As we look to the new year, Product and Ecommerce Leader, Brian Flanagan, shares the top skills required for product skills in 2025. This interview ...
As we look to the new year, Product and Ecommerce Leader, Brian Flanagan, shares the top skills required for product skills in 2025. This interview took place at our recent Product x Design event.
I think it's a combination of two things. One is good interpersonal soft skills to allow people to storytell, influence, and engage people in the process. For a long time, there’s been this idea of the "gods on high" who brought product, engineering, and design down from the ivory towers and presented them on a silver platter. That just doesn’t cut it as much as it used to.
We have a role - as I come from a product background, I’ll speak from that perspective - as Product Managers to bring the company along and help everybody understand that all the boats have to rise within the organisation. You see organisations that are very successful, and those are the ones with a culture built into the DNA of the organisation. They speak about things as stories and outcomes for their customers.
The second soft skill is having a customer-first perspective while also looking at things from a business perspective. So many organisations, particularly now with the drive to revenue and so on, aren’t looking at where they’re going. They’re not considering business value as they move forward. What you end up with is these "feature factories," where people just keep building feature after feature without thinking about how those things link together, how they drive value for the customer, or how they create value for the company.
That kind of approach has to stop. People need to think about how it’s okay to do lots of little projects, but only if there’s a goal in mind. Having that end goal is really critical.
Brian Flanagan is a transformational leader with extensive product management, business, ecommerce and technology innovation experience across travel, telecom, banking and consumer goods verticals. Leveraging this experience to build and motivate teams to conceive, invent and deliver integrated customer focused products that drive growth and profitability.
