PM @ a mid-size startup (been one for 5 years). Skills: - Be able to sympathize with your users (and be able to translate their pain into actionable steps tha

PM @ a mid-size startup (been one for 5 years). Skills: - Be able to sympathize with your users (and be able to translate their pain into actionable steps that build toward your company's bigger goal) - Be a communicator. You need to be able to write help documents, update emails, epics, stories, etc. Verbally, you should be able (and want!) to get up in front of your company and evangelize the work you're doing. - Be a junior project manager. Even if you have project people in your company, you need to keep the trains running. Sometimes that means you've gotta be a dick to people too. - Demonstrate deep understanding of your product. You're going to have to make tradeoffs and compromises along the way and knowing the landscape of your product (both from the user's perspective and the technical perspective) helps you make better decisions. - Be able to prioritize. This one is tough to demonstrate, but good PMs know how to effectively take a long list of requirements or stories and prioritize them based on what will drive the most value - Be able to think big. It's easy to go for incremental wins, but you've really got to be able to take the long view of your product. Your customers, sales team, and engineers will all want to do things that aren't part of your product's vision and you've got to know that. Background: I was a history major in college. Almost did a PhD. I've always had an interest in coding -- taught myself Java, PHP, MySQL. When I finally got serious about having a career, I joined a company as a member of their marketing team. My 'programming' background made me the natural lead for talking to our tech team. Eventually, they changed my title to product manager and I was in.