From my personal perspective, product manager is the entrepreneur inside the company, he is the driver that drive the vision, strategy, design, and execution of product AND he is the responsible of the product success or frailer.
To achieve that he/she needs to be AWARE of everything related to the product and all the data, interviews, team organizing, studies , market and competitors analysis and more are just a tools to achieves a higher level of this awareness than can help him/her to prioritize and drive the product strategy to get succeed.
The coolest thing about that is he has to be in a continuous learning and researching process and problem solving process while partnering with all the teams members to deliver the best for your product.
I feel the product manger ultimately work in finding the balance between Business Needs and Users Needs in a smart way with partnership with the company teams.
In Simple Words ( Product Management is mixed from Awareness, Strategy & Communication).
As we are talking about Keys ... I personally believe that the Keys of success of any Startup or company can be summarized in 2 words ( Clear VISION & TEAM )
The good product manager, is the one who can mange the success of 2 main types of products:
Idea to live product ( The skill of building the and managing converting an idea to a success live product, which is usually the skill that early stage entrepreneurs and startup founders should have).
Live to future Product (keep the product moving forward,It's an important rule and usually founded in the large company and happens usually with the people who have several skills like user knowledge , Marketing , User Experience , Business.. etc)
The main difference here is mainly in the goals clarity, How ?
In the Idea to launch : The product manager (mostly here one of the founders) are focusing in exploring and discovering more than development and growing.
In the Launch to grow: The product manager (mostly here employee (Team member)) are focusing in growing and gaining more revenues , users markets .. etc more than exploring and discovering.
If a company has more than one product manager and all of them have equal skills, the main thing that differentiate the good product manager is the number of successful test and features that he do. (In A/B test his feature submit a high number of user usage or improved the KPIs)
And that requires a high lever of research and user understanding
Do what the users want not what they said
How:
look for how the new sign ups act -- Remember how apple removed the CD ( they asked their users to use adapters or cloud).
Studding the user behavior using the data.
Focus on new users and signups not the old one (Sometimes old users ignore the new changes because they just used to use the old UI or behavior and simply they just lazy to try or learn the new thing)
There are several things I see from my personal prescriptive that every product manager have to do, some product managers forget to do it:
Keep interact with the customers (on social media, to be as a devil advocate some time, and to go with the sales people to the filed).
Engage the team (Developers, Designers .... etc) with coming up with the new features, projects or problems that need to be solved.
Keep checking the other apps or solutions (even if they are not related to your product field) and try to explore the ideas that can fit and improve your product growth(Users, engagement, revenues... etc).
This is a strange thing but i find it cool, hahaha try to have a side talk with the team (all departments) to give them the feeling of comfortable speaking to you and telling you their feedback or comments.
Understand the product that he is managing (Market, Competitors,users, use cases ....).
Understanding the product development cycle ( Research , Action and launch).
Understand the main vision and KPIs that the company are working to achieve.
Understand the team ( personally and work scoop).
Know how to talk with the team: And this point has to sides 1) To be friendly, engaging and with a lot of positive vibes with the team members (they are finally the product manager partners to make the product got succeed.) 2) The second side is to be able to speak in each team member language ( Concepts, Terms, way of thinking...etc) so, when the PM speak with the enginering team, to be able to deliver and interact with what they says as well as with the Marketing, Sales, Customer Serves, UX/UI , Content , SEO, Social Media, Business, Finance, Legal and the top management ( the CEO, investors) and so on.
Writing the requirements and measuring and picking the right KPIs. (Clear requirements that covers all the teams needs, How to breakdown the big projects into small steps, following up with the teams and the progress of the ticket)
Knowing and learn how to use some product management related tools (like JIRA, Trello, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Tablue , Wire-framing tools .. etc)
Be clear and transparent with the team ( Transparency is the trust key in the product management role -- (told me by Ossamah Basaitah when I did my first ever change in the requirements while it is with the tech team - asked me to add comment that I changes that part and then told me that).
Do your full Research before pitching the idea (check the competitors, numbers, Market, use cases, expected impact and how to achieve it... etc) ---> told to me by Ramzi AL Quraini when I first time present an Idea to him and Ossamah. ||| Note: here it is going to be a very good practice if you consult each one that can be involved by implementing this idea
If we got back to the roots of the product manager from my point of view, he should know almost everything happens around the product that he is managing (Ex: Financially, User feedback, legally, Technology, UX/UI Marketing ... etc )
But for the sake of developing and having several products in the company the product management role popped up to manage everything related to a cretin function/functions or product.
So, The knowledge that each product manager should know divided into 2 main parts :
Horizontal knowledge.
Vertical Knowledge.
The Horizontal knowledge is mainly the base or the main things that each product manager supposed to have or know (like : communicating with the teams skills, the Teams member knowledge from a high level, product development cycle , prioritization and much more) and this type of knowledge starts as a huge learning part and become fewer along with the PM life (Like the funnels ) but it is like all the learning ... continuous process.
The Vertical Knowledge is mainly reflect the expedience of the PM in certain field (Like AI/ML Product manager, Payment product manager, API product manager, Technical Product Manager, UX product manager ... etc) OR ( E-Commerce product manager , Tourism product manager ... etc).
And here you have to remember that the company mindset can play a big role of defining what you need to do as product manager ( the startup companies are different than the SMEs and these are different than the global and enterprise companies).
Let's imagine this as a tree Product Management in the top ... Under this we can find Startups in a side and Enterprises in the other side (They are mostly different 2 worlds).
PMs in the Startups.. mostly have a wide horizontal knowledge ( like they are mostly have knowledge in Marketing, UX , UI , Data, DevOps, Finance, SEO, Team Management, Technology, Content, Customer Serves, Sales and So on) And this is the positive side of working in startup atmosphere BUT the negative side is you will usually as PM will not have the chance to dig deeper into one particular aria and have the full knowledge and information about it (You are a general product manager/ and Mini CEO). since you have to communicate with all teams to make your product got succeeded in the Market .... (They have a general knowledge more than( يعني بعرفوا بس مش زي المتخصصين) specific focused vertical knowledge).
PMs in the Enterprise.. Mostly present the opposite side of the Startups PMs, they are more focused on a participator aria or field in a big product more than having a general knowledge about all area and fields. The Positive side is the focus ... the detailed focused that gave you as PM the ability to know more details and Information about the product area / the certain or particular filed that you are more into it but PMs here (The Negative side) don't have that wide range of everything about the whole product and departments.
MVP helps us as PMs to have a quick testing and market analyses (Speed up the feedback from the users) and that helps us to know and build the road map or to decide if we want to keep the product a live, to kill it or to postpone launching it.
I will talk in more details but mainly:
Agile: when we have an unknown or not defined target or goal for the project/product (Something we want to analyze to improve with time) (A huge product is a good example of it) --> Defined and Clear Goal
Waterfall: When we have a well defined and known goal & target to do along with known & static time. (I think Jira tickets is a good example of it). --> Undefined and unclear Goal