3 product management skills to learn in 2025

The product manager role has evolved with technological advancements and shifting market demands. Mastering product management skills isn’t just beneficial, it’s essential for success.

Staying ahead in product management means continuously honing your skills. This comprehensive guide covers the essential skills that’ll define successful product managers in 2025, as well as tips on how to develop these abilities.

Each of these skills plays a pivotal role in enhancing your ability to lead teams, understand customer needs, and make informed decisions that drive innovation.

Using AI responsibly

Arman Javaherian, former Product Chief Officer at Shortcut, says, “(AI is) not a replacement, but an augmentation.” He continues talking about the topic in the Leader Spotlight series, he where adds that AI tools can help with a variety of tasks such as:

• Aggregating customer feedback
• Providing recommendations for feature improvements
• Inspiring better user experiences and designs
• Helping with organizing product requirement documents (PRDs)

Javaherian sees AI as a powerful resource for product managers, suggesting that “AI can really help product managers with menial tasks so they can focus on the real human-oriented work of product discovery that most of them love.”

To this end, start by reviewing your workflows and finding areas for improvement. Once you’ve identified repetitive tasks, try different AI tools to see which would work best for your team. Test with small projects first or conduct A/B testing to see which AI tools are most effective.

Real-world example:

Ariel McNichol, founder of YesCraft.ai, cautions that AI can get things wrong and says, “The first rule is to assume there are hallucinations and get humans who do know these things in the loop.”

McNichol emphasizes the importance of providing hands-on training for teams to help members turn from skeptics to feeling cutting edge. She also shares that understanding the limitations of AI will help enhance a person’s work.

For example, a product owner using an LLM to write a feature spec may end up with a document filled with errors.

Instead, it’s more helpful for the product owner to write the feature spec and then ask the LLM to review the user story. The LLM can look for logical errors, lack of acceptance criteria, and areas that may need clarification. The AI assistance can provide helpful feedback.

“Keep prompting the LLMs to review themselves and train everyone to understand that these tools are just eager-to-please generative bots,” says McNichol. “They say what they think you want, whether it’s true or not.”

Effective communication

Soft skills are hard to learn since they’re closely tied to a person’s personality. Still, you should seek constructive feedback and build strong communication habits.

Bryanne Pashley, Director of Product Management at Ziff Davis, says product managers should learn how to communicate expectations and follow through.

“Communication means knowing how to talk to people with different motivations and following through means doing what you said you were going to do when you said you’d do it,” she explained in her Leader Spotlight interview. “Both are essential to building trust and having productive working relationships with stakeholders.”

She suggests asking the following questions when you need to communicate:

• Are you talking to the right team?
• How often are you talking to that team?
• Are you communicating with the team in a way that is most effective and resonates with them?

A few ways to improve communication skills include:

• Active listening — During meetings and discussions, ask clarifying questions and summarize what others have said. Active listening can help ensure messaging is heard from all parties
• Organize your thoughts — Creating a meeting agenda and tailoring messages to the audience allows product managers to communicate more effectively. Pashley recommends using the Minto Pyramid as a starting point
• Seek regular feedback — Prepare your ego, and ask for constructive feedback from your peers. Feedback can help product managers pinpoint specific areas of improvement. Then they can develop a plan to practice new communication skills

Real-world example:

Maksym Kunytsia, Vice President of Product Management at Ideals, shares that the company has two products. Each product has differing needs, which can make it challenging for communications and decision-making. “For us, this means that we invest a lot of resources into maintaining the best possible user experience (for the first product). But our second product is more like a startup, so our main focus in that area is actually getting clients.”

Kunytsia adopted a document-first approach to handle this challenge. He writes everything he considers and then shares it with the team. During meetings, they iterate, provide feedback, and provide examples.

Documentation is vital for decision-making as it shows the logic and process of how a decision was made. Creating documentation improves visibility for stakeholders. “Because of this need to share (the decision-making process) with everyone, having it in written form is crucial,” said Kunytsia.

An added benefit of documentation is that it can help future employees and stakeholders understand why a decision was made and avoid creating problems that were previously discussed.

Develop a gut instinct

Sometimes following your gut instinct might get dismissed as reckless decision-making. However, your experience and knowledge of your consumers can help you make confident decisions. Experience and knowledge are crucial tools for developing a gut instinct you can trust.

Jack Litchfield, Head of Product at Super.com, warns against being too data-driven and says, “I like to teach teammates that your gut can actually be very data-driven when you’ve built an existing habit of reviewing the data. You’re picking up subtle cues that your experience has trained as indicators of success or failure all along the way.”

Intuition is essentially built with pattern recognition. To refine your instincts, consider incorporating these habits into your work:

• Understand the market by broadening domain knowledge. Stay informed by reading articles about your industry, competitors, and related-subjects
• Regularly seek customer feedback to ensure you know their pain points
• Learn from past mistakes to avoid repeating errors
• Ensure you’re working with accurate and relevant data
• Review apps to determine the intention behind features and understand the rationale behind their decision-making

When making product decisions, Maria Cusay, Director of Product Growth at Ancestry, likes to consider these three questions:

• What does high-level data analysis tell you?
• What are the main things and “must haves” customers are looking for in your product?
• What is your product intuition telling you?

Real-world example:

Prefect, a workflow orchestration platform for data and AI engineers, had a problem. Data showed users were having long periods of inactivity. Based on the data, it would seem that users were finding the platform unusable.

But Chris Reuter, Head of Growth, had a hunch that inactivity wasn’t the real issue. He started using LogRocket to gather session replay recordings and see what users were doing.

The data confirmed his instinct. Users weren’t inactive. During the “inactive periods,” they were building workflows in terminals that weren’t tracked by any of their legacy tools.

With this information, Reuter readjusted the customer activation metric for a more accurate picture of how customers were using Prefect.

Key takeaways

By using AI responsibly, improving your communication skills, and sharpening your intuition, you can be more prepared to handle the challenges that come your way.

These skills aren’t just nice to have; they help set you apart as a product manager and help build impactful products. Take the time to practice these abilities.

As technology and markets change, product managers who have invested in developing these competencies are well-positioned to thrive.

Featured image source: IconScout