What it takes to be a successful product manager

What are the skills required to be a successful product manager

1.     Immense empathy for the user: You have to be obsessed with the way the your user is using your product and constantly thinking of how you can solve his problem and delight him.

2.     Prioritize, prioritize ,prioritize- The product is like a baby and you know you can improve it in so many fronts. But you know you can do only so much in the limited cost and time. Prioritisation and sticking by it will what will make or break a product and its team

3.     Juggling expectations – Your customer, your sales people, the CEO all will have different expectations with your product. Being the voice of your product and managing the expectations of stakeholders through communication will help you keep control of your product. 

4.     You have to love your own product and be its user – This product will occupy most part of your life so you have to love what you are making and understand its value. You are the tester, the storyteller, the user of your product hence you have to love it. To become a product manager of something you dont use is like having a pricky cactus poking your body.

5.     Knowing how to build it – This skill is not a necessity but a good to have. But knowing what goes into building a chair will help you know how to improvise it, which wood to use, what age the wood is . Similarly software product manager should know which other technology can be used to make it better - faster, scalable.

6.    Analytics know how – So you changed a feature and it brought down the app usage and you changed another and it brought the usage higher. You should be able to analyse the changes , conduct A/B tests and make a decision on the basis of that

7.    Celebrate small success – You are in the driver seat of a large team. You should be able to constantly motivate , drive and push the team towards the goal by communicating

8.    Be the Listener – Chances are the software engineer on your team or the designer or the QA person has already ideas on how to improve the product and where it will break . You have to make yourself a leader which is open to ideas and constantly host open forums where people can comment or raise concerns

9.    You are an Artist and a Mathematician – You are the painter who has the final output in his head something that initially no one can see, you paint its picture to those around you and communicate it using user stories, flow diagrams and whatever else it takes to keep everyone on the same page. When the painting is painted you turn into the mathematician who observes the user closely to see his interaction with the product and make the bets on the other improvements you need to launch.

10.  Project manage – Although there is a project manager always on your team it is extremely important for you to be onboard the timelines of the project because chances are you have to be answerable to the board for them.

11. Know how to work with the designer - If software engineers are the brain , the designer is the heart of the product. Chances are if you come from a engineering background it may become hard for you to work with designers but realising the difference in thinking that designers have and taking their input can take your product from average to excellent.
12. Be in a timecapsule - You have to be in the timecapsule. The product manager is present in three times. The past always measuring the success of the product he released, the present ensuring the product is on track for release and future always strategizing and thinking what to busld