What are the key skills required for a product manager?

Product management has been one of the hottest roles in technology for sometime now. Successful product managers are ambassadors of the product that they are carrying from conception through production and final launch. They must understand the market they are targeting with their new product and the competition it will face. They are also responsible for creating and executing a successful strategy that will ensure seamless and cost-effective delivery of their product through research and development. So for such a vital role, what are the key competencies required for one to be a successful product manager.

1. Basic Business Competencies You don’t need to have a degree in business or finance to be a product manager. But, you will need a fundamental understands of the basics of business and economics. For instance, you will need to know the difference between revenues, profits, operating cost etc. More importantly, you will need to understand budgeting and cash flow. An understanding of basic economics can also help in dealing with how to handle requests, plan launch dates or prepare forecasts.

2. Ruthless Prioritization Skills One of a product manager’s top responsibilities is to be a ruthless force for prioritization. This is critical to ensuring the engineers are always working on the most important tasks. Knowing how to prioritize, and how to respectfully turn down requests that could upset your product’s strategic priorities, is an extremely valuable skill.

3. Proficiency in Research and Analysis

A product roadmap strategy should be data driven, and not based on intuitions. In my conversation with product manager, almost all of them emphasize on the importance of data driven decision making. Intuition and gut feelings do play and important role, but most times they need to be backed by some positive data to prove the business hypothesis. Data can help alert product managers to opportunities or threats in the market. It can guide them to the right places to focus development resources, and it can even help them validate product and feature ideas before allocating resources into them. Gaining proficiency in metrics, analytics, and research definitely represents a hard skill every product manager should develop.

4. Knowledge of Development Principles One of the biggest questions is if a product manager need to have technical knowledge? I have discussed this more extensively in my other blog “Do Product managers need technical knowledge”. My personal preference is to have a basic understanding of how technology works. As the product owner its also important for the resource to know if the technical implementation of the product is feasible to be scaled later. You may not need to know how the write or read code, but basic fundamentals of how to build software could be very handy skill.

5. Strategic Thinking Strategic thinking begins with asking the right questions and then understanding the market needs and landscape. The data points collected during the process are finally sued to define the product roadmap. The product manager must be able to forecast how much time each stage of the production cycle will take, position their product to take advantage of market cycles, and formulate strategies to control costs and manage risks along the way.

6. Analytical Skills Analytics skills follow on the heels of strategic thinking. Analytical skills center around researching and analyzing the right data to make product decisions. This data driven skills helps the product manager predict product features that would help add value to the end users. This is a data-driven skill rather than acting on instinct or innate response. A product manager with solid analytical skills knows how to use data to crunch numbers and create solutions for business strategy, product development, and pricing outlook.