Essential Product Manager Skills

As a product manager, you bring the vision of a product to life. This involves working with an interdisciplinary team—often including engineers, business professionals, sales and marketing teams, and more—to develop a strategy that conveys the unique vision and tone of the product. 

Because of the diverse requirements for this position, most successful product managers will have a blend of technical, business, and interpersonal skills. If you’re interested in working as a product manager, you might like to know that the average annual salary for this position is $124,176 [1].

By exploring different types of skills that can help you thrive in this role, you can learn whether your strengths align with the job, what you might need to work on, and what types of courses can help you prepare for this position.

Top technical skills for product managers

While you’ll often be looking at the big picture of a product and helping the vision come together, you’ll likely spend some time detailing product specifics and performing basic analyses. A few top technical skills that can help you with this aspect of the position include:

Technical writing and communication

Using technical writing skills, you can document product requirements and communicate insights to your team. This helps to clearly detail the current product’s requirements, showcase features for upcoming products, and keep a record of your team’s design flow. 

It’s also important to be able to understand technical information and communicate it to your teams. While this will vary depending on your product, you’ll likely be discussing the technical architecture of your product, the software—such as the application programming interface (API)—your team is using during the design process as well as how to prioritize design features or requirements. 

Data analysis

As a product manager, being able to perform simple data analyses to understand customer satisfaction, product metrics, and market trends can help you keep up with the demands of the industry while ensuring your product actually does what you say it does. Data analysis can show you how your product performs in different scenarios and identify any unexpected outcomes. You can also use data analysis to identify gaps in the market, anticipate market trends and customer needs, and make changes to your product based on customer feedback.

Customer and user experience (CX/UX)

By leveraging customer and user experience frameworks, you can design a product that more closely meets customer expectations. Instead of only thinking about whether the product meets a certain functionality, design thinking helps you assess whether customers like the experience of using your product and want to choose it over alternative options. 

Agile methodology and rapid prototyping

Agile methodology focuses on an iterative approach that can help you obtain feedback more quickly on whether your product is likely to fare well in the market. This helps you test the risk of launching your product and gain insight into whether it performs its intended functions. You can gauge your product’s feasibility, scalability, and usability without spending an excess amount of resources.

Top business skills for product managers

Even if you have an exceptional product idea, marketing the product to customers and using resources wisely are essential steps to a successful product launch. Having business expertise can help you manage your team’s budget and project revenue as well as align your product strategies with your available resources. A few skills to build on the business side include: 

Market research and customer development

Market research involves understanding the current market landscape and projecting how your product will fare with customers. Customer development skills help you bring products to market more quickly and develop a product that is specific to the “target” you are trying to hit. Not only can these skills help you identify gaps and anticipate user needs, but they can help you continually refine existing products to meet new demands and stay on top of trends. 

Resource efficiency

You’ll likely come across several scenarios where you have to make challenging decisions about resource utilization. With limited time, budget, and staff, deciding which idea to pursue or how to allocate resources more effectively is an essential part of the job.

Using KPIs

As a product manager, you may work with key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates (prospective customers to paying customers), daily activity on your website, and customer satisfaction rates. By understanding which metrics are most important to you and how to set them accurately, you can better track the progress of your product and make adjustments where necessary. You might do this through customer segmentation research, competitor analysis, or exploratory market research.

Top interpersonal skills for product managers

Product management is a team-centered role, meaning interpersonal skills are among the most valuable for this position. You’ll need to be able to communicate clearly with your team, adapt to changing environments, and solve problems effectively. Workplace skills that can help you excel in this position include:

Cooperation and negotiation

In almost every facet of this position, you will likely be involved in some sort of negotiation. With customers, you might negotiate prices, fixes, or features on your product. With your engineering or sales teams, you might negotiate timelines and how quickly each team can accomplish certain tasks. You’ll need to strike a balance between protecting your team and making sure you can meet customer demands. When you are continually making decisions that involve multiple team members, it’s important to facilitate cooperation between professionals while negotiating a timeline and execution plan that works for everyone.

Critical thinking and problem-solving

Design teams often face unexpected challenges throughout the product life cycle, and a product manager needs the ability to help resolve these issues. As a product manager, it’s key for you to be able to think critically about each challenge and find a creative solution that provides the best possible outcome. 

Collaboration and influence

Because you’re working on dynamic teams, collaborating with diverse professionals is integral to your job as a product manager. For example, you might need to communicate design changes to your engineering teams, translate engineering insights for your business team, and communicate engineering requirements to your design team. Each team will have their own set of priorities and goals, which means you will need to communicate with each team in a way that makes sense for them. 

You’ll also sometimes have to make difficult decisions and prioritize certain aspects of the product, and your team needs to trust you to make the right decisions. This type of influence helps to keep your team cohesive and working toward a common end goal.

How to build your product management skills

Building product manager skills involves a combination of formal learning and practical experience. Seeking out opportunities on cross-functional projects can help you gain experience working on interdisciplinary teams and building interpersonal skills for this type of environment. Other ways to build related skills include:

• Degree programs: Degree programs such as bachelor’s or master’s degrees in business or marketing can help you learn to manage a product throughout its life cycle and work with metrics like KPIs.

• Online courses and Professional Certificates: Taking online courses can help you deepen your expertise in technical skills as well as develop your abilities in the areas of management and collaboration.

• Related entry-level positions: Landing an entry-level position can expose you to the type of environment in which more senior product managers work. As you progress, you can volunteer for additional responsibilities to help develop your skills and prepare for a product manager role.

• Books and online communities: Taking advantage of available materials and communities can help you learn the necessary skill set to work as a product manager. Try listening to podcasts that discuss common product management experiences, or reading a book written by experts in the field.

Learn product manager skills on Coursera

As a product manager, you’ll need a mix of technical, business, and interpersonal skills to bring your team’s product vision to life. On Coursera, you can take courses from experienced professionals in the field to help you build related skills. The IBM Product Manager Professional Certificate is a great way to build relevant skills while earning a Professional Certificate that demonstrates your proficiency to employers. You might also consider the Product Management Certification Specialization from SkillUp Edtech, which can help you learn how to manage stakeholders, adjust to change, and identify product development strategies.