- Be able to sympathize with your users (and be able to translate their pain into actionable steps that build toward your company's bigger goal)
- Be a communicator. You need to be able to write help documents, update emails, epics, stories, etc. Verbally, you should be able (and want!) to get up in front of your company and evangelize the work you're doing.
- Be a junior project manager. Even if you have project people in your company, you need to keep the trains running. Sometimes that means you've gotta be a dick to people too.
- Demonstrate deep understanding of your product. You're going to have to make tradeoffs and compromises along the way and knowing the landscape of your product (both from the user's perspective and the technical perspective) helps you make better decisions.
- Be able to prioritize. This one is tough to demonstrate, but good PMs know how to effectively take a long list of requirements or stories and prioritize them based on what will drive the most value
- Be able to think big. It's easy to go for incremental wins, but you've really got to be able to take the long view of your product. Your customers, sales team, and engineers will all want to do things that aren't part of your product's vision and you've got to know that.
Background:
I was a history major in college. Almost did a PhD. I've always had an interest in coding -- taught myself Java, PHP, MySQL. When I finally got serious about having a career, I joined a company as a member of their marketing team. My 'programming' background made me the natural lead for talking to our tech team. Eventually, they changed my title to product manager and I was in.
Uber cannot afford to do any of the things you've listed because Uber cannot sustain the subsidies it is already giving out to its drivers. Moreover, Uber doesn't want its drivers to be educated about the true cost of operating a vehicle for Uber because if they realized how much it cost, most wouldn't do it.
The only one of your bullet points Uber has pursued is the last one -- they rope drivers into car leases in hopes that when they eventually ramp up the amount of money they collect from each fare their drivers will be locked into driving for Uber so they cannot leave.
The US navy is planning on introducing the ability to generate jet fuel from seawater on its nuclear aircraft carriers in the 2020s. The process works, it just takes a tremendous amount of energy (hence the nuclear carrier part) and it requires a lot of water to create a gallon of jet fuel (20,000 gallons I believe for a singe gallon of jet fuel).
The toughest part, however, is that the process would release methane gas into the air. So it's unclear if it's really greenhouse-gas neutral.
In theory, though, if you could trap the methane and then sequester the hydrocarbons you made, you'd have a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Skills:
- Be able to sympathize with your users (and be able to translate their pain into actionable steps that build toward your company's bigger goal)
- Be a communicator. You need to be able to write help documents, update emails, epics, stories, etc. Verbally, you should be able (and want!) to get up in front of your company and evangelize the work you're doing.
- Be a junior project manager. Even if you have project people in your company, you need to keep the trains running. Sometimes that means you've gotta be a dick to people too.
- Demonstrate deep understanding of your product. You're going to have to make tradeoffs and compromises along the way and knowing the landscape of your product (both from the user's perspective and the technical perspective) helps you make better decisions.
- Be able to prioritize. This one is tough to demonstrate, but good PMs know how to effectively take a long list of requirements or stories and prioritize them based on what will drive the most value
- Be able to think big. It's easy to go for incremental wins, but you've really got to be able to take the long view of your product. Your customers, sales team, and engineers will all want to do things that aren't part of your product's vision and you've got to know that.
Background: I was a history major in college. Almost did a PhD. I've always had an interest in coding -- taught myself Java, PHP, MySQL. When I finally got serious about having a career, I joined a company as a member of their marketing team. My 'programming' background made me the natural lead for talking to our tech team. Eventually, they changed my title to product manager and I was in.