What makes a great product manager: a guide for top-performing teams

Being a product manager (PM) means wearing a dozen hats before noon. You’re the voice of the user, the go-to for cross-functional alignment, and the calm in the chaos when things inevitably go sideways. From shaping roadmaps to squashing bugs (and egos), PMs are the glue holding it all together.

But let’s be real—driving a product from idea to launch (and everything after) is no walk in the park. It takes a rare blend of empathy, strategy, and fire-fighting finesse. The best product managers don’t just juggle tasks—they bring order to the madness and rally teams around building things that actually solve user problems.

In this guide, we break down the 4 things great PMs do consistently—and the 5 essential skills they can’t live without. Whether you’re new to product management or a seasoned pro looking to sharpen your edge, there’s something here for you.

What does a product manager do?

A PM oversees a product through its entire lifecycle, shaping the product strategy and development. To do this, a good PM must strike a balance between building a business case, championing user needs, and communicating with the engineering team.

1. Define the product vision and roadmap

Product managers research the competitive landscape, customer needs, and development requirements to create a vision that articulates a product’s direction and aligns with the company’s business objectives. 

Then, PMs create a product roadmap that lays out a plan on how they’re going to bring this vision to life. The product roadmap aligns and inspires internal teams—and helps them get buy-in from executives.

It includes

• An argument for how the product helps the business achieve its goals 

• Required features for the product

• A step-by-step development plan with delivery dates and milestones

• Product success metrics 

2. Understand what users want and need

Product managers are dedicated to understanding their customers, so they can create a product and develop new features to solve their problems. Not content to simply guess what they might want in a product, PMs dive deep into quantitative and qualitative data by

• Gathering product feedback from surveys and on-site feedback widgets

• Interviewing users or conducting focus groups

• Watching session recordings to understand how users interact with their product

• Reading customer reviews online

• Analyzing support tickets

PMs use these inputs to understand customer pain points, learn how to improve the product, and tweak their strategy to develop a better user experience (UX). This helps boost customer satisfaction and product success in the marketplace.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Interviews tool to go beyond surface-level feedback and uncover the why behind your users’ needs. Schedule one-on-one interviews directly through the platform, and use flexible guides to dig into motivations, frustrations, and unmet needs—so you can shape features that truly resonate.

Use Contentsquare’s Interviews tool to get face time with real users and gain a deep understanding of their product needs

3. Prioritize product features

Product managers have to decide which features customers need and when to roll them out. This requires a rock-solid understanding of user needs, but it’s not quite as simple as fulfilling every request of customers or sales reps. 

PMs have to weigh which features

• Fit with the company’s strategic goals

• Align with the product’s vision

• Are technically feasible to develop

• Are viable based on conversations with sales, marketing, and legal teams 

• Provide the most delightful UX

• Offer the greatest trade-off of cost to return on investment (ROI)

Ideally, a product manager won’t decide how to prioritize features alone. Instead, they guide a team through a product prioritization framework like story mapping or the RICE scoring model, which gauges reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

🔥 Pro tip: don’t rely on gut instinct alone. Use a prioritization framework like RICE to guide your team—and be sure to layer in real user input to validate what actually matters. Use Contentsquare Surveys to launch a quick feature prioritization survey and get fast, focused feedback straight from your users. It’s like turning your hunches into hard data.

An example of a Contentsquare feature prioritization survey

4. Analyze and report

Excellent product managers go beyond following their gut instincts when making product changes. They keep a close eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) to

• Discover inefficiencies

• Track financial progress with metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

• Learn which features are most popular

• Gauge customer satisfaction with metrics like Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) 

• Report progress to stakeholders

If your product doesn’t meet its performance goals, it’s the PM’s job to make adjustments to the vision or plan. This is especially key for PMs leaning into a product-led growth (PLG) strategy, which focuses on having an optimum UX to delight users and generate sales through word of mouth.

💡 Pro tip: use a comprehensive experience intelligence platform like Contentsquare to easily gather and analyze UX data. With tools like Heatmaps to see what users engage with and ignore on your website and Surveys to let users weigh in on product features, you gain even more insights to supplement other analytics tools in your tech stack.

Zone-based heatmaps highlight areas of moderate to very high levels of user interaction

5 essential skills of a product manager

To carry out their daily tasks, a product manager needs to have a unique assortment of technical and soft skills—personal attributes that influence their work style and habits. The difference between a typical product manager and an outstanding one often comes down to these competencies.

1. User empathy

PMs are laser-focused on meeting user needs, so empathy for their experience is a must. Exceptional product managers look closely at user behavior, unpacking what it might convey (often before a user can even articulate their own needs). They genuinely care for their customers, and collect and analyze user feedback to drive empathy-driven design.

2. Communication

PMs have to be able to communicate clearly across functions. They use business talk with executives, tech-speak with devs, and popular metrics with sales and customer support teams. They know how to use language to motivate team members in daily or weekly meetings or via written communication. With all stakeholders, they convey the product narrative through creative storytelling and use their understanding of audience needs to articulate the product vision in a compelling way.

3. Flexibility

Agile product management is popular for a reason: it’s an iterative approach to software development that allows for flexibility in roadmapping and incorporating customer feedback. Whether or not a PM follows this methodology, adaptability is the name of the game in product management. PMs may have to change roll-out strategies in response to market shifts, or find ways around obstacles like software bugs that delay release dates. When faced with challenges, they find outside-the-box ways to achieve their product vision and goals.

4. Leadership 

PMs have a keen ability to delegate, empowering others to make decisions on their own to contribute to the product’s progress. They motivate the product team to ensure high morale and coordinate dependencies with other teams. Instead of maintaining a top-down mentality, an exceptional project manager leads from within the team. They’re always ready to jump in to secure approvals or write call-to-action (CTA) button copy to ensure a feature ships on time. 

5. Strategic and analytical thinking

A product manager excels at thinking strategically as they create high-level, big-picture plans for a launch and beyond. At the same time, they need analytical thinking skills—the ability to break down data to learn how to improve and optimize the product. While some people shine at one skill or the other, a stellar PM zooms in and out between the two effortlessly in their role.

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare Dashboards to keep one eye on the big picture and the other on the metrics that matter most. Whether you're tracking conversion trends or digging into specific user behaviors, the Dashboards capability helps you spot patterns, flag issues, and make smarter decisions—without getting lost in the noise.

The Contentsquare Dashboard surfaces the insights you need to spot trends, track impact, and move fast

Become an outstanding product manager 

With the right skills and competencies—and a capacity for creativity and curiosity—a product manager transforms from good to exceptional. They elevate the product team and help create a product that delights users. While a typical PM’s daily workflow consists of planning → launching → reporting → optimizing (in that order), an exceptional PM prioritizes their tasks differently. We’ve structured the rest of this guide to follow this hierarchy. Keep reading for more on how to become a successful product manager.

• Optimizing: how do great product managers improve and optimize what's already working? 

• Reporting: how do great product managers create insightful and actionable reports?

• Issue detection: how do great product managers spot bugs and UX issues and fix them?

• Planning: how do great product managers prioritize new initiatives to unlock more growth?

FAQs about product managers