“AI will replace everything.”
This statement annoys me because it’s misleading.
AI is disruptive and will transform our work, especially product managers. Yet, specific skills will make you a bulletproof product manager in 2025.
Let’s use this free episode to explore the skills you need to thrive this year.
Before we jump into the skills, I have something for you. I’ve compiled a 5-day free e-mail course to give you actionable insights most product people miss. Ultimately, it will help you become a robust product manager.
What’s a Bulletproof Product Manager?
You may wonder what a bulletproof PM is. It’s a professional ready to survive disruptions and become stronger and more attractive in the crowded market.
The bulletproof PM will thrive despite the challenges. Unlike most PMs, this one is ahead of the curve. Principles guide decisions, not frameworks. They focus on driving value no matter what. Their unique skills enable them to move away from bullshit management and create impact.
Let’s explore the skills you need to hone to become the product manager AI won’t replace.
Soft Skills
For a long time, I thought product management was about mastering frameworks, and that’s where I put my energy. Yet, I could barely see an improvement in my journey. After years, I recognize that product management is about people and collaboration. Without sound soft skills, you will block your full potential.
Six skills stand out to me because they pave the way for success.
1. Leadership
The product manager is an unfortunate name. You don’t manage anyone or anything. Leading is what you indeed do. Yet, that’s often misunderstood.
Here are the leadership traits you must pursue to thrive:
Decision-making: You’re brave to make decisions regardless of which information you have. You focus on progressing over analyzing forever.
Trade-offs: You can quickly analyze trade-offs and choose the best action.
Inspire: You can get people on a mission to achieve something beyond their imagination.
Goal setting: You know how vital focus is, so you set one goal at a time and ensure everyone understands why that matters.
Take action: You act fast. You don’t wait for things to happen; you make them happen. Stepping into the unknown is part of your repertoire.
2. Communication
As a product manager, you interact with many people, and everyone probably wants something from you. The secret is to filter through the noise to find what’s relevant and move on, which requires solid communication skills.
Communication isn’t only about spreading your message and ensuring people understand what you mean. Beyond that, you also get to understand the others. Here’s what can help you:
Listen to understand, not reply: When you talk to someone, pay attention to whether you are thinking about your answer or are trying to understand the other person. The first limits knowledge, while the latter amplifies it.
Rephrase to ensure understanding: We often get people wrong. A simple rephrasing of your words can clarify many misunderstandings immediately.
Choose the right medium: You have many ways of communicating, but not everything is the same. Knowing what to use, when, and whom to address is key. For example, critical feedback will land poorly in a text message but well in a video call or face-to-face conversation.
Talk the language of your audience: Adapting your communication according to your audience will help you connect with them faster. An executive wants straight-to-the-point numbers, while a software engineer needs context details. You need to know how to communicate with each one.
3. Resilience
You will hit the wall more often than you can imagine.
Users will surprise you
Leadership will sometimes reduce investments
Software engineers will do things differently than agreed
You will eventually receive a roadmap that you see no value
The above will happen eventually, but resilience will keep you moving forward.
Resilience is about sharpening your skin to take punches and keep moving with the heads up. Without resilience, you will quickly become demotivated, and the work loses purpose. With resilience, you understand the cards you have and make the best possible move you can.
4. Drive
How do you motivate yourself?
When you need external motivational incentives, you depend on others and can quickly become demotivated. External factors cannot be controlled; you can influence them at best.
Drive means having an internal motivation mechanism that shows you’re self-sufficient. No matter what’s happening, you’re motivated to keep moving on.
You act as the hero of your story, not the victim of your circumstances.
5. Patience
Things will take longer than you imagine:
That cool new features you validated will take 3x more than you planned
Sharpening something to unleash its potential takes a long
Driving value is slower than shipping features for the sake of it
The ability to delay gratification is fundamental to thrive.
You do now what’s relevant for tomorrow, even when you know you cannot collect any immediate value. You avoid short-term rewards at the expense of future growth.
