Everyone knows the basics of product management – understand user needs, understand what business wants, build a hypothesis on what would work to solve user problems profitably, prioritize what you will build & plan your go-to-market strategy well. There are other topics, but these are critical.
The challenge of the field is that each of those elements requires practice. You can read a lot of theory, but unless you do it first-hand, you’ll have huge blind-spots.
The more I practice, the more I realize that a key responsibility of a product manager is to preempt fatal or costly decisions.
Every product manager makes bad decisions. The key is to identify which ones could lead to quagmires and try and prevent these, or have a mitigation plan in mind.
In my experience, I find exposure and experience are the best teachers. Smart product managers know there’s a reason it’s a discipline. You can’t read/write about it and expect to get better. You need to keep practising. Instinct building takes time, as does the skill of convincing others on why to not/take a particular path.