A product manager does many things. A product manager is like a CEO with all responsibilities except any of the authority.

Here's a list of skills that tech companies look for in product managers:

Technical Skills - Coding level knowledge. Some companies prefer software development as a prerequisite for product managers, Some don't. A good technical understanding will never hurt​.

​People Skills - Build communication and trust from your development team.

Research Skills

Management Skills

User-centricity

Data-driven Analytics - Use SQL, Excel, etc. to make data-driven decisions. Put product investments in the areas that will produce the best return on investment.

Strategic Thinking - Product go-to-market strategy. Game theory.

Good Design-sense - Markup/wireframe.

Experimentation Mindset - A/B testing.

You want to stand out when the competition is already there when entering a market. Think about three things:

1. Form your own personality for your identity: Clone a service offer by a guru won't make you a guru. You want to have the content come out your personality, yourself. Clients respond to what you like. It's too risky to be a me-too.
2. Find out from the customers to identify the REAL problems.
3. Create a single superpower to tackle one of most identified problem.

Once the company is positioned, then, move on to design irresistible products. 

​Getting traction is hard.  In the Bullseye Framework, the outer ring is what's possible, the middle ring is what's probably, the inner ring is what's working. Getting traction is finding the inner ring.

There are 19 channels you can use to gain traction. According to Law of Shitty Clickthrough, all marketing strategies eventually result in shitty clickthrough rates. However, some may works well, others not so well. It's hard to predict which channel will work the best. Therefore, do not only consider those channels you're comfortable with.

Scrum is a flexible agile development practice / method / framework built around some agile principles and on top of BDD. Scrum is one of many agile methods. Each SCRUM team is recommended to be not too big. In Scrum practice, features of products are written from the perspectives of end users. Features are known as user stories. The collection of user stories are called product backlog, which is a wish list to make end product great.

This post is a case study of my latest project. The resultant product is a pair of websites designed for new Bitcoin (a crypto-currency) users. I laid the ground work of inbound marketing in September (3 months ago) along with market research and planning. It is not until recently I started the design and development in anticipation of a full rollout planned in the coming year 2014. The websites, bitcoin-tw and bitcoin-en, are partially live and open to the public as of this writing.

The role of product manager is viewed as a business function to maximize ROI in the product, maximize market share, revenue, etc. for business success. Product managers work with engineering and across the business to make sure the software product is well built and defined. 

I personal think an entrepreneur should be a product manager in his soul with product manager skills.

What does a product manager do?