What is a Great Product Manager ?

You have to be good at…

• Road mapping
• Prioritizing feature list (and Prioritizing decisions)
• Use of Engineering mandates wisely, since you have very few shots
• Calibrate your predictive skills and metric abilities
• Talk in different languages when talking to engineers, business people
• A good sense in understanding of the customer
• Understanding all of the features
• Understanding revenues & Profit & Loss(P&L key metric in PM performance)
• Understanding ALL the pieces

If you can be a product manager, you can acquire the experience of acting as a CEO. The skills gained in product roadmapping, prioritizing tasks, interoffice communications, customer understanding, and product marketing are absolute necessities for being an effective enterprise lead.

Being a product manager is a demanding and high profile job. Individuals should make sure they’re up to the challenge. Here’s why product management as CEO training makes sense:

Marrisa Mayer is Engineer turned Product Manager turned CEO

Good Product Managers

• Good product managers are extremely detail focused throughout the full product development lifecycle. You should be able to identify and resolve inconsistencies in features/applications you are defining and participate in the entire development process. Leading a quality product to release may require hundreds and hundreds of minor adjustments, clarification and decisions to get to that highly polished state of a truly great user experience.

• Good product managers command strong leadership of the build & release & feedback & iterate process. Putting a qualitative and quantitative feedback system in place that actively monitors all systems and uses signals to inform future decision, and is adaptable and willing to quickly change thinking & approach when data indicates the reality is contrary to a hypothesis.

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