I’m an engineer myself but I’m asking from the perspective of non tech people interested in making a move into tech. As an engineer I get the hate that bad PMs get, like not having technical chops or in some cases not even being useful, but I’ll also say I’ve worked with incredible PMs who really helped drive a product and understood what customers wanted. That being said, is there still opportunity and growth for newcomers to the space? Best way to break in if you’re coming from consulting, law, etc.? Do boot camps work? Edit: people assumed I was asking this for myself, I’m actually asking this for non-tech people who want to get into PM roles. I get PM work can be hard but so is legal and consulting. What’s the best way to break in if your dead set on it? #productmanager #product #career
Even if you have technical chops, can't escape the hate
You are there to fulfill your peoduct objectives, not to ‘help’ the team do their work. Sheep will always hate the tiger
It is additional role… you will be the first to laid off :)
I certainly wouldn’t mind a job that’s laid back. Unless you mean laid off
Google’s google translation is glitchy: it’s engineering brain - normal translate did not work well. They meant laid off. It’s not laid back don’t expect it to be laid back
There's an optimal number of PM's for any firm, but at this point, big tech is far beyond the point of diminishing returns. The question is - would you be able to pivot back to SWE if the PM market tanked? If the answer is no, I wouldn't make the switch in this market.
This kind of actually worries me. I went PM over SWE as a new grad, and the current economic landscape makes me feel like it’ll be harder to land on my feet should the worst happen. Knock on wood though. A big reason was not wanting to keep up with Leetcode for the next 20 years everytime you want to change companies. I already had experiences like that with dental school and then PA school. Studying Leetcode required the same of me as taking several months to study for a professional entrance exam.
How’s product life in Lowe’s? I’m thinking join this company. I heard Lowe’s is focus on building digital e-commerce,?
What about for non engg background? Consulting or policy or law - is PM a legit option? If so - what courses/boot camps do you recommend?
This is what I’m wondering
Please stay out of product if you don’t have the technical depth to know details of how products are made/how they work. Btw there’s a lot of non technical product companies out there that use product managers
Without PMs engineers would endlessly refactor everything in Rust for big impact metrics like reducing latency by 20ms. PMs are the adult supervision and always needed.
^ this. I work in the energy industry, building power equipment and power plants. We've always had PMs because you need SOMEONE to babysit the engineers.
SDMs hold the keys to what the Enggs are working on. PMs if they are doing their job well don't need to or have to baby sit Engineers. Repeat after me, baby sitting Engineers isn't the Product Managers job. If you find yourself baby sitting Engineers, please get out or supply as much context to the Engineers as you can so they have the same customer knowledge as you do. Engineers working on useless features is a symptom of PMs failing to supply contextual information and user insight into the team. A bunch of Enggs will always find an Engineering problem to solve without bothering to connect it back to how big of a problem it is for the end user. This usually happens for bigger Engineering teams. The PM.has to find a problem worth solving that keeps big Engineering teams busy. If PMs don't find a big enough problem, you will run into this situation of shipping useless features because....hey....Engineers gotta work on something
Nope it's such a grind
I was an architect before i became PM. tech chops certainly helps to a point.. but if ur coming as a PM in tech, you must have a secondary skill worth hiring..
people skills, UX skills, execution or strategy etc has to be something!
For the amount of hate engineers show PMs, you’d think every engineet is a top performer, but that’s not the case. 90% of the time, engineers I’ve worked with do literrly nothing. They work on their 2 stories a day and away or offline the rest of the day while PMs are drowning in meetings, building iht strategies, meeting with customers, testing all the code the devs broke, etc
Technical chops is meaningless at best, and a detriment at worst, for being an effective product manager (unless your organization is technology driven, and then you have bigger problems). Product managers should be market experts and have zero say or interest in execution. The more prescriptive a PM is about technical implementation the less successful the product will be imho.
As a PM for 7+ years I agree. My job is more about understanding how the market works and how clients think. I couldn’t care less about how to get the widget to do what I want/need it to as long as in the end it does what I want/need it to. Do I need to have a basic understanding of how stuff works? Sure, but it’s far from my main focus.
This.
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Supply >>>>>> demand. Doesn’t pay as much as engineering
It’s within 5-10% at a lot of big tech companies
Nope. I was an L6 at aws and not even close