Being a successful product manager isn’t just about your technical skills or knowhow. In fact, it’s your soft skills—things like communication, time management, and even curiosity—that will allow you to flourish in this challenging and unpredictable career. This is why we had a themed session on Skillset to Mindset: Realizing Your Potential as a Product Manager.

There’s been a palpable shift in the product world over the past couple of years. It’s no longer enough to focus on our craft and on the growth our products can drive for our companies. There’s now a mandate to connect our work to our company’s business outcomes. But if you’re brand-new to the world of financial forecasting, what’s a troubled product manager to do?

You’ve probably heard the expression that product is a team sport (and maybe you’ve even said it yourself from time to time?). And while this is a useful analogy, it’s important to translate it into practical steps that guide your everyday work. What can you actually do to ensure you collaborate with others, both within product, design, and engineering as well as your cross-functional partners and leaders?

The concept of a product operating model—an overall set of rules that frames and guides how you go about your product work—is not new, but it’s been gaining attention over the past year, especially thanks to high-profile books like Product Operations by Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles and TRANSFORMED by Marty Cagan.

Exciting news from the product community in Hamburg: We’ve just wrapped the second annual Product at Heart conference, which took place on September 13, 2024. This year we returned to our home at Kampnagel, where over 750 curious product people from around the globe gathered for a day of curated programming and spontaneous conversations.

It’s easy to get stuck in the same patterns of thinking when we’re following a regular routine day after day. The idea behind the Product at Heart Leadership Forum is to give product leaders an opportunity to break away from the everyday; to share their successes, challenges, and frustrations with their peers in a safe space; and to gain some fresh perspectives and inspiration to bring back to their work.

Something magical happens when you put product people in the same room and allow them to share their successes and struggles. If you attended Product at Heart, you probably had the chance to observe this firsthand. The power of learning with and from peers is undeniable, which is why Knowledge Exchange for PMs was one of the themed sessions at Product at Heart.