jlgray

Good points. You definitely got me on the HIV vaccines, although that would be one quality-conscious product manager!

The number one skill a good product manager should have is being able to understand what the users need (not always the same as what the user wants, of course). Using the product, when possible, is a great shortcut. When it isn't possible, customer understanding is going to require phenomenal communication and imagination. That said, I would still be very wary of putting someone without some domain knowledge in charge of speccing out a super complicated product.

"So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand..."

maybe this is startup-land naivete speaking, but I pity the company whose product manager doesn't routinely use their own product.

If they had said we're setting up a market to sell Instagram photos. You can opt-in any of your photos, we'll take a cut for running the service, and you get the rest. The problem would be filtering out the junk, not getting people to sell their cat pictures.