Christine Itwaru writes about Servant Leadership for Product Managers:

Reflecting back, there’s one critical thing I didn’t recognize until I was in the thick of it. I realized those in product management — from product owner to chief product officer — are never individual contributors. Instead, they’re in a position to become true servant leaders.

I would only clarify one thing, and that is that PMs are, for the most part, never individual contributors only. We still do a lot of hands-on work, but I do agree with the larger point that we need to teach more general leadership skills in the role. Christine continues:

Several key principles belong to servant leadership and are critical to being good students and teachers, including empathy, persuasiveness, and generosity. We’re going to talk about how to be a servant leader in product. Let’s go into more detail on how these traits apply to your team, your people, your organization, and finally, your customers.

She shares some very good advice in the rest of the post.