What hard skills are must haves to be a Product Management leader? What are nice to haves?

Product Manager Leaders essentially act as CEO of their Product. They bring 5 key traits to the table

1. Product and User Sense - Good Product Leaders have the talent to 'easily' obtain a holistic, strategic view of what the right product might be for a given problem space; they can identify the riskier assumptions and they know how to test them, learn and adapt; Successful Product Leaders demonstrate a ‘user mentality’ and use empathy to relate to user problems, frequent customer needs, and stakeholder expectations; they are able to feel the pain points and deeply understand the problem and the ecosystem in which it exists.

2. Innovation Mindset - Successful Product Leaders realize the value of innovation for product development and establish the right processes to empower a special culture — fostering ideas sharing, collaboration, creativeness, and experimentation.

3. Entrepreneurial Thinking - Product Leaders demonstrate a special mindset that sets the basis for success: they are enthusiastic about designing and building products people love; they are always looking for opportunities to create value and solve big problems in novel and effective ways;

4. Cross-domain Knowledge - Modern digital products are complex: their success depends on a mix of technology, usability, business models, marketing, and operational excellence — they must all work together in harmony to drive user engagement, value creation, and sufficient monetization.

5. Commercial Acumen - The commercial element is key. Good Product Leaders are able to identify the right business models, monetization strategies, pricing structures, and growth mechanisms to ensure the viability of the product;

Product leadership is a delicate mix between hard and soft skills - and soft skills are required in any leadership position.

Hard Skills:

The further you move up the management chain in product, the more the hard skills move from being just product management skills to more general management skills. When you are leading product teams you can't just think about the product or your specific area. You have to think about how the product fits into the ecosystem of the company. This can look different for different companies, but some examples are:

• Is the company aligned on the customer target - i.e. is the product team building for the same customer to sales team is going after?

• Is the onboarding process self serve enough or is it too burdensome on the CX team to implement everything?

• What is the impact of the product quality on the support teams?

• Is the product fulfilling the competitive differentiation that the marketing and strategy teams are seeing as the largest opportunity?

The main hard skills that are required for Product Leadership are:

• Product strategy

• Product vision

• Organizational structure

• Team building / PM hiring

• Ability to learn the market

• Business/Data fluency

• Goal setting

Nice to haves hard skills are:

• Basic understanding of UX, tech, analytics tools the company uses

• Deep market expertise

Soft Skills:

I would argue that soft skills are a non-negotiable skill set for PMs at every level. This is because PMs cannot complete anything alone. The main thing that changes as you move up in product leadership is the sphere of influence you have or are expected to have.

The main soft skills that are required for Product Leadership are:

• Communication

• Empathy

• Ability to influence others

• People management

Nice to have soft skills are:

• Storytelling

• Ability to motivate and inspire teams

• Public speaking

GREAT product leaders have both the must haves and nice to haves. However, there are some product leaders that are not great public speakers or didn't start the role with deep market expertise and are able to be successful.