The Most Important Skill for a Product Manager?

Vazgen Babayan
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read
“assorted books” by Jason Wong on Unsplash

Earlier this week I was asked a question — “What is the most important skill for a Product Manager?”. The question was not an easy one for me. With the different hats Product Managers have to wear (ProductBoard has identified nine!), the importance of a skill seemed to be entirely dependent on the context of the situation. At one point you are looking at the eagle eye view of your long-term roadmap, at another you are working with the team on the nitty-gritty details of executing against it. All while building and maintaining relationships with the team, customers and all the other stakeholders.

Still, after further analysis, I think there are some skills which are equally important in all of those scenarios. Below is my take on the top three of them.

  • On the third place for me is prioritization. Through our daily lives we constantly prioritize, make trade-off decisions and this is certainly true for product management as well. We see this most when choosing the most important work to do for the team and the company in general. There is a reason why prioritized backlog of work is at the core of the most popular Agile methodologies. But it goes beyond that. Prioritization is essential to managing our own time and with the amount of context switching required from Product Managers, it becomes even more critical to prevent burnout. Prioritization also means saying “No” more often than not and that allows us, the team and the company to focus on what matters most to the users.
  • The second is empathy. It’s hard to undervalue the importance of empathy for product management. In order to be effective at product management, we have to be able to understand and share the emotions of our users as that not only provides us with qualitative insights about how effective is the solution we’re building but also the desire and drive to act upon those insights. But it’s not only about the users. Empathy is critical for effective communication with the development team, sales, support, executive board and other internal stakeholders.
    Catherine Shyu, Senior Product Manager at Crypto Startup actually named empathy as the most important skill for a Product Manager. As it should be present in our every decision, I think it is very close. But for me, the most important skill for a Product Manager is…
  • Analytical thinking. In my opinion, analytical thinking is the one critical component that any good Product Manager possesses and uses on a daily basis. It’s the ability to gather information that will be required to effectively solve the problem. More so, it’s also the ability to look at the collected data points and connect the dots, identifying trends and patterns that lead us to the the best solution. Empathy will allow to deeply understand the problem customers have, but it’s the problem-solving aspect of analytical thinking that will derive a solution to that problem.
    Analytical thinking is used in every short-term and long-term decision on the way of solving customers’ problems.

So that’s my personal list of the most important skills for Product Managers. Analytical thinking, empathy, prioritization skills. And while the list is prioritized, I can’t stress enough the importance of those three for any Product Manager. I don’t see how one can be good at product management without possessing any one of those skills.


On a final note, I want to mention that these skills are equally important outside of product management and by building those skills you can not only become a successful Product Manager but a successful person in general.

Vazgen Babayan

Written by

Traveller, movie geek and a fan of great products that transform our lives!

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