Product Manager is the Mini-CEO of his Product.

What are the roles of a Product Manager and what does he do?

1. Understand the business problem
1. Product Manager is not concerned too much on the solution but keeps in mind the problem always.
2. Understand the User
1. Interview the end-users
2. Survey the potential users to understand the user needs
3. Collect the data and perform the analysis
4. Brainstorming
3. Study the Market
1. Why user should use your system not a competitor product.
2. The Product Manager performs market research to understand customer demands, competitive landscape, future trends, and product requirements.
3. The Product Manager will drive innovative and engineering-focused delivery into the self-service cloud offerings being brought to market.
4. Create the Strategy
1. Understands the company goals and business model to make sure the products building is with in the overall strategy and positioning.
2. The Product Manager provides content to create strategic business plans drives product management processes to optimize product definition and maximizes the value of products to Virtustream's business and profitability.
5. Work with Development Team
1. What we want to achieve by this product
2.  The Product Manager is a key member of a multidisciplinary team to jointly develop products that are focused on delivering robust, reliable, and marketable products. 
3. Product Manager will have to work effectively in SDLC software development methodology and lead the entire team to successfully deliver product goals.
4. Identify the design of the solution
1.  Develop the wireframes to visualize the design
2. Create the prototype to makes sure the system provides a simple and intuitive solution and not adding more work to users.
3. Review with the user and perform the usability testing
4. Build the product, work with the scrum team to review the progress and provide constructive feedbacks
5. His goal is to make sure everyone in the team rallying behind the goal. Be an advocate of the user.
6. Make sure to ship the product's own time. This is the key KPI of Product Manager and the only way to evaluate the progress.
7. Define the user experience for the product.
6. Analytics and growth
1.  Going and selling the product.
2. Look at the performance of the product.
7. User Experience Design
1. Pays special attention to the end-user experience.
8. Marketing
1. Works with the marketing team to formulate the marketing strategy, release notes and other communications
2. The Product Manager formulates tactics to support the growth associated with our products and understand the competitive ecosystem inclusive of products, services, and cloud providers.
3. The Product Manager creates "first, best content" which describes and communicates product vision and product direction for customers, analysts, and internal Virtustream audiences.
4. Product Manager will use customer & market research, customer and user feedback, customer usage and competitive analysis to identify new product opportunities and enhancements

What are the skills the Product Manager requires?

The product manager needs both hard and soft skills to rally the entire team behind you to achieve the product goal.

1. Hard skills
1. Problem-solving attitude. It's difficult to team but easy to practice. Think of the big solution.
2.  Passion for technology. No need to be a great coder. But you need to understand different technology, how apps communicate etc.
3. Deep understanding of the user. You are not building the app for you or your mom or friends. When you are working on B2B app, you need to really understand the user.
4. An Eye for Design. What continues a good way to solve a problem and what’s a bad way to resolve a problem. If you understand that, well for the product.
5.  Business Perspective. Has a strong business sense. It should add value and bring revenue to the company. It brings money and adds to companies' P&L.
6. Analytics Skills. Product used by millions of people so understand why the user is using your product.
2. Soft skills
1.  Leading without having authority. He works with 20-30 people, where they don’t report to the PM directly. All the bad stuff will come against PM whereas goodwill goes to the development team, so you need to ready to accept that and live with that. Through your vision, clarity, and expectation of the user, you need to rally the team towards the goal. It’s tough but you need to motivate them and keep motivated.
2. Teamwork. Strongly communicate with the team, since you are working with many people other will have a lot of ideas and which is good and bad. While you respect other's idea you need to rally the team towards the goal.
3. Ability to take strong feedback. Always users will not be satisfied with the product, they want better. Everyone in the company will have different opinions and they feel PM doesn’t know. You take all feedbacks positives. Don’t take it personally and see what can be taken from feedbacks and what can be taken into the product.
4.  Prioritization. You have 50 ideas, some of them are yours and some of them coming from other stakeholders. But understand what the user wants and prioritize those. Make sure you are funneling the right requirements for the product backlog.

What do the organizations expect from the Product Manager role?

The organizations qualify the candidates based on his problem-solving, analytics, leadership, communication, and feature prioritization skills.

1. Problem-solving
1.  Pick up any of the favorite application of yours and find out the enhancement that could be done to increase the market demand and adaptability.
2. Develop a new product by doing greenfield development.
1.  Clarity of the problem context is an important factor
2. Create a list of assumptions about user
3. You need to think of big problems and solutions
2. Analytics
1. A clear understanding of how to do analytics about the problem and solution. For example, if you build the analytics product you need to identify the market size of the Analytics tools for healthcare in North America.
3.  Leadership
1. You need to have the ability to handle situations where you had issues with your team members
4. Communication and teamwork
1. Written and Verbal
2. Be a team member and roll your sleeves when needed
5. Prioritization
1. Feature Roadmap Prioritization and Grooming - Features that most needed for each stage of the development
2. MoSCoW analysis
3. Usability analysis and feasibility study
6. Financial management experience
1. A good product manager should have experience in Estimating, Budgeting, Pricing, Risk assessment

How does the Product Manager validate the product feasibility from the market?

1. Macro Analysis from Google - How large is the market? Who are your potential competitors? Are you differentiated enough? Google will answer all those questions for you
2. Customer Validation Interviews to Get Commitment - This is the economical and fastest thing to do when a competitive the value proposition has been crafted based on customer insights, we want to get an understanding of whether it addresses customers’ pain points and does it better than existing solutions by other vendors. It will also help validate the early adopter target segment identified.
3. Customer Discovery Interviews with Mock-Ups or Storyboards - Instead of running an interview in the form of a simple chat, you can spend more time to prepare a storyboard representing the scenario, and then use it to take the customer through the journey of how they complete the process.
4.  Landing Page and Advertising Campaign - This a classic way to test a new business idea in a quick and cheap way. You just must buy a domain, put a landing page live showing off the value proposition, and run advertising campaigns to drive traffic. Then you measure the conversion rate and you tweak either the customer targeted, the channel/message used for driving traffic or the proposition until you get a decent conversion rate.
5. Customer Validation Interviews with a Working Prototype - From this test onward, we start dealing with real products. So, no more sketches on paper, scrappy prototypes or promises, here we test the real stuff. With all the cash and time investment that follow.
6. Sell Actual MVP In Test Markets - These last two tests are the most resource-intensive ones, and they require founders to build the actual product and launch it on the market. This means that a potentially considerable amount of cash is going to be invested. The concept of a Minimum Viable Product is one of the key principles of the Lean Start-up methodology. It dictates to build an actual product to get customers commitment with several features reduced to a minimum.

Refer to for more product validation details:- https://studiozao.com/how-to-select-a-test-to-get-market-validation-for-a-business-idea/