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Practice of Product

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Attributes of a Product Manager

Sean Horgan
The following list of attributes reflects the expectations placed on Product Managers at many large organizations. These attributes are centered on a mid-level Product Manager (L5) but scale +/- 1 level pretty easily.
You can find a table version
which can be very useful for self-assessments and career planning.
At Verily we broke the PM job ladder into a set of categories based on those used by Google back in ~2016 and I extended it to include Entrepreneurship in 2019 to reflect the demands on PMs driven by startup nature of our business.
I organized the categories in this stack to highlight the distinct layers centered around leadership:
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In each section below I lay out the attributes for each category along with some references to public material I found useful.

Beyond attributes, it’s important to guide your actions by clear principles such as those laid out in .
A note on culture: this is a cornerstone and it’s what people in your company do when no one is looking. As Peter Drucker famously said, ”Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I don’t cover it here (yet) given how unique this can be for more companies but it’s high on my list.

General product references

, Marty Cagan
, Martin Eriksson
, Ian McAllister
. Ben Horowitz and David Weiden. Written in 1997. Lots of great themes but even the authors say that it is dated at this point. PMs are not the CEO of their product — that’s a catchy but misleading metaphor that has led to a lot of dysfunction in PM land over the years.
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