What is the most brilliant product skill?

Sharing some reflections on this:

1. Brilliance at scale is not about building new things, it is about subtraction. As an org scales, the product becomes bloated with edge cases. In regulated spaces (like payments or lending), this complexity multiplies. The most brilliant PMs I have worked with are the ones who can deprecate legacy features and simplify architecture without breaking the core consumer experience.

2. Product is centered around managing stakeholder anxiety as much as technology. In early startup days, execution is everything But as you hit unicorn scale, product management becomes heavily dependent on aligning legal, risk, and compliance. The best minds do not treat these functions as blockers. They build an intuitive understanding of regulatory boundaries so they can design compliant flows from day zero.

3. Brilliance is knowing when to stop optimizing. PMs are naturally obsessed with moving metrics. But more critically, this also means that pure optimization hits a plateau on marginal value beyond a basic threshold. The brilliant ones realize that spending three months to optimize a conversion funnel by 0.5% is wasted effort compared to identifying a completely new distribution channel.

All of these considererd, how do we actively train for this kind of brilliance? Unlike traditional hard skills, this does not seem like a "read a book" framework. What would be the realistic timeline to build this intuition, at which career growth is driven by pure judgment rather than just execution? What are ways in which a standard PM can accelerate this learning curve (eg: shadowing senior leaders or spending time in risk / operations etc., to increase scope)?

PS: this post is not about basic execution skills. Anyone can write a PRD, this is for the nuanced judgment required at scale.