Test-n-Tell.com - making product decisions

I've noticed some PM vacancies mention this requirement to a potential candidate: "enjoys dealing with multiple stakeholders". Enjoys? Really? In my ten years of working in product, I've met dozens if not hundred fellow PMs and none of them were enjoying dealing with multiple stakeholders. Most commonly this aspect of product management is the most dreaded.

A good product management process has stolen a lot from the scientific method. But there is at least one other skill a good product team would want to adopt from science - an informed debate.

The previous article described what does it mean to be technical as a PM and how to become one. You don't need to know how to code or have a computer science degree to be a PM. You might just need to learn how your product is being built, learn the language of developers and be mindful about the limits of your knowledge.

How often potentially great candidates don't apply for suiting product management vacancies because they are afraid to be not "technical" enough? This word became scary for a lot of capable PMs or people who want to break into the field. Product management community is full of discussions on how technical PMs should really be. But perhaps even before that, we need to clearly define what does the word "technical" mean when applied to a product manager?

Multiple times I've seen those terms used interchangeably, even though there are major differences between market and customer research. Not understanding the full complexity of market research might lead to bad product decisions.