What are the five things you need to create a successful career as a Product Manager?

The role of a product manager involves various activities, such as researching, planning, prioritizing, forecasting, and others. To drive the strategy behind a product, they need to work with all stakeholders, colleagues, and customers.

For those of you seeking a career as a product manager, here are five tips to help you get started.

• Align product strategy with the organization's objective: Determine the metrics your organization uses to define success and how your product aligns with the organization's objectives. You need to familiarize yourself with the top priorities of the executive team and gather strong evidence to support any potential changes in strategy that you may suggest. Maintaining alignment is also important with the higher-ups to streamline your work process.


• Interaction with different customers: User acceptance testing and surveys help engage customers and prospects to figure out how they interact with your product in real life. While interacting with customers and prospects, you’ll also realize not all of your assumptions are incorrect. So it’s important to ask rather than just rely on imagination.


• Gather insights from sales and support teams: Sales and support teams have a higher frequency of customer interaction than you. They can help you with questions that seem too complex or require a lot of research and let you know what customers are thinking about the product. On a similar note, support teams can help you understand how users use your product, their queries, and their pain points.


• Hands-on experience with the product: Get a high-level understanding of your product. It's crucial to have practical knowledge of your product's functions, capabilities, and limitations. This will help you gain customer empathy and a better chance of analyzing and solving problems quickly.


• Research products other than direct competitors: Try to look for inspiration other than your direct competitors and figure out how other products address problems. You can try products in the market by using their free trials option.