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Software Product Manager

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"I remember my uncle showing me how to play around with VB (Visual Basic) as a young child," says Amber Shah. "I'm sure I couldn't do anything useful but my family always nurtured that potential."

Shah has certainly done a lot since then to develop her potential. Shah has been a software project lead for NASA as well as project manager for a multi-million-dollar product package. Oh, and she's a mother and has a black belt in martial arts.

"Software project managers must have flexibility above all," says Shah. "Requirements change, technology doesn't cooperate, people leave the team. These things are part of the day-to-day of a project manager's life so it's important to be able to take roadblocks in stride."

Handling all those requirements isn't easy. Communication skills and people skills are a big part of a software manager's role. "The important thing is to stay in close contact with the programmers and the client," says Shah.

"If you can do this, you're golden, but that's easier said than done. It requires perseverance, since everyone is busy and distracted. It requires trust and mutual respect [so] that both sides will come to you with a problem.

"[As a project manager], I spent a lot of time listening to concerns the client had and then following up on them to make sure they got handled," says Shah.

"I spent a lot of time listening to concerns the programmers had... and then following up to make sure they were taken care of. That's why I said flexibility was so important. Whatever job needs to be done in order to move the project forward -- that's what the project manager needs to do."

Like Shah, Justin Grant had an interest in software beginning at an early age. He leads the product management team at Cantaloupe, a software company in San Francisco.

"I always played around with nerdy stuff when I was a kid," says Grant.

"I started programming BASIC when I was nine or so, and then kind of just kept with it, more as a hobby than anything, and then when I was in high school I ended up getting my first programming job, sort of in the way that some kids get work in construction in the summers or waiting tables or whatever. For me, I just loved software [but] when I went to college I didn't really expect to continue that, I just thought of it as a short-term, money-making thing."

Grant explored other possibilities, such as becoming an English teacher or an architect. However, after talking to people in those careers, he decided those roles weren't for him. He fell back into technology as a default, he says.

"That said, working with technology is one of the best things," says Grant. "It takes some aptitude and it takes a while... I spent years and years wasting lots of time learning my way around technology before it actually became something that I could make money at."

Grant was a software developer for a number of years before becoming a product manager. He says it was a great foundation for his current work. "I find it helpful to have been a software developer for a long time, because it gave me insight into what it takes to build stuff," says Grant.

Knowing how to build stuff isn't enough, however. You have to make sure you're building the right stuff. And that means having your finger on the pulse of what customers want and need.

"I think it's really important to have passion for serving customers," says Grant. "It's helpful to be able to distill customer input into concrete steps you need to do to [translate] what the customer wants to what you need to do. It's not always the same thing.

"A lot of times, people are really good... at internalizing what it is that the customer wants, but they can't really translate that into, 'Okay, Customer A asks for this, Customer B asks for this, C asks for this -- you know, we really need to build Feature D because that will help us in the long run and satisfy most of what all these people want,'" says Grant. "It's the ability to translate customer input into something that's actual."

Two personal qualities help software managers understand what customers need -- curiosity and empathy. So says John Turnbull, a former software product manager currently working as a systems consultant.

"The software manager needs curiosity," says Turnbull. "Knowing how something works is knowing how it doesn't work.

"He or she also needs complete empathy. You have to be the person no one would think of lying to, even if they are just lying about their emotional state. You will also need the courage to avoid telling your own lies to your clients and customers."

There's another quality that software product managers need -- pragmatism. That means having the ability to be practical and to see what's necessary to get the job done.

"I think it's helpful to have a real sense of pragmatism," says Grant. "The people that I see that don't do very well in this job are the people where everything has to be perfect [as opposed to], 'How do we do something that's good enough?' and then move on."