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How can I learn to be a good Product Manager?

Product management is a skill you learn and improve through practice. The articles and books cited in the other answers are great for gaining perspective, but being a good product manager boils down to a few core practices.

1. Be aware.  This applies to everything: the product, your team, yourself. It's easy to get caught up with the details of a project and miss the big picture. It's also easy to get caught up in the routine you've established for you and your team and not realizing it's not working. Take a step back and observe your assumptions, your existing practices, and your performance; you'll be surprised what you'll realize. Some questions to ask:

• Is the product we're building solving the correct problem? Is it solving the problem correctly?
• How does this decision play out in the long term?
• What are the unintended consequences?
• How is the team doing? Are you optimizing too much for progress vs. team well-being?
• What areas do you need to develop to be a better leader?

2. Be adaptable.  In addition to being aware, you need to adapt to the new information. Products evolve, prototypes fail, and people's needs change. If the product isn't solving the right problem, change course. If a meeting is no longer productive, cancel it. If you need more help, ask. Understand sunk cost and do what it takes to move the product in the right direction.

3. Be proactive.  I once heard an analogy that product management is like filling in the white space between the different roles. I think it's a really important attitude to have. You are the owner. Either do it or delegate it. If you don't, no one else will. Product managers are in the service industry; your role is to serve the teams, and no task is too menial or trivial.

4. Understand the core problems.  A lot of people think that product management is about "having good ideas" or "adding features." Breaking down the problem correctly will go much further. If you dig deep and understand why people aren't clicking the button, you'll understand why the product is not working the way you intended, and it will probably lead to a more obvious solution that solves the problem in the correct way.

Ideas like "making the button bigger" may solve the symptom, but they don't address the deeper issues. To do this well, I think it helps to have thought about psychology, ecosystems, and designing studies in the social sciences (random, I know, it does help).  Also, keep learning through your peers, books, podcasts, TED talks, Quora, whatever. One of my favorite podcasts is This American Life; it helps me see problems from a completely different perspective.

5. Learn to balance.  When you're making decisions, you're actually making tradeoffs. Every feature has its costs. Identify the dimensions that matter most to the project (e.g. simplicity, time, aesthetics, functionality, use case A, use case B), assign rough utility functions to each dimension, and figure out how much you want to move each slider. Deciding how much you value each dimension will lead naturally to the right decision. Balancing not only applies to product features, but also to making any other decision (hiring someone, deciding on a team structure, setting a company vision, etc...).

It's difficult to boil down product management into a short answer, but I'll give some starting points.

1. Study the basics
Read up on a few different books:

• The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank on tactics for getting to product / market fit and what to do after.
• Designing for the Social Web by Josh Porter on how to think about the user's journey as a lifecycle.
• Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman, Jr for the basics of UX design and wireframing.
• Agile Software Development with Scrum by Scwaber and Beedle for the canonical Scrum project management book. Things have evolved a bit since then but this is the original and will give you a solid foundation
  
• The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks was originally written in 1975 but it's still so true. Great lessons on project management and product development.
  

2. Build up a mental library of best practices and design patterns
On every site you visit, dissect it.

• What makes it great? What makes it awful?
• How did they design user registration? Required before interacting with the content? After?
• How does hipmunk display search results? How about kayak? What's the pros / cons?
• What are different e-commerce experiences? How is shopping for clothing different from electronics?

This way you can draw upon your mental library when developing your own products and make better choices.

3. Identify whether you are before or after product / market fit, and apply the right tactics.

Before product / market fit: You've identified a problem, a market of customers who you think have that problem, and a solution you think solves the problem. Your goal is to validate that those three things are true in the cheapest + fastest ways possible (this is what an MVP is).

After product / market fit: It's time to optimize to hit a goal. If the goal is to increase sales by 20%, what are the series of features you could implement that get you to that goal? Who are the stakeholders you need to get buy-in from?

4. Apprentice under a senior product manager

Practice makes perfect. Join a company that has a strong product management culture and apprentice with a senior product manager. It'll help you build up your mental library (see #2) and see best practices in action.

For those of you interested in getting some help with your learning, General Assembly offers a full-time Product Management Immersive and part-time Product Management course. The Immersive also includes a three month apprenticeship at a local tech company which should give great experience and a foot in the door to your first job as a new PM.

To preface my answer, I don't think the product manager role is meant for everyone. Just as it takes a special type of person to be a programmer or designer, it takes a particular type of person to thrive as a product manager. Here are some qualities that I think are necessary:

1. Vision. This largely consists of being able to understand the essence of emerging trends and applying them in new contexts. It is not necessarily conceiving new ideas, but it entails connecting existing ideas in new ways.
2. Understanding how different people think. A product manager must get deep in the heads of many types of people with diverse mindsets; engineers, designers, sales, customers, etc.. Working well with different roles and building products for real people takes a great deal of emotional intelligence.
3. Visual communication. A product manager must be talented at clearly communicating new concepts, either through user interfaces for customers or through diagrams communicating product strategy. Inventing new visual metaphors is inevitably necessary.
4. Logic. A product manager must be able to think very rigorously about the design of systems, the tactics of execution, and the analysis of performance.
5. Passion. A product manager must show great tenacity in pushing things through. You have to love what you're doing and live for seeing results.

