
…ctually delivering products to your users. You can be great at helping your team build cool things, figuring out the right products, or embodying the vision, but it only matters if you can ultimately help the team get to a point where you can ship it. Great product managers understand the very tricky balance between getting it right and getting it …
Doing this requires a deep understanding of your target users, what their challenges and issues are, and how your product should deliver the value and delight they are looking for. Great product managers listen to user feedback all the time — whether it’s from usability tests, meeting users in the field, reading support emails or tweets, or working with the people in your company who do all of those things on a daily basis. But the best ones assimilate this wealth of information into a vision for the product that helps th…
…urable, and that the hard questions about whether people are really using the product can be answered. Once a product ships, they are reading through that data voraciously and helping the team figure out what parts are working and what parts are not, and together quickly coming up with a plan for improvement and more testing.