What Makes a Good Product Manager: 7 Most In-Demand Superpowers

Behind every successful product is a person, usually called a product manager (PM), who effectively combines technology and design to solve user problems for business benefit.

Being a good product manager is not easy. It requires a combination of design, technology, and business knowledge, various competencies and experience, as well as technical and "soft" skills — from strategic to detail-oriented. Effective product managers sometimes seem like superhumans who know everything and can do everything.

Therefore, starting a career as a manager can seem confusing. Where to start? What knowledge and skills are necessary? What are the responsibilities of a product manager?

Instead of racking our brains over these questions, we found people already working in this business and asked them what makes a good PM. Below is a list of the most in-demand and important qualities of a product manager, according to product managers.

1. Mind-Reading Customers

The roles and responsibilities of a product manager include determining what will be built and delivered to customers. Sounds simple enough. The complexity lies in ensuring that the product backlog is worth building — that it gives customers something so valuable that they consider it worth their time, energy, and money. Something that overcomes customer pain points.

How to achieve such product-user fit is the biggest mystery in business. If there were a working recipe, 90% of startups wouldn't fail. Perhaps that's why Ibrahim Mehiddin, head of Peep, calls mind-reading the most in-demand superpower of product managers.

2. Understanding Data

A significant part of knowing your customers is understanding what they do in your app. The internet allows us to figure out customer behavior with impressive accuracy — through sales analytics, usage analytics, and A/B tests. But you can only benefit from these data arrays if you know how to analyze them, both with algorithms and with data analysts, and use the results to support your product strategy.

3. Imposing Structure on Chaos

You've gathered the "cookies", completed research and user interviews. You've analyzed a lot of data, and now — what to do with it? How to know what's important and what's not? A key strength of a product manager should be the ability to turn millions of Excel spreadsheets full of data into understandable elegant tables or charts.

4. Know Your Product (and Your Competitor's Product) Like the Back of Your Hand

After you've learned to read customers' minds, it's time to become an undisputed expert in your product and your industry. All the PMs we interviewed agree that you cannot move into product management without having a deep understanding of your own product and competitors' products.

One senior specialist once advised the following: Know your product better than anyone on this planet. Know your competitor's product better than anyone on this planet.

5. Communication and Team Management

Building a great team requires a completely different set of skills than building a great product. That's why many successful designers and developers never transition to product management. When we asked residents of a product management community on Reddit about PM superpowers, people management and communication skills were mentioned most often.

6. Having a Strategic Product Vision

When there are too many tasks and too few resources, the startup game resembles musical chairs. It's impossible to implement all ideas and develop all features at once, so you need to create a roadmap and set priorities for the development team.

One of our managers says: "One of the most important qualities of a product manager is the ability to prioritize: what is mandatory for customers and what is simply nice to have."

7. Writing Concisely and Clearly

A PM at ESK Solution is convinced that writing ability is a PM superpower, since writing is a key communication tool for product managers.

Many department heads tend to ramble or only write bullets in Jira tickets, but Lucinda believes this is a missed opportunity. Great writing can persuade, inform, and inspire — all of which a PM should do.

But wait, people don't like reading long articles. How do you get stakeholders to read a 10-page document? Of course, no one wants to read a 10-page document, but you increase your chances of success if:

1. Shorten it.
2. Structure it.
3. Give people time to read it DURING the meeting.

What Should a Product Manager Consider?

Here are seven indispensable PM superpowers. Let's summarize what characteristics a good product manager should have and how to acquire them:

1. Start by becoming an expert on your target audience. Become your company's specialist in understanding customers and their behavior, both quantitative and qualitative.
2. Learn to analyze user data and extract meaning from it, then share your insights with others.
3. Develop a strategic product vision to prioritize features and create a roadmap.
4. Learn to write clearly and concisely to communicate with the team and stakeholders.
5. Become an indisputable expert in your product and competitors' products. Again, share your knowledge openly and generously.
6. Work on building strong collaborative relationships with development team members.