Are you considering a career in product management? Before taking the leap, it’s important to assess whether this path aligns with your skills, interests, and goals. With product management roles varying across industries, product types, and company sizes, it can be challenging to determine if it’s the right fit for you.

Product management requires a unique combination of technical, creative, and leadership skills, making it a fast-paced and challenging field. Whether you’re a beginner or considering a career change, it’s crucial to evaluate your strengths and identify areas for growth. To help you make an informed decision, we’ve gathered advice from these experienced product managers:

Their advice can be distilled into three steps: 

  1. Evaluate your skills
  2. Align your interests
  3. Find a suitable role 

While it may seem daunting to determine if product management is right for you, with careful research, networking, and clarity on your goals, you can find the right fit. Keep reading for valuable insights.

→ Test your product management and data skills with this free Growth Skills Assessment Test.

→ Learn data-driven product management in Simulator by GoPractice.

→ Learn growth and realize the maximum potential of your product in Product Growth Simulator.

→ Learn to apply generative AI to create products and automate processes in Generative AI for Product Managers – Mini Simulator.

→ Learn AI/ML through practice by completing four projects around the most common AI problems in AI/ML Simulator for Product Managers.

Evaluate your skills

Sandhya Srinivasa (Senior Product Manager Technical at PayPal)

Passion is great but a lot of us are efficient in our roles because we have learned to love what we do and have identified hidden strengths along the way. I started out as a quality engineer, went on to be a quality engineering manager, and worked for 12 years in that space before moving to product management. Transitioning initially was weird because it is a mindset shift but once that shift happens, the sky is your limit. There are various product roles but in general, the following skills would make you a great product manager:

☑ Visionary
If you sometimes ponder over how the world will be in a few years.

☑ Problem solver
If you are someone who can identify problems and think of what can solve them.

☑ Collaborator
You should be able to comfortably speak the functional language of business and the technical language of engineering because you are the bridge.

☑ Explorer
When someone says there is a problem you don’t take it at face value. You dig deeper to find out if it really is a problem, the cause, and the repercussions for not solving it.

☑ Knowledge seeker
You are someone who keeps abreast of news and major events happening around the world, especially in the tech world and how it is changing.

☑ Leader
You are a leader without authority so you should be skilled at influencing people and teams to sell your idea.

☑ Data analyst
You should be able to read data and deduce patterns. The ideas for building the next feature or identifying the root cause of user behavior are in the data and you should be able to identify that.

☑ Context switcher
Since you wear multiple hats you have to do a lot of context-switching for almost every meeting.

☑ Psychologist
Most product managers only get to interview a handful of users but should solve for millions. So you should be able to identify the right users and validate your assumptions from the few user interviews you can do.

☑ Project management skills
Most companies expect the product manager to also oversee execution so you should be great at high-level estimates and know when to launch a specific feature.

☑ Pricing and marketing
Some product managers are also expected to do market pricing. You need to figure out how to entice users to pay for your product or services.

Sandor Akszenovics (Senior Product Manager at Just Eat Takeaway.com)

Drawing from my personal experience of transitioning from software development to product management a decade ago, here are some essential skills and qualities to consider:

☑ Curiosity
My switch to product management was motivated by the desire to understand the “why” behind requirements. As a product manager, you’ll need to persistently ask questions and delve deeper to uncover user needs, industry trends, and competitive landscapes. This curiosity will enable you to develop more innovative and user-centric solutions.

☑ Empathy
Cultivating empathy for both your users and stakeholders is vital to addressing their actual and often unspoken needs. Empathy will empower you to make informed decisions that resonate with your users, ultimately resulting in better products.

☑ Open-mindedness
Open-mindedness is crucial, as you’ll frequently face multiple solutions to a single problem. Being receptive to feedback and adapting to new ideas will help you continually refine your product strategy and grow as a product manager.

☑ Data-driven decision-making
As a product manager, it’s essential to make objective, data-driven decisions. This involves defining KPIs, conducting data analysis, prioritizing features, allocating resources effectively, and measuring your product’s impact. More importantly, you must be able to evaluate your product’s performance using numerical data.

☑ Communication and collaboration
Effective communication is paramount for a product manager, as you’ll work closely with a diverse range of people (e.g., developers, designers, sales, and marketing). Adapting your communication style to each team member and actively listening to their input fosters a collaborative environment and is crucial for obtaining buy-in and support from executives.

☑ Self-discipline
In my experience, balancing multiple projects, deadlines, stakeholder expectations, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance is the most challenging aspect for any product manager. Developing self-discipline to pick battles, know when to stop, avoid cognitive overload, and prevent burnout is perhaps the most critical long-term skill a product manager needs to cultivate.

Rebecca Scheigert (Senior Product Manager at Carvana)

If you’ve considered a role as a product manager, here are some questions you can ask about yourself to decide if it’s a role you’d find fulfilling and rewarding:

☑ Are you comfortable working with ambiguity?
As a product manager, it’s your job to determine what problems to solve and how to solve them. You’ll often be given very vague direction if you’re given any at all. For example, a company might need to increase subscribers, increase gross profit per unit, or reduce operating expenses. You should be able to take a high-level objective and hone in on how exactly to solve a problem. Being thoughtful, curious, and data-driven will help you in this area.

☑ Are you empathetic?
Product managers are responsible for understanding and advocating for their users. They also need to navigate stakeholder relationships. The best product managers are patient listeners, and approach every conversation with a sense of empathy.

☑ Are you decisive and confident?
Product managers are leaders in the company, and they make decisions that impact customers and the business on a daily basis. You should feel comfortable and confident taking a stand and making decisions about the products you work with.

☑ Are you a team player?
People often say that product management is a team sport. Product manager is a role that depends on the engineers, designers, and other stakeholders on the team. This means you need to be collaborative, communicative, and truly value the working relationships on your team. You should also be proud to share the credit of your product’s success with the people who helped you accomplish it.

Hayden Davis (Senior Product Manager at VMware)

Product management is the right role for individuals who prefer long feedback cycles, have strong directional intelligence, and thrive in environments where the data only gets you 80% of the way to the answer. Product managers need to be able to speak the language of multiple disciplines and act as a translator between those disciplines and the customer. In addition to the more technical aspects of product like feature prioritization, choosing the right KPIs, and working on product strategy, excellent product managers also exhibit the soft skills to get their team “fired up” about what they are working on (many times a niche B2B product few outsiders know about) and a natural competitive tendency that rubs off on their teammates.