Successful Product Manager Skills
Question: "I am a software engineer with six years of solid work experience. I have very strong technical skills. I also have an MBA degree from a good university. I am now interested in a product management position as part of growing my career and working more with customers. What other skills would I most require to be successful as a product manager?"
Product Manager is the title given to a job container which holds two or more roles. Product management is comprised of two disciplines, product planning and product marketing.
Accordingly, the cardinal roles in product management are those of a Product Planner and Product Marketer. This means that the skills that you would need depend on the level of dominance which either of these two roles would have in your job.
The skills that are required in order to be successful as a Product Planner are:
- Superb linguistics skills.
- Competency in crafting market requirements.
- Mastery of the market requirement's structure.
- Profound comprehension of customers' needs.
- Deep understanding of the product delivery process.
The skills that are required in order to be successful as a Product Marketer are:
- Superb planning and process skills.
- Competency in conceptualizing the abstract.
- Mastery of marketing techniques and tasks.
- Profound comprehension of psycho-social behaviors.
- Deep understanding of the marketing lifecycle.
For more information, please see the Blackblot Product Management Team Model and the Blackblot Product Definition Team Model. Also see the "PMTK Role Descriptions" template (PMTK Personnel Management section) in Blackblot's Product Manager's Toolkit® (PMTK).
These issues are explained in length in the Blackblot "Product Management Team Model" and the Blackblot "Product Definition Team Model" chapters in the PMTK Book.
