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
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.
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.
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;
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.
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.
Skills for a PM leader are primarily categorized into two large buckets:
-
Hard
Technical/domain knowledge skills based on the product you support - eg:It can be understanding of MAU, DAUs, ad revenue etc for growth PMs or it can be AI, data and infra tools and technology for Platform PMs
Inferring information from data - It's very critical for PMs to translate data into information which is valuable to them
-
Soft
Stakeholder management - As a PM, you need to manage a bunch of teams and people both upstream and downstream. You should know how to manage and align them and understand the optics on what is in for them that overlaps with your story
Influencing without authority - PMs don't have direct authority over the team that is executing the vision. So, PMs should be able to influence upper management with their ideas and proposals and influence engineering who is executing their vision
Storytelling (Crisp and clear sync and async communication) - In this day and age; short and crisp written and speaking communication skills based on the audience is very critical for PMs to influence (mentioned in the second bullet). With global and geographically diverse workforce, async and written communication over Slack, teams etc is also very critical skill

Must have skills that are difficult to gain and develop:
Building alignment on objectives across multiple, high level stakeholders
Making all stakeholders feel like they were part of the journey with influence at all points (even if they didn't)
Ability to make hard, risky decisions quickly with just the right amount of data (a no-decision is actually a decision)
A strong pulse on your markets - their trends and what's informing decision-makers to move
Nice to have skills that will make you a standout Product leader:
Financial and data acumen to inform your hypotheses and decisions on where to invest and, more importantly, where to divest
Strong product intuition built over experience and time in understanding other products (in and out of your market)
Related Ask Me Anything Sessions

Atlassian Senior Group Product Manager (Director of Product), Narmada Jayasankar on Product Management Skills

BILL Sr. Staff Product Manager - Platform Intelligence (Data & AI), Aindra Misra on Product Management Skills

Skilljar SVP, Product, Tammy Hahn on Product Management Skills
Top Product Management Mentors









