Why Product Managers Are Perfect For The Newsletter Revolution

Product managers are uniquely positioned and already have the skills to succeed in the creator economy. Here's why your skills as a product manager give you a natural advantage as a content creators.

Have you noticed how many newsletters are popping up in your inbox lately? 📪

It's not just your imagination. We're witnessing a massive shift in how content is created and consumed. The newsletter platform Substack has over 20 million monthly active subscribers (free and paid subs). This explosion represents a fundamental change in our digital landscape.

And guess who's perfectly positioned to ride this wave? Product managers.

That's right. As a product manager, you're already doing most of what successful newsletter writers do every single day. The skills that make you effective at managing products are the same ones that can make you a standout in the creator economy. Let’s see how! 👇

The Writing Machine Behind Every Product Manager

If you're a PM, I don't need to tell you this: you write. A lot. Every day feels like a constant stream of documentation, emails, presentations, and messages fine-tuned for different stakeholders.

Think about it:

🗒️ Product documentation that needs to be clear, compelling, and user-friendly

👤 User stories that articulate scenarios from the customer's perspective

📊 Reports and analyses that distill complex data into actionable insights

🗺️ Roadmaps that communicate vision and strategy to diverse audiences

💬 Slack/Teams messages, emails, and presentations tailored to executives, engineers, designers, customers, and even your manager.

Each of these outputs requires you to communicate complex ideas in digestible formats. You're already a content creation machine! You just haven't been calling it that.

The PM's Secret Superpower

Audience Understanding

The most successful newsletters have one thing in common: they deeply understand their audience. Sound familiar? It should because that's exactly what product managers do every day.

You spend your career understanding users' needs, pain points, and desires. You know how to:

• Segment audiences based on different needs and contexts

• Adjust your communication style for technical vs. non-technical stakeholders

• Craft messaging that resonates with specific user personas

• Balance aspirational features with practical realities

💡 The skill of understanding who you're communicating with and what they need, is the foundation of successful newsletter writing. While others struggle to find their audience, you've been training for this your entire career.

Visual Communication

The PM's Hidden Advantage

Newsletters aren't just about words, they're visual experiences as well. And as a product manager, you're already fluent in visual communication.

As product management Anant Dhume puts it:

"As a Product Manager, effective communication with user personas is paramount throughout the entire product lifecycle... visual artifacts enable swift communication, validation, and proves instrumental during discussions or workshops."

Think about all the visual tools you already use:

📊 Data visualizations that tell stories at a glance

🗺️ Product roadmaps that communicate priorities and timelines

📱 Wireframes and mockups that bring ideas to life

📈 Dashboards that track progress and performance

These visual communication skills translate perfectly to the newsletter format, where the most successful creators use a mix of text, images, and structure to keep readers engaged!

Frameworks You Already Use That Apply To Newsletters

Product managers live and breathe frameworks. You have frameworks for prioritization, for decision-making, for stakeholder management, and they all apply to newsletter writing.

For example:

1. User personas → Reader profiles

2. A/B testing → Newsletter headline testing

3. Feature prioritization → Content prioritization

4. Product discovery → Topic discovery

5. Success metrics → Newsletter engagement metrics

You already know how to define, measure, and iterate based on feedback, which is exactly what successful newsletter writers do. ✅

How To Leverage Your PM Skills For Newsletter Success

So how can you actually put these skills to work and start your own newsletter? Here's a practical approach:

1. Define Your Newsletter's "Product Strategy"

Just like you would for a product, start by asking:

• Who is my target audience?

• What problem am I solving for them?

• What's my unique value proposition?

• How will I measure success?

These are questions you answer every day as a PM, now just apply them to your newsletter concept!

💡 Parenthesis here, I didn't start a newsletter to answer these questions, but sought out these answers and refined my strategy along the way. This was incredibly helpful. If you're just starting out with this, I think you'll be better positioned early on.

