How did you choose your career to be a Product Manager? What were your career paths to become a Product Manager? Books to recommend to read? (Cracking the PM interview, decode to conquer - besides these books) What do you enjoy the most being a Product Manager? Thanks a bunch in advance!
Lots of responsibility as a PM, I think the best route is building a startup so you know all aspects of a product IMO
Thanks, I cannot agree more 😊
Previous dev, became pm after MBA. Always had been more interested in shaping product strategy direction, and being a dev just didn't allow that. But as previous poster mentioned earlier in career you have to struggle thru driving a lot of mundane stuff or small parts of products, but as you gain credibility and superiors believe you can take bigger challenges it starts getting a lot more interesting. As an ic you still don't have authority, but you are just asked to figure out a totally ambiguous problem and make sense of it, and then help shape the strategy and direction for it. Frustrations, especially at msft are the layers, that you actually need to convince, or in some cases being over ruled by managers and skips, and sometimes very annoyingly from the dev side, who are only looking at a very narrow implementation angle. But again ultimately it's about credibility and influence. The other frustration at msft are all the so called project managers and status pushers masquerading as real pms, no vision, no customer empathy or business or strategy just keeping notes and writing reports for their teams. You have to work with them sometimes in your own teams or in partner teams, while you are just better off working directly with engineering. I would say the senior and principal roles give a very good balance of autonomy and also owning and delivering something, which also my answer to what I like most about the job.
Thank you for your awesome feedback! 👏🏻👏🏻
I always feel that MSFT should have seperated out product management from project / program management in terms of job and title responsibilities. Instead everyone is called a program manager at MSFT. While my thoughts yo yo between whether a product manager should or should not manage engineering team/project schedule, I think if the company is large enough than it's better to seperate the two roles and have a product guy, who is solely there on behalf of the customer, and a project/program guy, who is there to make sure things get done on time and to manage risks and Dev team... When you mix the two I feel often the engineering and project schedule take over priorities and things get dropped for the wrong reason. And this happens a lot at MSFT when I was there...
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I was so excited to move from dev to PM. But now after being a PM for a few years, I can say you get least satisfaction in the beginning of your career because you may not work on the most exciting or fancy product ideas. Once you prove yourself with some product launches under your belt you start getting better product initiatives to work on. Get through the not so fancy phase and you’ll get great job satisfaction when you get to work on things that actually make a difference to someone’s life. Burn out is very real with PMs because you’re always fighting fires but you should slowly get used to it and never get into the mode to be “liked” by your colleagues. You will always be in a position where someone is pissed off with and you need to be comfortable with that. If this appeals to you, go ahead and dive into this career path. Figure this out before you start prepping
Greatly appreciate your comment👍🏻👍🏻