Top 5 skills for a successful Product Manager

Photo by Jexo on Unsplash

Recently, for Women’s History Month, I got a chance to reflect on my career journey and some of my key learnings so far. Summarising some of the top skills that a Product Manager needs to be successful in the role, based on my experience:

· Lead without authority — As a Product Manager, you have to lead without authority — trust and relationship building is the key here. I have found that the easiest way to build trust is to effectively communicate — and listening is a key element of it!

· Customer empathy — Product Managers solve problems for customers and what better way to do that than to imagine yourself in your customers’ shoes. Use the product yourself as a user, talk to customers, read up on the support tickets, talk to the Technical Account Managers and truly get immersed in the customers’ personas.

· Prioritization — Product Managers are in a unique position to influence the product features and hence it becomes important to learn how to prioritize customer requests and engineering expectations. Several factors can help with prioritization — customer impact, scope of the feature, engineering efforts, and our confidence in these estimates.

· Leverage data — learning how to collect qualitative and quantitative feedback will make you stand out as Product Manager. This is an often…