What are the most important soft and hard skills PMs can build to become successful in their field going forward?

1. Ability to communicate well - Someone told me early in my career: The single most important PM skill he looks for when hiring a PM is communication. Communication is really a proxy for building trust, driving alignment, having healthy debates when there’s conflict and committing to a path forward. That’s all under the hood of good communication, and is instrumental in driving product teams forward.
2. Data driven mindset - relevant to qual as much as to quant. Ask yourself and teams the right questions. Become familiar with qualitative research tools, understand what your dashboards need to look like, and get your dashboards in place. Be empowered to make data-driven decisions.
3. Ruthlessly prioritize - every day you have more you want to do than you will have time to do it. That’s just the reality. Every human has 24 hours, and one can’t change that. Make sure you prioritize your team and the team's time and resources.

My top soft skills:

1. Storytelling: As PMs, we must communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely to a range of stakeholders, including developers, designers, executives, and customers. Personally, I spend a good chunk of time creating artifacts that align multiple stakeholders on the direction of my area. 
2. Natural curiosity: I never stop asking a why question. I don't assume others have asked this question or might have a better understanding of customer needs or architecture constraints. I'm always curious to understand conceptually how things work and why they are needed.
3. Team play: successful PMs should always start with strong working relationships. I empathize with each of my teammates and deeply care about their personal and professional lives. This pays good dividends allowing me to bounce ideas and ask why questions frequently.

My top hard skills:

1. UX design: great PMs are obsessed with perfecting their craft. During my time at Apple, I remember "Simplify. Simplify. Simplify" written on the wall to bring the best UX out of everyone who worked on a new feature.
2. Technical knowledge: While PMs are not expected to code, a solid technical background fosters productive debate with engineering teams. From my experience, presenting an ideal-world PRD often = 3-6+ months estimate. Deeply understanding technical constraints allows PMs to have a better sense of time vs. UX tradeoffs, thus shipping products to market faster. 
3. Data analysis: All PMs should be comfortable with data analysis to inform product decisions. This means gathering and analyzing usage data and market trends to inform product roadmap. 

Product management skills are a little tough to nail down, because unlike engineering or design, there is not one set of skills that work for all product managers. Product management needs can be different by industry, company, organization, teams, etc. However, there are 5 key skill categories that I have seen be consistent across most PM roles - product execution, customer insights, data-driven decision making, influencing others, product strategy.

At BILL we define these 5 key areas with sub-skills that are critical for each area:

• Product Execution

  • Ability to drive product execution to deliver high quality products to customers. Requires strong project management skills and a focus on partnership for eng planning, dependency mapping, and risk mitigation. Requires ability to manage execution through the product lifecycle from discovery, definition, and scoping, through execution, long range improvement and partnering with GTM, CX and others for effective launches.

• Customer Insights

  • Ability to discover, analyze, and translate customer insights (customers interviews, research, voice of the customer, customer data, etc); into actionable plans, establishing continuous customer feedback loops all the way through measuring customer satisfaction (qual) post launch.

• Data Driven Decision Making

  • Ability to design and execute roadmaps, experiments and decisions that map to and drive customer and business outcomes based on usage data and customer behavior using product analytics techniques. 

• Influencing Others

  • Ability to lead cross-functional development teams, manage stakeholder alignment and expectations, resolve conflicts and dependencies and collaborate effectively.

• Product Strategy

  • Ability to define goals and OKRs. Ability to conduct opportunity identification and sizing, market & competitive research, financial modeling, building business case for new features and products, identify and deliver business outcomes.

All of these areas include both hard and soft skills. However, influencing others and product execution have the highest focus area for soft skills as they require lots of storytelling, communication, and collaboration to be effective.