The Top 50 Product Management Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2025
Overview
The knowledge we need to excel at our jobs is often locked in the minds of peers. At Sharebird, our mission is to make this knowledge accessible to everyone. Imagine succeeding with top mentors by your side.
The Product Management Mentor List showcases the top 50 product management mentors to learn from and work for to develop your career. Every one of these practitioners has contributed content that Sharebird users trust and value for their professional development.
Methodology
Sharebird's algorithm ranks product management contributors based on how helpful our users perceive their content to be. We do not handpick people. To be considered for this list, mentors need to be current product management practitioners and in a leadership role. We look at the following factors with Sharebird content: views, saves, and followers. We then apply a proprietary algorithm to calculate content credibility and helpfulness. Views show us content relevancy, saves show us content quality, and followers show us content credibility.
Sharebird does not accept payment to be included on this list, which allows us to maintain objectivity and independence. We update this list every year. For any questions about this list, please contact support@sharebird.com.
About Sharebird
Sharebird is where the top product management leaders share their expertise. Discover actionable insights and advice to tackle your toughest work challenges and unlock your full career potential.
In Alphabetical Order by Company:
Career Path Tip: Here is the tip I usually give to my teams: The PM career is a late-reward career, so don’t expect to have recognition before years. You should work on how to improve your influence, and this doesn’t happen overnight. Focus on getting things done, and start small. Lots of small wins bringing impact to customers go way further than a big initiative that is a failure. Build your track record in order to get legitimacy towards teams and stakeholders.
Career Path Tip: In 2025, AI isn’t just a productivity booster—it’s a catalyst for disruption. As product managers, staying informed on AI trends is crucial, not only to harness its potential but also to stay aware of new players entering the market. Startups leveraging AI in innovative ways can quickly redefine your competitive landscape. While classic competitors still matter, keep an eye on how emerging companies are using AI to accelerate development and gain an edge. In a world of frictionless tool adoption, retaining customer loyalty requires both innovation and agility.
Career Path Tip: Always look for roles that require you to learn something new. That could be subject matter, or working with different functions, or working at a different stage of company. It'll help you approach your work with a curious and humble mindset. When exploring new opportunities, be open about what you don't know yet and demonstrate your capacity for learning quickly. The energy of people who are excited to learn is infectious.
Career Path Tip: Take time to look up and around. We spend so much time heads down focused on the what of our work and can lose sight of the why behind it. Take a break, travel, spend time with loved ones, or try something simple like spending your lunch time outside in a park. The change in context can be refreshing and energizing.
Career Path Tip: Product Management is all about navigating the unknown and ambiguous. Oftentimes there are not concrete answers to your question or getting the answer would take so long the opportunity is gone. When I started to get more comfortable with saying "this is what I think, why I might be wrong and what we should do in either case" it was a real game changer for me.
Career Path Tip: A great product manager starts not by convincing people of value, but by listening and exploring problems faced by their customers and team members.
Career Path Tip: Learn to find joy in small moments and fine details; that will make you observant and help build a good taste, which will supercharge your career. Honor logic, but don't let it squash your curiosity. Be patient with others and yourself: great things take time. Help others discover their strengths, and be relentless in developing yours.
Career Path Tip: When you've invested deeply in a product or a feature, resist attachment—ask yourself daily: "Is it still worth shipping to customers?
Career Path Tip: Share your career dreams—your future depends on you, luck, and others. Help others grow, as their future relies on them, luck, and you.
Embrace feedback, even when it hurts, and give it graciously, even when it's tough to give.
Career Path Tip: Talk to customers and prospects and let them guide you. It's quite important to go in there open minded about what you're going to learn - because there's a high chance that all the assumptions you made when going into these conversations are wrong, that people don't face the problems you thought they faced, or not with the intensity that you imagined.
Career Path Tip: Stay curious and find ways to break outside of your role purview. Try to understand what goals your manager and skip level are trying to accomplish - and how your work contributes to it. Speak their language and look at bets and priorities from their vantage point.
Career Path Tip: Master the balance between listening to customers and trusting your product vision. True innovation happens when you solve real problems in ways customers haven't imagined yet. Always lead with integrity and put the customer first—long-term success is built on trust and delivering real value.
Aindra Misra
BILL Group Product Manager - (Data Platform, DevEx and Cloud Infrastructure) )
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Career Path Tip: In this day and age, where human interactions in workplace are often overlooked, we should focus on developing strong communication and interpersonal skills and engage authentically with people around us (stakeholders, teammates, customers) and build genuine connections to foster long-term growth and success. Instead of only talking about work, try to ask them how they are doing, and about their hobbies outside work. Trust me, it works.
Career Path Tip: Get clear about what you want, get vocal about what you want, and make sure you are demonstrating your value in your current role. If you want people to help you grow your career, they need to know what you want and have confidence in your ability to achieve it.
