The Most Important Skills for Product Managers are …
By Saeed Khan
Last week, I asked you (the readers), to answer the following questions –
What are the base skills, tools, knowledge etc. that are either necessary or VERY useful to have to be a great Product Manager?
And what’s typically missing that people should go out and learn?
There were a lot of great responses.Here’s a summary of what you said:
- Communicating with customers. Being able to understand how they use the product and what they need is crucial.
- Ability to talk to different audiences (from the high level discussion with the top management to very in-deep discussion with support)
- Presentation skills
- Understanding the technology behind the product
- Domain knowledge for their products
- Understanding development processes
- Understanding UI/UX processes and working with those team members
- Project management skills
- Leading by influence
- Market knowledge (current situation and what may happen on a short&long term, your market share, understanding of the competition)
- Market research techniques
- Customer vision (which are your customers, what reasons have they had when choosing your product, which are the competition’s customer, which is there profile, etc)
- Ability to create medium and long term strategy
- Enthusiasm and humor spirit
- Analytical thinking, logical thinking
So what do you think of this list? It’s not a bad list, but I’m surprised no one mentioned business skills and sales skills! Does that mean they are not important, or are not an issue with most PMs, or simply that they just weren’t mentioned?
Is there anything else missing? Are there tools or skills you’ve learned along the way that you’d recommend others learn about?
What would you say are the most important skills that most Product Managers (and their bosses) need to learn? i.e. that they don’t have today?
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