What hard skills are must haves to be a Product leader? What are nice to haves?

The hard skills that come to mind for me are:

1. Technical - This is going to vary depending on the type of career you want to have and the company you want to work for. Generally, it is important for you to have an understanding of technical development principles and vocabulary. You want to be a strong partner to your peers and competitively, this will put you ahead of others. 

2. Analytical - Data is an important part of the product management journey. Someone said "If you care about it, measure it" and its very true. Data is critical to helping you understand how to build your roadmap, see your threats and opportunities and competitive performance. You will want to feel verse in the tools that help you measure and what they are telling you. 

3. Business skills - As a PM, you have to understand the product AND the business behind it. You need to speak to revenue and profit, budgeting, forecasting, etc. The ability to have these conversations with company leaders is critical.

4. Industry knowledge - When working on product, you need to understand the landscape in which you are competing. You are tracking key market trends for your project and constnatly reporting on that. 

5. Strategic Thinking - You need to be able to make and anticipate paths based on your industry knowledge and business understanding. You'll have to consider company goals and determine what is the best way to get there.

6. Ruthless Prioritization + Decision Making - In product, you will always have too many options. You will have to pick a path and fairly quickly. You will need to understand what things get you to goal quickest. 

Every product leader is different but I'd say there are generally two primary flavors: 1) amazing executors who work with strong visionaries or 2) strong visionaries who work with amazing executors. Having awareness about your superpower and finding a company to complement your strengths is critical to being successful. No matter what your superpower is, there are some basic hard skills that are important:

• an understanding of your market and market dynamics

• user research & customer interaction skills

• a design or user experience sense and the ability to provide meaningful feedback on designs

• technical depth and the ability to chart a path in partnership with engineering

• data analysis and the ability to set meaningful measurable goals

• strong written, visual and verbal communication

• financial acumen and the ability to make a basic financial model

• the ability to collaborate with legal to ensure that you're evolving the legal agreements to sell your software

• basic understanding of the tools of the trade such as Figma, Jira, GSuite, BI, Zoom, Salesforce, etc.

If anyone has gotten close to a complete list of must-have items for product leaders it is Amazon with their Leadership Principles (see https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles).  These represent a list of 16 principles that cover a wide area of areas including communication, strategic thinking, data analysis, research, organizational management, and more.

Any product leader (or product management professional) will find it challenging to be successful at all those principles, but they are a great list to aspire to achieve excellence across.

In terms of what are nice-to-haves, in many cases this will depend upon your organization and what you are expected to be responsible or accountable for.  For the most senior leaders, such as a Chief Product Officer or VP Products, these may come in as must haves but for less-senior product leadership roles or in larger organizations these may be carried by other functions within product teams such as product marketing, product operations, finance, legal or user experience teams:

1. Financial Acumen, in particular understanding the financial metrics and budgets to optimize product costs and profitability.

2. Sales and Marketing Strategies to maximize the messaging, positioning, pricing and promotion of the product.

3. UX/UI Design Understanding: Knowledge of user experience and user interface design principles to create user-friendly products.

4. Legal and Compliance Knowledge, including the ability to understand the potential impact of industry and governmental regulations and standards requirements on the product and the business.

5. Vendor and Partner Management, including negotiating favorable terms with vendors and partners to achieve favorable outcomes.