2. Create a Content Roadmap

Use the same prioritization frameworks you use for feature development:

• What topics will deliver the most value to readers?

• What's my publishing cadence?

• How will I balance quick wins vs. deep dives?

• What themes will I explore over time?

💡 This has been incredibly helpful to me, I have a backlog of topics that are coming from:

• Trending topics in the industry

• Personal experiences at work

• Other writers POV

• Any inspirational thing that I feel it is worth to write about

• Etc.

3. Build Your Subscriber Acquisition Strategy

Channel your growth-focused PM skills:

• Where does my target audience already hang out?

• What acquisition channels make the most sense?

• How can I leverage my existing network?

• What metrics will I track to measure growth?

💡 I've experimented with my newsletter a lot.

For example, I decided early on to try Substack's paid feature long time ago. I noticed that the amount of subscribers was growing at a very slow pace and newcomers were having a hard time reading my old material (not that I'm proud of my early writings actually...), but there were people interested in getting to know me and how this newsletter has “evolved”.

So after setting a longer time period for the archives, new subscribers (even paid ones) started coming more often. Ironic, isn't it?

4. Gather and Apply Feedback

You wouldn't build a product without user feedback, so don't write a newsletter without reader feedback:

• Set up a simple feedback loop with early readers

• Track engagement metrics (open rates, click rates)

• Iterate on format and content based on what works

• Create a backlog of content ideas informed by feedback

💡 Always experiment and listen to your audience, I've made many adjustments not only to my writing but to the type of information that is useful to the audience and tweaking the settings of this newsletter.

The last example is the welcome email for each new subscriber, I turned that one to be more welcoming than leaving the default welcome email Substack, and I see how people interact with the shortcuts I left for them. It’s like guiding them from the beginning.

The Benefits Go Beyond Just Building An Audience

Creating a newsletter not only offers you a creative outlet, but can help you improve in your daily work.

By writing regularly about product management, you'll:

✅ Solidify your thinking on challenging product concepts

✅ Build your professional brand as a thought leader

✅ Connect with other product professionals outside your company

✅ Create new career opportunities through your expanded network

✅ Develop a deeper understanding of your own knowledge gaps

Many of the most respected voices in product management built their reputation through consistent writing and sharing of ideas publicly.

I have an article on how it made me better at my job, if you want to jump in here it is:

Maintaining a newsletter has not only refined a core set of indispensable product management skills, it has also accelerated my learning curve, equipping me with knowledge I wish I had known at the beginning of my career.

The Perfect Time To Start Is Now

With Substack reaching 5 million paid subscriptions this year and the number of newsletter readers continuing to grow worldwide, there's never been a better time for product people to start sharing their knowledge. 🧠

As

Jim Person

put it perfectly:

“Email is here to stay… Email gives you the power to truly own your audience, unlike social platforms and search engines.”

With newsletters, it's never been easier to grow your audience, create new income streams, build a deep connection with your readers, and establish a foundation for your personal or business brand.

The 2025 State of Newsletters report from Beehiiv summed it up well:

“In 2025, a shift is taking place worldwide: Artificial intelligence is on the rise, social media platforms are in flux, journalists and creators are going independent."

As a product manager, you're uniquely positioned to thrive in this new landscape. You already have the skills and all you need to do is start. If you want to learn more about Substack's numbers, check out this in-depth analysis I did for Substack. 📊

Final Thoughts

I know what you're thinking: "But I already write all day for my job. Why would I want to write more?"

The difference is ownership. When you write a newsletter, you're building something that belongs entirely to you, not your company. You're creating an asset that grows in value over time, establishes your voice in the industry, and opens doors you can't even imagine yet.

So while AI can help generate product documentation, it can't build your personal brand or share your unique perspective. That's something only you can do.

I'll close with a question:

If you started a newsletter tomorrow, what would be the one thing you could teach other product people that no one else could teach quite like you?

Drop your thoughts in the comments! 👇