You don't need much people management skill to do consulting. You are managing yourself, not running a company. You do need to deal with clients. Product management skill would help tremendously. Basically clients rarely have any clue on what they want. You need to take their vague ideas, map to equivalent feature/functionality, extract the detail from them, and translate those into development functionality. Then fit the change into existing architecture, do the design, and implement them.

On the technical side, try to understand various architecture and how things work together. Do the full stack. Ideally when talking to the clients about a feature, you should be able to figure out what need to be done along the whole pipeline of work.

If you are a software developer and want to go further, I would say get involved in:

- Product management.

- Architecture.

- Go to meetings to talk to clients.