I recently left my Product Manager role at Assembla to become the Chief Experience Officer.  I transfered responsibility for a lot of different decisions about the product, release schedules, teams interactions and development. To make the transition easier, I decided to write a small piece of skills that the next Product Manager should have to continue running our product successfully. I knew that if he was the right person, he would not read a long piece of text about "managing" nor he will take my advice too seriously.

So I started with the great blog post from Andy about Assembla's Tech Lead Checklist as my base and together, we figured out which 5 Skills we were looking to have the best Tech Lead in the world to run our product:

You should be a developer, and a good one. Try to always make you some time to be involved with the code. If you help developers with their code issues, they will be willing to help you with the release. If there is an urgent problem that you can fix faster, do it. Don't forget that you started in these business because you wanted to program computers.

Your main job is to resolve needs and roadblocks (not to make sure that people are following any methodology). You should care to keep everyone moving and working on important and small tasks. Balance load so that everyone is only working on one task at a time. You should be good splitting work into small pieces so that the tasks are easier to estimate, control, finish or postpone when needed.

Prioritize, that's all. Then, you just have to work on the most important tasks from your list (which will also be small ones if you did your homework). Find "minimum releasable features" and products. You should think features as products and always be releasing features you can sell, otherwise you are wasting everyone's time. After you release a new feature, market it and continue improving it with user's feedback. Learn to let data drive your development by always defining metrics for your problems and to prove your solutions. 

Aside:  If you follow these rules, you will avoid code refactoring.  You will only be doing refactoring when you need it for something new.  This is one of the ways that you will start to think differently from an pure engineer that is not thinking about product management.

Learn how to test people inside your team. Don't waste time with paper work, leave that for someone else. Document the "getting started" and learn to do "on boarding" to help new members get started. You are seeking for people that get things done, the rest is just accessories.

Be honest and helpful. Always remember you might be dealing with people from different cultures and countries so understand the communication problems instead of getting angry about them. Your goal is to remove the stress away from your team but still make them part of the decisions and success so that they are happy and challenged. The hardest challenge is not to build a great product, but to have a growing team of talented and motivated guys working on the same thing.

At the end, we took these ideas into a training program for our team members. We made some extra materials that best describe these skills and put them into practice. We will continue sharing it through our blog.