For example, saying yes to all stakeholder's requests makes you look good in the short term, but it will hit you strongly sooner or later. Yet, when you say no, you allow your team to focus on what truly matters.
Be patient. That will help you grow.
6. Flexibility
What worked yesterday may not work today.
Some product managers learn a few frameworks and want to deploy them wherever they work. However, context matters: Some frameworks thrive in startups and fail in big corporations.
Developing a toolbox and a sharp understanding of what to use, when, and how is essential. Product is anything like a science. It’s more like an art.
Flexibility helps you focus on what matters instead of getting distracted by what doesn’t.
Hard Skills
Soft skills pave the way for success, but they aren’t enough alone. You still need a few hard skills to help you thrive. Six skills will prepare you to deal with the adversities of the product world.
1. Business Acumen
Product managers need to master business understanding. Here’s what you need to know about your product:
Business model: How the overall business dynamics work.
Competition landscape: Who are your main competitors, and how do you differentiate?
Revenue model: How your product generates revenue.
Health: How sustainable is your product financially? You need to understand it pretty well to uncover opportunities.
Current business challenges: Where are the struggles? It may be customer acquisition, activation, monetization, growth, or retention. You need to understand the big picture.
Often, product managers serve the business instead of partnering with them. Both need to collaborate so everyone wins closely. Yet, if you lack business understanding, then stakeholders will define what to do, and you will become a backlog manager at best.
2. Product Experimentation
Most ideas will generate mediocre to no results. You better drop the bad ones fast enough. Product experiments are what enable you to ditch flawed ideas quickly.
Sadly, too many product managers use and often abuse a few test methods while reflecting on the best way to learn whether your idea is good. A/B test isn’t the only test method you have. There are many more.
I recommend reading Testing Business Ideas by David J. Bland to amplify your toolbox. The mindset should be: the weaker the evidence, the quicker the experiment.
First, experiments should run in hours to give you direction, e.g., surveys, 404 tests, polls, etc.
Then, you scale to a few days to explore more, for example, landing pages, interactive prototypes, painted doors, etc.
Ultimately, you use more robust experiments to test value creation, e.g., wizard of Oz, concierge, hack a solution, etc.
The more complex your idea, the more experiments you should run. Yet, if coding your idea is faster than experimenting, you can deliver the feature to a small portion of your audience and learn from the results.
Ensure evidence talks louder than opinions.
3. AI-Know-How
AI is your co-pilot to amplify your potential. However, you remain the pilot. You need to know where you’re going, and AI will help you get there faster.
I’ve reflected on what AI can do for product people,e and I came up with the following.
I won’t go through it as it’s beyond this episode's scope, but I leave a message to you: AI is here to stay and transform how you work; you can either ignore it and become outdated or leverage it and thrive.
4. Data Savvy
Understanding how to get insights from data is fundamental, but it goes beyond creating dashboards and tracking everything.
North Star Metrics: What’s the one thing that defines ultimate success for your product? For example, Airbnb has nights booked per day, while Uber rides per day.
Leading Metrics: Do you know how to identify metrics you can quickly measure and adapt your course of action? Those are the leading metrics because you can promptly understand your product's health, while a laggard metric, e.g., revenue, takes too long to impact.
Focus: You will have more data than you can ever imagine, the ability of focusing what what truly matters is fundamental to progress.
Some things may hurt you, so be careful:
Track everything and decide later
Look at data several times a day as if you were doing day trading
Panic when you see a deviation
Send reports to everyone around you
Data-savvy product managers know how to collect actionable insights from data.
5. Metrics Definition
What’s success?
Defining metrics is fundamental to enabling focus. The most crucial part is knowing which metrics you’re optimizing and which you’re protecting. This helps you review the success of your work.
Even today, many teams ship and forget. That isn’t product management at all.
Your job is only done once you drive customer and business value, and you can only evaluate your success if you know how to set measurable metrics.
6. Delivery Frameworks
I left delivery frameworks as the last one because it generally becomes the only one.
