People often say that anyone can become a product manager if they are willing to put in the effort. Becoming a successful product manager may not be especially difficult; becoming the product manager behind a successful product is much harder.
Effort matters, but genuine interest in the work matters just as much. Product management is not a profession that can be judged by a résumé alone. When hiring for the role, three commonly emphasized qualifications may matter far less than people assume.
Age is not the deciding factor
When people talk about age, they often mistake accumulated experience for potential. I once made a joking comparison while discussing China’s literary history: the generation associated with the 1980s and 1990s can be imagined as having transformed the culture of their own era, just as earlier generations shaped the literary world around 1917. A century can bring enormous changes, but age itself is still a poor measure of what someone can learn or create.
China’s internet industry had only been developing for a little more than a decade when this view was formed. Someone born in the 1990s could already have spent ten years using the internet, which meant that the gap in online experience between younger and older users was not necessarily as large as it appeared. People who grew up alongside the internet also tend to be comfortable with new technologies and unfamiliar products.
Experience can be accumulated, and knowledge can be learned. What cannot be reliably measured by age is whether someone has product thinking and a real interest in building products. Those qualities are more important than the number of years a candidate has been alive.
A degree does not tell the whole story
The internet industry has always been somewhat unusual in this respect. Many well-known figures in technology did not come from highly prestigious academic backgrounds, and a large number of people working in the industry do not have particularly advanced degrees.
A degree mainly reflects what someone accomplished in the past. Current ability says more about the present, while the capacity to learn points toward the future. Not having an impressive educational history does not mean that a person lacks curiosity, discipline, or the ability to keep learning.
For a product manager, the willingness to understand users, absorb unfamiliar information, and turn what has been learned into a workable product can be more valuable than the name of a school on a résumé.
Previous experience in the same vertical is not essential
The internet is made up of many vertical fields: video, social networking, e-commerce, real estate, and countless others. Experience in one of these areas can certainly be useful, but it should not automatically become a barrier to entry in another.
If a candidate can absorb information quickly and has strong learning ability, how decisive is prior experience in a particular vertical really? Products across different internet sectors often share fundamental similarities. They still need clear user problems, sensible functionality, effective interaction design, and a way to turn ideas into something people can use.
The same applies to job titles. In China, the idea of the product manager had only recently begun to take shape. Before that, similar responsibilities might have been described as website planning or given another title altogether. A candidate may lack experience with the exact title “product manager” while still having handled many of the underlying tasks. Sometimes it is not the experience that is missing, but only the label used to describe it.
My own background illustrates this point. I was born in the 1990s, had only a junior-high-school education, and previously worked in internet operations. I later moved into a mobile internet product manager role in the real-estate media industry, a field different from my earlier experience. I was not yet an outstanding product manager, but my abilities were sufficient for the position. That is why age, formal education, and experience in the exact same vertical should not be treated as absolute requirements.
What should employers look for instead?
None of this means that hiring a product manager should be casual. The role is important, and the work requires more than enthusiasm. At its core, product management means coming up with useful ideas and making them real. That ability is developed through practice.
For newcomers, the biggest shortage is often not experience with a specific product-management job. It is experience with the internet industry itself. Someone who has never understood how internet products work may struggle to focus on the details of a particular vertical, no matter how familiar that industry is from the outside.
A practical path is therefore to first understand the internet: how products are shaped, how users behave, how teams collaborate, and how ideas move from concept to implementation. Once that foundation exists, it becomes easier to learn the rules of a specific field.
When evaluating candidates, employers should pay close attention to product sense, interest in the work, learning ability, adaptability, and the capacity to turn thinking into action. Those qualities are harder to list on a résumé, but they are often more relevant than age, academic credentials, or a narrowly matched industry background.