3 Smart Ways to Elevate Product Management Skills
Product management skills define your success as a PM—and the best ones go beyond building features or writing user stories. They involve deep customer understanding, strategic domain knowledge, and strong communication. In Productside’s Product Management Skills Benchmark Report, based on a survey of over 1,650 product managers globally, these three areas stood out as the most impactful.
But identifying your strengths is just the beginning. The real magic happens when you learn how to elevate and apply these product management skills in ways that boost your influence, credibility, and career trajectory.
Here are three proven ways to grow while giving back to the community.
- Domain Knowledge: Product managers often excel in this area due to their deep expertise in specific market spaces.
- Customer Understanding: Understanding customer needs is crucial to building the right product. Without this foundational skill, success is unlikely.
- Communication Skills: Effective written and verbal communication is critical for successful collaboration and stakeholder engagement.
Share Your Skills Through Mentorship
Mentorship is a powerful way to strengthen and apply product management skills. Whether you’re a senior PM or just one step ahead of someone else, mentoring helps you clarify your thinking and pass on what you’ve learned.
In Productside’s Women in Product Management blog series, top VPs like Soni Meinki, SVP of Product at Optum, often mention mentorship as a key growth tool. She advises:
“The greatest piece of advice I ever got was to go to meetings early, especially the important ones. Sit near the person running the meeting, whether it’s a C-level executive or CEO. Be prepared, share your opinion, and you’ll gain respect.”
Mentorship helps you develop skills by teaching them to your protégé. Practicing next bench coaching or swivel chair coaching with a new team member is particularly effective. Whether assisting with a requirements document or attending a retrospective, sharing both the “how” and the “why” solidifies your knowledge.
Build Thought Leadership Through Writing
Writing forces clarity. It’s also a great way to share product management skills at scale.
Whether you post on Medium, LinkedIn, or your internal team blog, writing about your product lessons, mistakes, or frameworks builds your reputation as a thought leader.
Start by identifying topics where you have practical insight:
-
How you prioritize a roadmap
-
How you conduct customer interviews
-
How you manage technical debt
Great platforms for publishing include:
- LinkedIn PM Groups
- Facebook PM Groups
Speak at Industry Events
Public speaking helps you communicate clearly, position yourself as a leader, and amplify your product management skills to a wider audience.
Events like ProductCamp and product meetups on Meetup.com offer a friendly stage for product professionals of all levels (DoFollow).
You don’t need to be a keynote speaker to start. Lead a breakout session, join a panel, or run a workshop on a topic like:
-
How you overcame a roadmap conflict
-
A lesson learned from a product launch
-
Building stronger relationships with engineers
Give Back, Grow Stronger
Giving back—through mentoring, writing, or speaking—not only helps others, but also deepens your own expertise. The best way to master your product management skills is by teaching, sharing, and practicing them in real-world scenarios.
How will you use your product management skills to impact your peers, community, and the broader field of product management?