You will work with delivery frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, LeSS, etc. And you should understand how to benefit the most from them. Yet, I warn you that frameworks are means to an end, not the end. Your goal remains the same: drive value for customers and the business.
Often, I stumble upon weird questions:
How do we do discovery with Scrum?
How do we integrate product experiments with Kanban?
How do we use the Sprint Review to measure outcomes?
The questions are genuine but misleading. You’ve got to do discovery, and it doesn’t matter what Scrum says or doesn’t say. The objective isn’t to do Scrum better but to deliver value faster.
Don’t let framework definitions limit you. Focus on the job you need to get done.
Differential
Product management is highly competitive yet exciting. I often reflect on what separates the best from the rest and want to share that with you.
1. Bullshit Nose
Almost everything is noise, but not everyone notices it. A nose for bullshit is fundamental for you to unlock teams, to boost value creation, and avoid waste.
In short, if you don’t know how what you’re doing creates value, then it’s probably bullshit. Here are a few examples:
Feature plans distract teams from creating an impact.
Stakeholder management transforms you into a stakeholder puppet - it’s better to build alignment.
Deadlines are often arbitrary and are created out of thin air.
Meeting marathons when many meetings result in another - many things can be solved asynchronously or ignored.
The bullshit nose is what it takes to sense something is wrong, stop, and do what makes sense. You don’t let anyone, including yourself, derail from value creation.
2. Courage
Courage is the number one skill to be a bulletproof product manager.
Why do I say that? Because you've got to have the guts to act when almost everyone is following the flow.
One obvious fact is often ignored: You cannot achieve what only a few people reach by doing what most people do. You have to be different.
Some examples:
Most people will keep outdated backlog items instead of deleting them
Most people will get into discussions on how to implement frameworks correctly instead of figuring out what your situation needs
Most people will focus on roles & responsibilities instead of doing whatever it takes to get the job done
Most people will often say "yes" to avoid conflicts instead of saying "no" to remain focused on goals
Most people will limit themselves to the status quo instead of stepping back and reflecting on what works and what doesn't
If you want to be a bulletproof product manager, you cannot act like most people. You've got to have the courage to step out of your comfort zone.
It's about being comfortable with the uncomfortable.
3. Entrepreneurial Mindset
Everything is business.
Your job isn’t to make the feature better for the user.
Your job isn’t to identify customers’ pain points.
Your job is to uncover opportunities to create successful products, improve customers' lives, and collect business value.
You can only get your job done when you become an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, you:
Continuously assess the risk and reward ratio
Strive to uncover angles nobody is looking at
Quickly evaluates multiple business models for the same idea
Explore hundreds of angles on how to drive and collect value
Define experiments you can run now to test if your idea is worth any time
4. Care for Results
Many questions don’t matter, but people keep asking:
When’s the feature ready?
What’s the team velocity?
Can you add it to the backlog?
How long does it take to deliver this?
You will hear the above almost daily. None of these questions will help you uncover what drives value; they will only lead to nonsense conversations.
Better questions:
How’s the last delivered measure creating value?
How can we accelerate value creation?
What are the most promising opportunities we should pursue now?
What’s the investment and value ratio of the idea in question?
Everything you do should relate to outcome creation. If you don’t care for results, nobody will, and you will, without a doubt, fall prey to the backlog manager anti-pattern.
5. Ability to Let It Go
Some things won’t work.
Sometimes, you will wish you had not started a challenge.
Many times, you will get frustrated with people for different reasons.
All of that is part of the game. What’s important is to have the courage to let things go:
You don’t make a bad investment good by pouring more energy into it - let it go.
Some things will fail to meet your expected results - let them go.
Conflicts with people will happen, but you will need to keep a sustainable relationship to create valuable products - let problems in the past and move on.
Don’t let the past hold you back from a brighter future.
Learn from the past, and act today for a better tomorrow!
Whenever you’re ready, I can help you boost your career
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Love the bullshit nose!
Reading through the list of skils I do not see a lot ai could guarantee. Thank you for the article!