User Modelling
As a Product Manager, you should be able to create personas with their name, picture, characteristics and objectives or goals. These personas should be as realistic as possible. Personas help you understand your end-consumer and what they want from your product, in more depth.
Visual Design Elements
Knowing and understanding basic visual design elements can help you communicate with the designer more effectively. You will start understanding the trade-offs in visual design and how the UX team makes its decisions. If you want to provide better feedback about visual design or just want to be taken seriously as a Product Manager, it is always better to discuss design in terms of the typography, hierarchy, legibility, alignment etc. instead of just saying that the text is too small or the shape of the logo does not look right.
A Product Manager has to know the overall architecture of a site or app and how information flows through the different pages or activities of the product. As a Product Manager, you should know these so that you can provide constructive and meaningful feedback to the UX team. You should be comfortable with wireframing, storyboarding and user journeys.
User Research/Product Validation
A great Product Manager is also a great customer advocate, who understands his customers and what they truly want, very well. He empathises with them and brings their pain points forward to solve them. Thus as a Product Manager, you would need great user research skills to generate insights for your product. You need to be good with A/B testing, usability testing, product demonstrations etc.
Functionality
It matters a lot for your customers to find your app functional, almost as much as the interaction design. When I talk about functionality, I mean operability here. How quickly does your app open, how much does it lag during peak performance, how smooth is the transition between screens etc. are questions you should be able to ask and then answer too for the sake of your customer.
Design Sense/Taste
The best Product Managers have impeccable design sense/taste. One does not need to be a great designer for that but the ability to recognise great design should be present.
How do you do that? Simple. Go through all sorts of design and try to understand what makes them good or bad. Thinking critically about design will eventually help you hone your skills and make the right design decisions.
The whole idea behind Product Managers understanding and being good with elementary design principles is that they can give meaningful feedback to the UX designer when it is needed. The feedback should be related to the end-user or the product. A Product Manager shall earn the respect of the UX designer only if and when his feedback helps better the product. A great Product Manager also would not micro-manage the UX team for the simple reason being that they know their job better than he does. He makes the work of the UX team easier by facilitating the process and understanding the customer’s needs thoroughly instead of being a bottleneck. A little respect from one side can earn the respect from the other side as well.
