[Roelven]

Head of PM here. I lead 3 PMs in my current position at Styla.com and have taught product management at General Assembly courses.

I myself come from a self-taught programmer background and found myself questioning the product strategy or design decisions towards managers until I was offered a PM position. I do find the technical background enables me to level with devs quite easily but I don't think it's a requirement. A pattern that has been working very well at SoundCloud is that we liked to transition customer support people into a PM role.

Important feats or skills I additionally look for in good PMs are:

- be a users advocate. Has to be good at putting themselves into the users' position and transfer that perspective to the team.

- has to be really good at email. Org/management/soft skills aside, the most powerful tool of a PM is email.

- eager to learn and apply those learnings quickly.

- be comfortable with numbers but be skeptical at the same time. Data is important but be wary of bias.