s estimates turn out to be wrong, evaluate why you were off and consider those learnings next time you do planning to improve your estimates over time. This exercise will help you get to know what’s hard and what’s less hard to build in your product area.

• Hold retrospective meetings with your team to find areas for improvement in how you all work. I like doing these monthly with my teams and also after big projects. Take these meetings seriously. It’s not just a time to vent about things that didn’t work. You must walk away with an action plan to fix the things that aren’t working. 

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#4 Influence Without Authority

Great product managers lead through influence.

Despite your fancy title with the word “manager” in it, you do not automatically have authority, control, or power over all the people you need help from. To launch anything, you will need a bunch of people to do a bunch of work. I’m talking engineers, designers, UX researchers, marketers, data analysts, security engineers, DevOps teams… and guess what? Absolutely none of them have to listen to you. You’re not their boss.

You will need to lead through influence and earn the trust and respect of a lot of people to get stuff done. People often say product managers need leadership skills, which is true, but it’s a particular category of leadership skills. Leading through influence when you don’t have any authority is a tough thing to do.

How can you practice influence? Take my course! In my Product Influence course, I teach my eight principles for leading through influence. There are a ton of practice tips, a cheat sheet, and even a practice tracker built into that course.

How to practice influence without authority

• Take my free course! Product Influence is free for a limited time. Check it out; I have lots of practice tips there. 

More stuff to read on this topic:

• Influence Without Authority (3rd edition) by Allan R. Cohen & David L. Bradford 

• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie 

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#3 Strategy

Great product managers are strategic.

As a product manager, you will be responsible for developing the strategy for your product area. But hold up, what is a strategy? A strategy is: 

“a detailed plan for achieving success in situations such as war, politics, business, industry, or sports, or the skill of planning for such situations” (Source: Cambridge Dictionary) 

As a young PM, I read definitions of “strategy” like this and thought, “Oh! It’s just a ‘detailed plan’? I already have a plan with lots of details… my roadmap! Done-zo.” Then I’d saunter off to happy hour, thinking my work was done. Boy, was I wrong.

Your roadmap is not a strategy, but your strategy should inform your roadmap. 

In business, and in product, your strategy should be more like a game plan than a to-do list; it doesn’t just describe what you’re going to do; it tells everyone why you’re doing it and how it’s going to help you win. 

Strategy can be one of the hardest skills to develop, I struggled for sure. But once I figured out what a strategy was for, writing product strategies got easier.

Your strategy tells everyone what field you’re all playing on and how you will play the game to win. 

When you have a solid strategy, it keeps your team and stakeholders aligned and focused on achieving the same goal. It makes execution easier because everyone knows what they are supposed to do and why they’re doing it, so distractions get minimized. It makes communication clearer if it’s easy to remember and understand. 

Developing your strategy muscle isn’t just a nice-to-have skill for product managers, it’s a requirement as you climb the ladder into more senior roles, leading bigger teams.

To practice being strategic, get to know your business, your market, and your industry really well. Study your competitors. Subscribe to business and tech podcasts and newsletters to be inspired by stories of successful product strategies. 

Finally, practice writing a product strategy and get feedback from your manager, your team, and leadership to help you strengthen your strategy and make a more compelling game plan. 

How to practice being strategic

• Make sure you understand your company’s mission and goals. Then figure out how your product area contributes to the company objectives. 

• Practice writing your strategy for your product area. How can your product area contribute to your company's mission and goals? What can you focus on developing in your product area to have the biggest impact on your company's mission and goals? Use a framework to help you practice – your Product team may already have a preferred strategy framework you can use. I like the DIBB framework (Data-Insight-Belief-Bet) from Spotify. 

• Study the strategies of successful products by listening to case studies or talks by leaders at those companies. Two excellent podcasts full of success stories are How I Built This and Lenny’s Podcast.

• Subscribe to business and tech newsletters. My go-tos are Harvard Business Review, The Hustle, and First Round Review.

• Subscribe to news or blogs relevant to your industry to keep up with the trends that will impact your product.  

• Study your competitors. What are they doing that is different from your company? What can you learn from their strategy?

More stuff to read on this topic:

• Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task by Lenny Rachitsky, Lenny’s Newsletter

• How to Define Your Product Strategy by Gibson Biddle, Medium

• Not Product-specific, but good explanations on strategy from Harvard Business Review’s YouTube channel: A Plan Is Not a Strategy and What Is Strategy? It’s a Lot Simpler Than You Think

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#2 Product Sense

Great product managers have excellent product sense.

Product sense is thinking creatively and critically about a product’s strengths and weaknesses. At a minimum, you need to have product sense about your product, but great product managers can think creatively and critically about any product. You’ve probably heard this question in PM interviews: “Think about a product you like and tell me how you’d improve it if you were the PM.” They’re checking your product sense.

