Seriously folks, even Blind has 1M ppl chasing the very few jobs. Thanks to Lenny (which I like btw), Product School etc. everybody (new grads, internal, job hoppers) chased and still chasing the title due to high paying, no-code nature. Unlike many puppets saying in LI that PM job will thrive, I want to move to another role. Open to suggestions. Note : Airbnb and Snap already jumped in to wagon. Which role? #pm #product #productmanager
With AI tpm jobs will go away first. Sales is a better prospect. Ai can convince people only to a certain degree, will need a human touch to push the rest of the way.
Why TPM?
Roadmapping , keeping track of dev work , how the project does all that can be automated by AI. There are companies already working on that .
My 2 cents...the product role will evolve to product marketing, requiring true ownership from the PM and evaluating them based on outcomes. Today's PMs either define the vision or write requirements and don't really care about the outcomes. With product marketing the PM will also be responsible for the outcome of the product and will be measured on how successful the product is. They will need to think about the TAM of the product and measure if the adoption was in line with the projected TAM, and will be responsible for moving it to maintenance mode when the adoption has plateaued.
IMO if you were trying to be a PM of any customer facing product without understanding GTM strategy you were doomed to failure anyway.
How can you say the PM is not responsible from outcomes, when our performance is measured directly against OKRs?
Yeah, I see a future with fewer PM roles. Also, the barrier to entry is going to get much higher. That said, companies still need great PMs - folks who think deeply about problems, exercise solid judgment, and can shepherd engineers to deliver real outcomes. All of these qualities are intangible. Which makes it both a difficult role and an underappreciated one. RIP to all those who thought writing specs, running meetings and other such procedural nonsense was the extent of the job.
With the continued adoption of AI and other advanced technologies, the need for capable PMs will be more important than ever. Everything you suggest could never truly be done by AI. Conversely, SWEs will be increasingly marginalized because we simply won't need them since software development will be easier than ever, which will reduce companies' dependence on them. As a result, in the next 5-10 years, I envision companies cutting the number of SWEs dramatically with the remaining ones being paid a small fraction of what they are earning.
Exactly. Great PMs will not be out of jobs. Every time I read this type of post, saying a whole function will be extinct, I can only assume they’re coming from mediocre professionals.
Why not be a real engineer?
It sucks
As opposed to a fake engineer... Dude shut up - chatgpt should replace you
Call it whatever you want — product, product marketing, product owner, gm — you need someone who will set the vision for the product and make something users love. Whether that’s done top down or bottom up, it’s the most important position at a company, as everything flows from that decision makers decisions.
Each of those jobs has different responsibilities. That being said, the people who are responsible for that from a R&D perspective are product managers while GTM, thought leadership, and market development should be led by product marketing.
What your product is, and how it resonates with consumers, is the absolutely most important thing you company decides. If you want to throw it into a role called product marketing and include GTM, sure. But if anyone thinks that marketing the product is nearly as important as creating a product users love, you have no idea what you’re doing
The truth is, while the market was hot, the barrier to entry was low due to plenty jobs in all fields. A lot of non technical folks have ended up in lucrative PM jobs and have done well but an equal number of PM’s have been procedural document writers who don’t add enough value Now with the market downturn, the expectations of a PM is to be highly technical as well as the regular stakeholder management, alignment, GTM. This will unfortunately weed out of lot of current PM candidates who aren’t technical with respect to the product they own. (Despite them being good or bad at what they do) The lack of respect for the PM job also comes from this where a lot of stakeholders, especially engineering are able to see that the PM has no understanding of the product or what goes on under the hood.
This gives me hope technical PMs are respected. Splunk hates technical PMs. All the way from VP to GMs, they weed out technical people. I am surprised to find it the way it is. It also explains why it failed to evolve from its original roots of one product.
Technical PM with good product sense and knowledge of customers is the most desired profile for a PM candidate. Non technical PM who reach VP probably are insecure about technical PM or have the misconception that technical PM are one dimensional which can be true but that’s the same as non technical PM without any knowledge how the product works
If you can't do product management, forget about product marketing.
Care to explain? I thought PMM is nontechnical and PM is the role that has more requirements to break into?
PMM can be technical or non technical depending on the company you work with and your role in that organization. In my case, I started off as PME, where I worked on demos. Helping SWs and working on efforts that a technical person would find interesting. I moved into PMM and eventually managed PMM groups Now I manage PMs/PMMs/SWEs
Lol @ most of the comments. Most of the folks commenting equate PM’ing to being a jack of trades…though they don’t have enough experience or education to articulate that; Especially, the FAANG types. Ask one of these all knowing PM’s what technical good or service (product) have they owned end to end; No one. PM’ing is about managing a product throughout its lifecycle. A product manager owns the what and why and engineering owns the how….period. You can’t just walk into a PM role…who can’t just be a dev and go into a PM role…you can’t be solely business and walk into a PM role…you can’t walk into a PM role off the street ….in these scenarios you will not be successful. Why is it that even with GPT we don’t have Pm’s generating billions of dollars of revenue for their companies???? Because in order to be successful you as a PM need to operate at top of license. You need to have experience, albeit high level and in some cases granular experience in most aspects of product and if not be astute in how to obtain said knowledge. GPT will not tell you the correct thing to do or what to look up in a given product management scenario…you have to have had experience and education to know what to prompt it.
Any advice on how to get sufficiently technical?
Technical for PMs really means just understanding system design and engineering tradeoffs, also being able to have a conversation with engineers about technical decisions without them talking to you like you're 5. Read design docs and observe meetings where architecture decisions are made. Develop an intuition for what will be hard vs easy to build. It's not actually about coding but more like be able to help engineers make decisions and make sure those technical. decisions support the long term success of the product
Have an understanding of the technical design choices in your product, the reasons for specific trade offs, a good way is to read the design docs or listen to design choices during meetings with your engineering team. Understand what trade offs mean for the user experiences, the customer. Understand how the system and customer is protected. Understand what part of the system is contributing to technical debt or bugs which will help you prioritize those things during your sprint. Understand the technical depth and velocity of your engineering team so you can better plan your milestones.
How about IT Business Analyst?
This was the product manager equivalent of the dot com era.
It was. Yes. But then Google wanted IT-BAs to know how many ping pong balls fit in a bath tub. 🙄🙄😝