Career Path Tip: Focus on opportunities that drive value for the business and customer, no matter the size - no task is beneath you if it needs to get done. Build your reputation as someone who consistently delivers results, takes ownership, learns continuously, and operates with integrity.
Career Path Tip: 1. Embrace child-like curiosity and frequently ask the question “why” to deepen understanding of your domain.
2. Focus on work that aligns with your passion, so it feels less like work and more like a hobby.
3. Once you find what you truly enjoy, perseverance will become your best friend.
Career Path Tip: Good product managers build a product that customers love. Great product managers know that the product is but one component of a successful business, and they own all aspects of that business. If you want to grow in your career, don’t just build an awesome product. Learn how to make your product even more successful by influencing its go-to-market, managing your financials, and incorporating real data in your prioritization.
Career Path Tip: We as Product Managers need to ensure that we are adding value for our organization by understanding the market (and our customers) and guiding the strategy to be successful in that market. It's easy to be a product expert, but we need to focus on being market and strategy experts.
Career Path Tip: Be curious, internalize asking why repetitively to yourself and to your stakeholders till you get to the basic need and value it creates over other alternatives. Understand current constraints in your product and challenge them. Align your communication with customer needs and strategy alignment. Most important, be in details use data to your advantage, develop product sense with empathy to customer and learn to make hard trade off aligned to your larger strategy.
Career Path Tip: Be an active listener to your customers. The first step in developing any product or feature is to identify the user's needs. Hence, your goal should be to talk to as many users as you possibly can to understand what they say, do, think, and feel. This also helps you learn who you are solving for and who you are not solving for and create a problem statement
Career Path Tip: Know your customer—sometimes, it's the investor or company owner! Nail their core expectations first to win their confidence. Then, dream big, stay agile, and rally your team to craft the next global hit while rewriting the playbook for success!
Career Path Tip: A good product manager always is ready to start Zero with clear understanding of Who( we are building for), What( we are building) and How( we are building and delivering). A great Product person is not building features but experiences / Journeys. Users are the key.
Career Path Tip: Communicate and collaborate with your customers, with your stakeholders, and with your teams. Being a successful product manager is about understanding needs and opportunities, then working with other people to build solutions for those things...both of which can only come from communication and collaboration.
Career Path Tip: 2025 is a new frontier for product managers. You have so many new tools available to you to deliver true value for your organizations with AI/ML at your finger tips. Spend more time realizing the areas of your role and job that can be more efficient and delegated. PMs that are differentiated are deeply connecting with the problems in their market, their customers, and their industry. Their connection enables them to build a unique perspective to solve their customer's pain points.
Career Path Tip: Never make the mistake of assuming your customers think the way you do. Speak to as as many of them as possible, deeply explore their problems and pain and then relentlessly pursue solutions to make their lives better.
Career Path Tip: Work for managers that you respect and that show you respect in return. They should mentor you and push you to grow, but within the boundaries that you set to make your work sustainable and gratifying long term.
Career Path Tip: If you're in a larger organisation, you might find your team drifting away from the org's main goal. That might be because the org is shifting direction, and your team hasn't caught up yet. It might be the opposite. Either way, don’t let misalignments like this creep in — they introduce risk to the roadmap or the team itself.
Career Path Tip: With all the discussion on Product Management careers changing or going extinct with AI, my recommendation will be to keep focussing on the skills that got you to Product Management in the first place: creating clarity in chaos, focussing on the customer and getting shit done. To some that will mean picking up a nocode AI too to build a prototype, to others it might mean using ChatGPT to do market research and to some others it might mean no change in how they work day by day.
Career Path Tip: You're smarter than you think, but stay humble. Your experiences have given you valuable product intuition – use it. At the same time, approach each decision with the humility to question your assumptions. This paradox isn't a weakness – it's the engine of continuous growth.
Career Path Tip: Plan is the plan until it’s not. It's good to have a plan, but it's also ok for the plan to change as you learn more. The older I get, the less I plan since I know that life can be unpredictable and the key to success is adaptability.
Career Path Tip: Don't get distracted by the "should"s or focus on the career paths of those around you. As you progress in your career, you might get a lot of conflicting advice and think that the only path forward is to manage a team or move to a larger organization. It's in those exact moments that it's important to be honest and ask yourself which unique challenges excite you and focus on those, to find true fulfillment.
Career Path Tip: Maintain clarity on your value proposition and its impact, ensuring it is consistently communicated to stakeholders and customers. Cultivate strong communication skills and stay adaptable, ready to adjust strategies as market conditions evolve.
Career Path Tip: Always stay rooted in your customers, their pain, and their experience with your product. This will lead you to clear priorities and problems to solve every release. As you advance in your career and handle more complexity and longer-term strategies, your deep customer understanding will continue to keep you centered and leading in the right direction.
