We believe that product management is the most important function in a technology company. It's like an orchestra conductor: someone who can lead and inspire different teams (e.g. developers, designers, marketers) to work together towards a common goal — only if they all trust and follow the leader will they be able to produce beautiful music (well… hopefully).

Here are my top 7 things one should learn about what it takes to become a great B2B SaaS Product Manager:

1. Project Management Skills: Prioritizing tasks and communicating status updates proactively with key stakeholders such as the CEO / leadership team. Great PMs know how to break up big projects into smaller ones and cascade these down into their own backlogs. They create actionable tasks for teams to complete and track these in project management tools, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

2. Technical Product/Market Understanding: Product Managers should be knowledgeable about what their current user base looks like (e.g. type of users, how many are free vs paying users). More importantly, they should also have an understanding of where their product or service can expand into next to capture additional market share. This includes identifying new feature opportunities as well as knowing when to cut back on "nice-to-have" features that do not impact the core experience for both new and existing users.

3. Ability To Craft A Compelling Business Case For Why A Feature Should Be Built Or Why A Competitor Feature Should Be Acquired: PMs should also be able to articulate why a feature is needed and would help accomplish a specific business objective. This requires having a thorough understanding of the current state, as well as what will need to change if a new product goal is being pursued.

4. Ability To Craft Compelling Product Experiences: At the highest level, PMs should have an ability to visualize how their product or service will look from a user's perspective and craft that into something customers will love. In practice, this means building features that are not only useful for your customers but also fit within your company's overall messaging strategy which can oftentimes be quite complicated at scale with many different stakeholders involved. Your target audience is a key component, but it's just one of the many pieces to consider when building a product from scratch.

5. Business Acumen: If you have only been exposed to product management through consumer-facing startups where growth and virality are top priorities, this attribute may come as a shock for some PMs since revenue isn't necessarily king in those environments. After all, your startup could be successful by simply not going out of business! However, at enterprise companies, your decisions will need to be justified in part by how they help grow the company's bottom line over time. This means that understanding the financial impact of any decision you make will play a critical role in whether or not that decision gains approval from stakeholders with budgetary authority.

In the early days of a startup, this perspective may not matter as much since most companies are pre-revenue and thus have no direct control over their revenue. However, once the company begins scaling its user base and is trying to monetize those users effectively, knowing how your decisions will affect things like LTV or churn will be critical for making decisions that increase revenue. In the words of CEO Andrew Chen, " A PM's success should ultimately be measured by how well they contribute to company metrics ."

In addition to understanding financials at a high level, you'll also need to understand which specific numbers indicate healthy growth and retention. While these metrics can vary from business-to-business, there are a handful of important numbers that most companies monitor.
According to Andrew Chen , you should be paying attention to the following metrics:

⦿ Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a measure of how many individual users interact with your product in a 30-day period. It's important for understanding the overall size of your market and user base, and can provide valuable insight into which features or geographies need more attention.

⦿ Daily Active Users (DAU) measures, unsurprisingly, daily activity by your MAU base. This metric gives teams insight about the intensity of use around their product, providing them information about areas they might want to encourage growth. For example, DAU might tell you whether are using just one key feature frequently while ignoring other areas of your product. It can also help you understand what times and geographies need more attention by providing information about activity patterns around the world.

⦿ Monthly Active Users (MAU) is simply the sum total of your daily active users over a 30-day period. MAU gives insight into overall product stickiness and usage levels, which might be important for understanding long term contract value or how well your sales and marketing efforts are working in aggregate across various geographies and time zones.

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