Given those qualities, here are some things a product manager can do to grow:

1. Build a personal learning network. A product manager's personal learning network is their capacity to stay current on trends that are relevant to their domain. This consists of following thought leaders on Twitter, connecting with insightful publications, and now Quora is becoming an amazingly valuable learning tool. For more on this, see Howard Rheingold's article Twitter literacy (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/bl...) or George Siemens' book Knowing Knowledge.
2. Develop a powerful tool chest. Since learning fast is at the heart of product development, it is essential for a product manager to hone in on a set of tools that allow their thought process to advance rapidly. For example, I've recently starting leaning heavily upon usertesting.com as a way to efficiently introduce user feedback into the design process. There could be another question on what tools product managers use to get the job done, but other categories of tools would be project management software or user interface wire framing tools.
3. Study users constantly. A product manager must constantly remind their self how people really use products (e.g., through watching user testing). Otherwise one will develop conceptually fascinating products that no one will use.
4. Become a master in the art of iteration. The most concrete thing that a product manager has to do is define an iteration of development, execute, learn, and then define another iteration. This entails developing and relentlessly reevaluating a long term vision and distilling it into iterations that get to the essence of where that vision currently stands. One's ability to iterate effectively will determine their success. Product managers without vision will be stuck in the weeds of a never ending laundry list and visionaries who don't know how to define poignant iterations will be frustrated to see their ideas never realized. A product manager can improve their iteration mastery through AGILE training, but I believe it is a lifelong enterprise to continue growth on this front.

I know that lot has been captured in some of the great answers above. These are the things I have found from my own experience and from talking to other product managers:

• 'Mini-CEO' - Being a 'mini CEO' involves in my opinion the ownership of a value proposition and a product strategy and being able to make product critical decisions when required.
• Forward thinking - Like Billy suggested above, an important part of product management is being able to outline what a product should look like in a year, 2 or 3 years from now and to create your product strategy accordingly. It's so easy to get lost in the 'small', day-to-day issues and to lose track of the longer-term product vision. This forward thinking, concentrating on the big picture is a critical responsibility of the product manager.
• Customer and market understanding - As a product manager, I think it is very important to be in touch with what your (target) customers want (and be able to predict what they want) as well as with your wider marketplace. What trends are you seeing? What are your competitors doing? What is happening in other sectors that can be of use to your product? A constant monitoring of these kinds of things will help to evolve your product vision/strategy and your product decisions (see my point about being a 'Mini-CEO' above).
• Keep talking to peers or mentors - I always find it incredibly useful to talk to other businesses to see how they manage their products, learn about their best practices, etc. As Vinay suggested above, it is very valuable to have a number of mentors or peers that you talk to regularly about new developments or who you can use as a sounding board.

Finally, I would say that following people are good to follow for product management related issues and practices:

Marty Cagan - http://www.svpg.com/articles/

Cindy Alvarez - http://www.cindyalvarez.com/

Ellen Gottesdiener - http://ebgconsulting.com/about.php

Alex Osterwalder - http://alexosterwalder.com/

Eric Ries - http://www.startuplessonslearned...

Ian McAllister - Ian McAllister

Roman Pichler - http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/

A great essay written in 1996 by Ben Horowitz (from Andressen/Horowitz) when he worked at Netscape talked just about this.  It's called "Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager" and you can read the PDF here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=...

As I read through the many thoughtful responses provided here by some obviously experienced people, I'm left with the sense that they've shared a lot of the mechanics of product management, but have somehow missed the quality that animates and sustains the very best product managers I've ever known.

That quality is a deep compassion for the suffering of others.  Because the very best product managers understand the following: products that address real, pervasive and urgent problems are ultimately embraced, championed and sustained by the people they serve.  You can't buy that kind of marketing - it's given to you by the people you serve, willingly and enthusiastically.

If you are the person who can connect an organization to that pain, if you can rally the best interests of a business behind the desire to address that pain, then my friend, you will be a great product manager, not just a good one.

The constellation of skills you need to make the product happen will come - in time - because that's the only way to learn them: over time, through trial and error.  It's your scar tissue and ability to leverage your failures that makes you great, not your wins.  Remember, victory has many parents, failure only one.

So - to learn compassion, spend time talking to people about what bothers them.  Understand their ambitions, problems, frustrations.  Spend enough time doing this and you will not only find a special niche you and your organization can exploit, but you will become a better person and a better leader in the process.

And you will also become a great product manager.  Which, ultimately, will propel you out of product management altogether, but that's an answer to another question.