Career Path Tip: In product management, your ability to navigate ambiguity and deliver impact at scale often depends on building strong cross-functional relationships and trust – I've found that investing time in understanding the unique perspectives and constraints of engineering, design, sales, and support teams not only leads to better product decisions but also creates the foundation for successfully driving transformational initiatives, like when we revamped Meta.com’s infrastructure or scaled HubSpot's Service Hub.
Career Path Tip: Above all else, focus on shipping impactful things. It may sound obvious but it's easy to get lost in the myriad of other things that land on our plates as PMs.
Career Path Tip: Don't let limitations (real or imaginary) stifle bold ideas and outcomes. Think about what is the ideal or best possible outcome and aim to achieve that. When the going gets hard - ask yourself what's holding you back, and break down the barriers one by one to get to your ideal goal.
Career Path Tip: Assume positive intent. As you grow in product management, your success will become increasingly dependent on relationships. When facing collegial barriers, it can help to take a step back and recognize we live in turbulent times where a little extra empathy and patience can go a long way.
Career Path Tip: Hire the best talent, ensuring they have diverse backgrounds and skills so that you can challenge each other to set a strategy that stands apart. But strategy is just the beginning- great products come from tight execution. This means being laser focused on aligning to company outcomes and building a culture of shipping. Finally, don’t forget to celebrate the wins. Success fuels success and celebrating helps us remember that winning feeling and repeat it.
Career Path Tip: If you are an AI Product Manager or aspiring to be one, here are some tips for success:
- Bridge the gap between AI and business by understanding key AI technologies, data strategy, and their business impact
- Stay updated on AI advancements and foster strong collaboration with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful solutions
- Focus on ethical standards, clear success metrics, and communicating AI value in simple terms
Career Path Tip: First, prioritize your wellbeing - both physical and mental health are your foundation. Without these fundamentals in place, no amount of career advice will lead to sustainable success.
Second, develop deep curiosity about your problems and identify critical bottlenecks. Master them thoroughly, and leverage AI tools strategically to accelerate your problem-solving capabilities.
Third, optimize for high-leverage opportunities where impact potential intersects with your execution strength. When presenting to managers, demonstrate your thought process, prepare multiple solutions, and articulate their tradeoffs with clarity.
Career Path Tip: When looking for your next opportunity, prioritize an organization going through tremendous growth. Specifically, I mean growth in rapid customer adoption, revenue generation, regional expansion, new product introductions, which will give you the exposure and opportunity to take on more responsibility, ascend quickly up the ranks, and deliver impact earlier on in your tenure or career. When you no longer feel yourself growing in any area, it's time to move on."
Career Path Tip: A PM's main job is to ensure we are building products for the right customer problem. So, having an exploratory mindset and curiosity about the problem space can provide an edge over other PM candidates.
Career Path Tip: Focus on building strong relationships with your internal stakeholders—aligning product, sales, and engineering teams early ensures smoother execution and better outcomes. A shared vision is the foundation for delivering impactful B2B solutions.
Career Path Tip: 1. Know your target customer in and out: In order to be successful in product management, it is critical to have a deep understanding of your target customers and their needs. If you don't know the customer base you are building a product for and what their pain points are, you are almost guaranteed to fail. You and your team should be spending at least 30-40% of your time on user research, talking to customers, and gathering feedback on your products.
2. Develop strong collaboration skills: Product managers have to work closely with stakeholders from across the company and it requires strong communication and collaboration skills to succeed. Knowing what each stakeholder is responsible for, and what their goals are and catering communication accordingly will help build trust and partnership. This solid relationship is essential for product managers to operate and succeed in their roles.
Career Path Tip: At the heart of developing products are people: customers, shareholders, and internal stakeholders. Understanding people and their motivations, honing strong collaboration skills, and communications expertise are 3 elements of the Product focused professions that are critical to success. Negotiating your way through the opposing motivations (at times) of these various groups is the true test of product leadership.
Career Path Tip: Bulding trust (with everyone you work with - customers, stakeholders, cross functional partners, leadership) and authenticity are key to grow as a successful leader.
Career Path Tip: To achieve high level of critical thinking, and remove many biases, it is particularly important to adopt strict scientific methodologies. Observe, formulate questions, make hypotheses, experiment and analyse data, formulates and communicate conclusions, and finally iterate.
Career Path Tip: One of the most high-impact things you can do as a Product Manager is cultivating an ownership mindset. A PM who excels at this will do whatever it takes to help their product succeed, doing the jobs that aren't getting done, finding resources, unblocking the team and dozens of other small things that add up to a successful product getting to users. Building this approach will pay dividends throughout your career.
Career Path Tip: It sounds cliché, but be your true, 100%, authentic self at work, quirks and all. It encourages vulnerability with your engineers, invokes all sorts of different perspectives/ideas from collaborators, and fosters trust with customers.
Career Path Tip: Effective product management starts with deep empathy for your users and a commitment to solving their most pressing problems. Pair that with data-driven decision-making and cross-functional collaboration, and you’ll create products that truly make an impact.