Product sense boils down to an intuition about what makes great products great and bad products bad. As a new PM, my product area was the signup and onboarding flow. To develop my product sense I went through the signup and onboarding flows for a ton of apps. I looked at everything from our competitors to apps known for having the best onboarding (at the time, some of the best were dating sites, which was awkward to explain to my husband). I took screenshots and critiqued every step. What delighted me? What frustrated me? 

The best way to practice product sense is to observe the products around you that you use every day, and ask yourself: 

• What’s the company’s goal with this product?

• Did they nail it?

• What’s great about this product?

• What’s lame about it?

• How would I make this product better?

To develop product sense for your own product, take it a step deeper. Learn your tech stack to understand what’s possible for your product. Take an honest look at customer feedback like chat support transcripts to uncover weaknesses in your product. And study UI/UX best practices to assess how your product stacks up against the best user experiences.

In time you’ll have a product sixth sense to deliver not just a finished product, but a great product your customers will love.

How to practice product sense

• Study other products and case studies to understand how and why some products succeed, and others fail.

• Look at products you use, physical or digital, and evaluate them. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the product? What goal is the company trying to achieve with this product? How would you improve this product if you were the PM for it?

• Learn about your product’s tech stack. Study the technologies that it’s built on and note the capabilities and limitations of those technologies. This will help you develop intuition about what’s possible for your product.

• Read customer feedback to understand where your customers have trouble with your product. Chat support transcripts can often uncover weaknesses in your product and be enlightening. 

• Study UI/UX best practices to assess how your product stacks up against the best user experiences.

More stuff to read on this topic:

• How to Learn Product Sense by Jackie Bavaro, Medium

• How to do a Product Critique by Julie Zhuo, Medium

• The Power of Product Thinking by Julie Zhuo, Future.com

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#1 Customer Focus

Great product managers focus on the customer, always.

Customer focus is the most crucial product manager skill. Focusing on your customers means deeply understanding who they are and what problems they are trying to solve so that you can build the right things for them. Teams that don’t focus on customers build products that no one wants or needs. To be great at customer focus, you must talk to your customers a lot.

As a new PM, I didn’t focus on my customers enough, and that led to one of my biggest failures. My job was to improve new user activation, and for my first project, I launched a big overhaul of the signup flow. A lot of really smart people in the company believed this change would improve activation rates, so I just went with it. I didn’t stop to validate any of the assumptions we were making. Instead, I dove into work with my design and engineering partners to build the redesigned signup page. 

Six months later, we launched, and nothing bleeping happened. The activation rate didn’t go up or down; we literally had zero impact. My fatal flaw? I didn’t focus on our customers. Talking to customers would’ve made it obvious that this redesign wasn’t solving a real problem. 

After wasting a lot of time and resources, I did what I should’ve done from the start, I asked people what was holding them back.  

Talking to users revealed two real pain points: new users didn’t understand how the product worked or how much it cost.

We redesigned the onboarding flow to give customers the info they wanted, and new user activation improved by more than 20% in our A/B test. 

I learned the hard way… product managers should always start with customer focus. So, talk to your customers as often as possible, validate your assumptions, look at data, and do whatever it takes to develop that deep understanding and empathy for your customers. 

How to practice customer focus

• Talk to your customers as often as you can.

• Always start with your customer’s problems. Before you design solutions, you should always start by deeply understanding the problem that needs to be solved. Ensure everyone helping design solutions (like engineers and product designers) also has a deep understanding of the problem. 

• Make sure every project your team works on ties back to some benefit to the customer. Advocate for your customers by bringing the focus back to the customer. 

• If your company uses user personas to communicate internally about your users, ensure you understand the personas and know which personas your product area serves. 

• Get close to other teams at your company who are also talking to customers often – UX research, marketing, sales, customer success, and customer support. Compare notes. What feedback do they hear from your customers? What more can you learn from the research those teams have done?

More stuff to read on this topic:

• Inspired by Marty Cagan

• Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres 

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If this list leaves you feeling overwhelmed or intimidated, don’t worry. These are skills that you will continue to develop throughout your career as a product manager. You are not expected to be great at any of these from the start. In fact, as a more junior PM, the expectations of you in any of these areas will be lower and will grow as you progress in your career. 

For example, an Associate PM typically won’t be expected to make major decisions through ambiguity on their own and will often rely on their manager or mentor to help them navigate tough decisions. However, a Senior PM will be expected to make good decisions in the midst of ambiguity more regularly, and in a leadership product role, you may be dealing with ambiguity every day. 

With practice, each of these skills will come easier and easier and guide your product career toward greatness. You got this!