Digital Twin

The PM Bingo Card

If you’re a product manager, you know you’re the glue holding the team together. Every day you’re juggling tasks that draw on a wide range of skills—most of them centered around communication. Whether you’re translating between people from different backgrounds, listening deeply, or documenting decisions, everything requires the discipline to keep improving.

Below, I’ve listed the skills I find myself using daily as a product manager.

Product Management Skills

  • Pitch: Succinctly explain an idea.
  • Vision Management: Be ready at any moment to articulate the product vision, whether to external stakeholders or your own team.
  • Domain Expertise: Understand the market, competitors, and domain-specific knowledge to make informed, high-level decisions.
  • User Research: Even if you have a dedicated research team, you’ll need to grasp your users’ motivations, behaviors, and pain points—and know how to ask the right questions.
  • Metric Tracking: Identify a core metric for success, along with supporting metrics that drive improvement toward that goal.
  • Stakeholder Alignment: Resolve conflicts among stakeholders and help them understand why certain paths are chosen.
  • Roadmap Management: Balance competing interests and priorities while managing the product roadmap.
  • Story Writing: Write user stories that clearly communicate what needs to be built.
  • Backlog Refinement and Prioritization: Organize and rank stories by value, and collaborate with developers to refine them for clarity and feasibility.
  • Design Reviews: Facilitate efficient evaluation of design changes and ensure alignment with the product vision.
  • Internal Team Communications: Reduce friction within the team by smoothing over miscommunications and roadblocks.
  • Process Improvements: Continuously iterate on processes to better fit the team’s needs and the product’s goals.
  • Process Communication: Inform and educate everyone involved in the product about the processes being used.
  • Delegation: Know when (and how) to offload tasks, big or small.

Now What?

It’s not an easy job. You need to be flexible, focused, and constantly helping others prioritize and grow. Product management demands a level of emotional intelligence that many underestimate. You’ll find yourself empathizing with customers, developers, stakeholders, and coworkers—seeking to understand not just their words, but their intentions.

The good news? The more you practice these skills, the stronger they’ll get. By staying conscious of what you’re doing each day, you’ll start to notice patterns in your work.

To make the journey a little lighter, I created some Download the Product Manager Bingo Card (PDF) a fun way to spot those moments as they happen.

Enjoy!