Tech Twitter will tell you that product management is the dream. Of course, the role sounds appealing from outside. Good pay, interesting problems and you don’t even need to know how to code (apparently). But most people get lost somewhere between reading the job description and actually understanding what the job demands.

At a recent conversation with Zikoko, expert product managers Florence Ogugbore, Ebube Ilo and Karen Ginigeme spoke with Peace Echeomuha on what it really takes to enter the product management industry. What came out of this discussion was an honest look at what product management actually requires, who it’s actually for and what the internet keeps getting wrong about the profession.

If you’re thinking about making the move, here’s what they had to say:

1. The Job is to Define A Product and Make It Work

The jokes about product managers are everywhere. They attend meetings. They create tickets on JIRA and they act like mini-CEOs who don’t build anything themselves. Ebube gave the clearest definition of what a product manager is there to do. They’re there to define the product and coordinate everything across the company to make it successful. The job description is value creation, value delivery, and value capture.

Karen compared it to parenting. A doctor’s job ends when the baby is safely delivered. That’s the project manager. However, the parents’ job is the child’s entire life. A product manager owns a product’s whole arc, not just the launch, so they collect feedback, watch growth and adjust constantly.

Florence put it more bluntly: “We’re here to define what you’re building, why you’re building it, and then collaborate on the how.” The engineering team isn’t there to take orders. The product manager is there to make sure the right questions are asked before anyone writes a single line of code.

2. You Need To Understand Engineers, Not Coding

On what’s overrated, Karen took a direct aim at the “learn how to code” crowd. She drew a line early in her career and decided she wasn’t going to be a technical product manager. That closed some doors and opened others. Her point was to know what you bring, build your career around that, and stop chasing every new tool that the algorithm throws at you.

Florence came from a technical background and hasn’t opened VS Code in years. She stressed that technical knowledge matters, but not in the way most people think. Your role exists to be the bridge between the people who build and the people who don’t understand what’s being built. That requires knowing what an API is, understanding what a database does and being able to explain both to a non-technical stakeholder without losing them. Her advice was to skip the coding course. Make friends with an engineer instead, and ask questions. The conversations you pick up informally will serve you as well as any certification.

3. If Coding Doesn’t Matter, What Skills Do?

Karen laid out three non-negotiables. The first is product discovery. This is the ability to find the right problem before you build anything. This means talking to customers, analysing data, and running research. It sounds obvious, but product managers who skip this end up building things nobody needs, with real company money.

The second is stakeholder management. Engineering wants to fix a bug, while operations wants efficiency. Your customers want something else entirely. Security flagged a breach. Everyone has a priority, and everyone thinks theirs is urgent. The product manager’s job is to hold all of that at once and make a call.

The third skill is communication. Karen was blunt about it. “If you can’t communicate the value of your product, I don’t know what you’re doing.” Storytelling is how you get buy-in, ship things and grow!

4. Product Management isn’t Unidirectional

Karen went from Chemical Engineering at UNILAG to building cross-border payment infrastructure at Visa in London. Florence co-manages ProductBuddies, a community for aspiring product managers. Ebube leads product at Rise, building tools for wealth management. Three different paths and specialisations, but the same core role.

What stood out was something Karen said almost in passing: stop following trends and start compounding skills. One year, it’s Web3. Next is no-code. Then AI. The product managers who survive those cycles are the ones who know their value and deliberately build on it.

So, Can You Actually Become a Product Manager?

Yes! The people we spoke to spent years getting wrong answers before they got the right ones. They changed industries, crossed borders, made friends with engineers and built things that didn’t work before they built things that did. That’s still the fastest path in. Figure out what problem you want to solve, and then work it out from there.

HERtitude 2026 is happening this April, and the theme is Main Character Energy. Get your tickets here: hertitude.zikoko.com