How to be a Product Manager 2o25

Conversational Style 

Product managers are able to sell their products through a conversational style of organizing clients. They tell captivating stories focused around customer pain and their emotions, which motivate others to action.

While bad product managers are straight up salesmen - they are unable to lead with authority, so they try to persuade teams to implement ideas they come up with. The key is to establish yourself as a professional who wants to inspire, and not to sell.

Learning is Always the Key

Product managers are not only great leaders, but they are also efficient followers. Whether it’s customer interviews, shipping product or looking at user metrics, good product managers are always focused on what they can learn to improve their craft.

Undesirable product managers are focused on shipping as they believe that success is only defined by delivering product into the hands of their customers and earn profit. They never see how shipping is subset of learning. They fail to revisit what they ship and use what they’ve learned to iterate on the original idea.

Multipliers of Efficient Team Players

For the most part, product managers are multipliers. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of their team and find ways to amend and utilise those skills. They learn the best way to work as an individual but at the same time, work with the team for productivity.

On the other hand, inefficient product managers are individual contributors. They have to be the first to have an opinion and sometimes prioritize their individual decision.

Context Over Ideas

Product managers share context and is the curator of the best ideas. They invest in collective sharing of thoughts and opinions and know the best ideas will come from a team where everyone has shared objective ideas over the customer pain and the reason to care to solve them.

Never jump to a solution without team consultation as those bad traits will produce low-quality output that no one wants to sign up for.

Decision Making 

When it comes to decision making, product managers make a small percentage of team decisions. Their priority is to empower everyone on the team to make the best decision, especially on crucial situations.

Bad product managers make a large percentage of team decisions because they view themselves as the person who knows all the right choices. A good indicator of this is a team’s progress when their product manager is unavailable.

Make Everything as Simple as Possible

Product managers aims to inspire people to handle leadership without hesitating on the level of difficulty. If you ever see a product manager and think that you could do his/her job with the same success, then they’ve done their part as a team leader.

On the other hand, product managers who doesn’t prioritize team-building talk about their stressful lives, always run from meeting to meeting and never seem fully engaged in conversation. You’d never want to handle the job because of the stress that comes with it.

Knows How to Handle Bad Outcomes

Product managers stay humble when they reach success. Winning in product development is a team sport, and there’s no “product” in team. They share the glory with others around them and make sure everyone is there to celebrate both big and small wins.

Product managers who can’t handle criticisms are the first to come up with an excuse and never want to talk about how they could improve for the next time around. They often point fingers at engineering, design, leadership…etc.

Great Relationship Builders

Good product managers are relationship-driven because they believe that relationships trump feature requests with external customers, and internal relationships drive great teams. They spend time knowing the people they work with on a personal level and think about the long term game, not the immediate future.

Bad product managers are heavily transactional. They tell others what they can do for them and ask for things in return. Everything is give and take.

Marketing Skills are Essential

Product managers are trained marketers. They know their target audience and know how to reach a wider audience and design their product for distribution.

Unprofessional product managers view product marketing as a secondary necessity that only the content team are suppose to handle.

Focused on Success

Product managers are focused on having a successful output. They know when to push a team for a specific solution, and when to be creative on how to get there. They are persistent in pursuing clear customer pain and only focus on a select few to solve.

Unorganized product managers are all over the place. They run teams in a decision by committee basis. They want everyone to be happy and are willing to cater to every request.