How can I become an effective product manager?

There is a lot of great stuff in a lot of these answers. But for me the first and most important thing you can do is understand the customer - better than everyone else does... Then work out how you can build a shared understanding with your team and company of your customers.

Here is some excellent advise on what it takes to be a great PM from University of Penn Wharton School of Business http://www.academybridge.org/?video_listing=wharton-school-of-business-the-role-of-product-management-in-startups This video is curated by the author

Product Management deals with all the challenges over each stages of the Product Life Cycle starting from product planning and forecasting to production and marketing. It is important for any organization to integrate its people, data, processes, business units and their extended supply chain entities to manage the product throughout the Product Life Cycle. The Product Management consists of product development and product marketing, which are different but complementary functions, with the objective of maximizing sales revenue, market share, and profit margin of the product.To know more details about Product Management you can read my blog https://logistcisindustry.quora.com/Product-Management-Marketing-Strategies?srid=74Ww&share=c9d9f688

You should start with this free email course: http://gohighbrow.com/portfolio/intro-to-product-management/.In this course, you’ll learn what Product Management is, what it isn’t, and a few key tricks to get started in any area. The course provides jumping off points to go deeper in any topic as you round out your skills. Enjoy! :)

- Think in long terms and outside the box - Think as to how this wonderful product you create can be easily integrated with other new technologies, products in future (have good hooks or plug-in's) - There is a short period of time to market the product, so think from user perspective - Have a simple UI (people want good usable UI than a complex jazzy one) - Have good user guides and documentations (many good products miss this and hence becomes a problem when you are out on a sick leave or you quit) - Create a prototype and have a good critic review with your peers - QA the product yourself - Keep the product requirement documents simple and easily understandable (it is not coding or scripting)

Some important skills to have to be an effective PM are as follows1. Influence skills( Communication/Interpersonal/motivation skills)2.Decision making skills( Analytical/Strategic thinking)3.Business knowledge(Industry-market /competition /product/customer /technology)4.Vision (how the product will survive in the dynamic trends and patterns in the business and change management )  To be a successful PM in any industry it is very important to have the Business knowledge which is the only think according to me will change as par the change in the industry.So to answer your question, all 4 skills are important but skill 1,2 and 4 is same across all industries. Skill 3 is industry specific. So prepare on all 4 skills.

Never say NO to 1. learning something new = eg: managing a s/w product without a background knowledge in s/w . go  through Programming 101 2. getting your hands dirty  - eg: marketing not able to deliver an effective plan - dive in 3. ask someone a question - eg: in a startup your tech team is not able to figure something out, ask people outside These are just a few examples, I am sure every product manager goes through problems like these day in and day out.

A lot of it depends on the company you are working for. Make sure you understand the expectations from a product manager. It is different for different companies. Somewhere it is more of program management, other its more of Product marketing, others it is mixed of all. but if it is about managing the life cycle of the product Discovery-> design->implement->test->launch These are some of the steps I think will work for you. Try answering these questions a) understand the mission and vision of the company. b) What are the strategic goals of the BU that has been set for the year. c) what should you do with your product. What ever decisions you take should help the BU achieves those goals and the changes are in alignment of the mission n vision of company. To answer  What should you do ? a) understand the customer- his actions to achieve his goals/needs. b) prioritize those needs. I generally use a 2*2 (  important , easy ) and then discard non imp. stuff. c) Come up with solutions for each need. for each solution I do is prepare a pro vs con table and pick one of them. What you have now is a list of needs and solutions to those needs. d) Prioritize those needs in light of solutions. I generally use a ROI for it. ROI = Impact on BU goals/ ease to implement. This will be helpful in case you are missing deadlines. e) Make a release plan by making sure you get a sign off from all the stake holders - Marketing, sales, engg, legal. Hope this helps!! All the best for your new role.

As a product manager, the most critical thing is to understand your market and your users. So, if your users are engineers, you need to understand the groupings into which they fall. For example, IT developers, SaaS systems developers, Agile practitioners, and so on. You need to spend some time writing the kinds of applications that they write in the way that they write them. Working on your product's support and services teams works wonders.