I’m a Product Manager at JPMorgan; role leans towards the business/client stakeholder side of the spectrum. I am looking for a FAANG Product Manager mentor who can guide me towards a more targeted effort in transitioning to tech. Completely willing to put in work and open to criticism. Any help is valued. Thanks all!
I'm a senior engineer who does quite a bit of PM work. The biggest difference you're going to find is: what the engineers say goes. If an engineer says, we can't do this in that amount of time, or this is not the right way to do this, or this isn't a priority for our team right now, that's it, especially if they have the data to back up their claim. Your primary responsibility will be to make sure no one is wasting the engineers time, which plenty of people (including other engineers) will try to do. By filtering out bullshit for your team, you can help significantly increase your team's productivity. I say this with utmost respect for what PMs do, I'm considering transferring into a PM role once I feel I've gotten bored of being an engineer.
I appreciate this and respect your stance. I do this in my current role as I’m the only one that can even have a basic conversation with the engineers on my product team. But to your point, in my arena, business wins and engineers don’t. If the senior managers want it, the engineers have to eat it. This is honestly why I want to transition to tech. This kind of mindset turns away all tech talent, and the banks in general are way behind the curve because of it.
Yeah I specifically brought it up because from what I've seen, it's been the biggest shock for people from traditional finance roles.
What is it like to be a PM at JPMorgan?
We are the business side of most projects and initiatives in a product sense. We work closely with project managers in tech, operations, and legal as the product subject matter experts. I would say a sweeping generalization would be that we make sure products being developed and launched benefit the clients most of all while we juggle the knives of tech, operations and legal teams to get to the finish line without everything bursting into flames.