Most Important Skills in Product Management

Working as a product manager requires different skills from different fields. It is not a job that requires one, two or even ten skills. It is like starting your own business and you must have different skills from different fields. It requires Skills from marketing, creativity, technology, pricing and leadership, etc…

Always I do ask myself: “What is the most important skills working as a Product Manager?”. I decided to enter Linkedin and post a new discussion in a popular group called Product Management that have more than 9,987 members and in Telecommunications Product Development Group that have more than 869 from different industries and I had more than 79 comments from different professionals. They had highlighted different skills. Some of them mentioned one skill and others more than one skill.

The number one was Communication. 47 professionals say it is an important skill. Number two was Stakeholder Management (Managing Internal and external stakeholder). 33 professionals say it is an important skill. Number three was Market Understanding. 18 professionals say it is an important skill.

17% of the professionals say Communication is the most important skill. 12% was for stakeholder management. Stakeholder management is something similar to communication. That means both of them is 29%. Product manager should care about developing those two skills.

The important skills from 4 to seven are: Customer Understanding, Product Understanding, leadership, Project Management, creativity, analysis and delivering effective training.

Working as a Product Manager is a challenging job. Although I did not get one answer that a particular skill is the most important skill as Professionals have different opinion, I can say communication is very important skill working in the filed of product management. 

Time to Market

Time-to-Market methodology is a popular methodology discussed worldwide in the market world. The first time I had heard this concept was with Orange from France. I liked it and in many services I try to implement it to make it successful service.

Time-to-Market is a methodology which is from the start of the idea till it is ready for selling it. Making the service ready from all the different directions. For example if a company needs to finish launching a project with three categories which are: Vendors tasks, commercial side and technical side. The Time-to-Market methodology target is to finish the project from the different categories. Time-to-Market not only focus on time. It also concentrates on the resources. It’s target it to reduce the resources. One of the resources is the amount of cost of vendors, buying equipments, services requested and others.

I want to tell you about one of the experience I had for one of the services in my work. Many challenges do employee who is responsible of managing and launching of the service of not get all the internal approvals. In addition, it may find many challenges that the service is getting to make the technical tasks ready. Time-to-Market targets too is getting the internal approval and make the service ready from the technical aspect.

Some popular technical tools are available online which some can use and others are desktop tools Time-to-Market. Online which is free from Zoho and desktop which is Microsoft Office Project.


Personally, I do feel it is nice concept to be followed to let the SMEs and big enterprises launch their services in the market and be happy that they had launched a new service.