What I Actually Taught When I Mentored Product Managers

The most important skill a PM can have isn’t prioritization. It’s not stakeholder management. It’s not even knowing how to write a good PRD.

It’s knowing how to listen. Really listen.

I don’t mean being polite in meetings. I mean having a strong internal filter that processes everything coming in, separates signal from noise, and knows when to go deeper and when to move on. Most PMs hear a lot. Fewer know what to do with what they hear.

That’s where I always started when mentoring someone new to product.

The highway mental model

I think about a PM’s relationship with information like driving on a highway.

You see every sign. You read every exit. You don’t take them all, but you know they’re there. When the time comes and you need that exit, you don’t have to search for it. You already know where it is.

Trends work the same way. You don’t have to use every framework, adopt every new tool, or follow every methodology the moment it appears. But you need to know it exists. You need to understand it well enough that when it becomes relevant, you can move toward it immediately rather than starting from scratch.

The PMs who fall behind aren’t the ones who ignore trends. They’re the ones who discover them too late, when everyone else has already been on that road for a year.

What I taught at Huawei

When I joined Huawei Turkey, there was no product manager in the team. I was the first.

Before I could build anything, I had to understand the problem. So I listened, ran discovery, and then did something that turned out to be more powerful than I expected: I prototyped what I was hearing. Not a polished product, a rough visual representation of the problem and a possible direction.

When I presented that prototype to leadership, the conversation changed entirely. Instead of describing a problem abstractly, I was showing it. Leadership could react, challenge, and refine. The feedback became specific and useful rather than general and vague. We got our go-ahead.

But what happened next shaped how I think about mentoring.

Other teams saw what the product process looked like and wanted to understand it. So I started running workshops. Not lectures, workshops. The difference matters. I didn’t stand up and explain product management theory. I asked people to bring their own problems.

They came with real challenges from their own domains. We worked through them together using product thinking: how do you frame the problem, how do you validate your assumptions, how do you decide what to do next. They left with methods they could actually apply, not slides they’d forget.

Then they went back to their teams and tried it. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. They brought the feedback to the next session. We iterated.

That feedback loop, bringing real problems, working through them together, applying the methods, reporting back, is what turned a workshop series into actual capability building. Leadership noticed. The program expanded. Eventually I received the Huawei Product Champion award for the impact on product talent development across the organization.

What good PM mentoring actually looks like

Most PM mentoring focuses on the tools. How to write user stories, how to run a sprint, how to use Jira. Those things matter but they’re the surface.

What I focused on was the thinking underneath.

Don’t just create Jira tickets. Understand the full product lifecycle. Know the difference between discovery and delivery. Build a routine that lets you do both well without dropping either.

Learn to delegate. Not because you can’t do everything, but because your job is to evaluate outcomes, not to produce every output. A PM who tries to do everything becomes a bottleneck. A PM who knows what to delegate and how to assess results becomes a multiplier.

Stay informed. Being aware of what’s happening in the product world, new frameworks, new tools, new ways of thinking, is one of the most underrated skills in the role. You don’t have to use everything. But you have to know it exists.

And above all, listen well. Collect the right information, strengthen it with data, interpret it accurately, and communicate it clearly. That chain, from listening to communicating, is where most product decisions actually get made or lost.

What changes when this works

The PMs I mentored at Huawei didn’t just learn a process. They started thinking differently about their own work. They started asking better questions. They started bringing better problems.

That’s the sign that mentoring has actually worked. Not when someone can follow a framework correctly, but when they’ve internalized a way of thinking and started applying it in ways you didn’t teach them.

That’s what I was trying to build. And mostly, it worked.