Hi blinders, just wanna ask the community about what PMs (product manager) actually do since at my company it seems like they are just going to a lot of meetings and come up with subpart PRDs. Are they more liasons between functions or do they actually do meaningful work? For those SE that made the jump to PM, what's ur exp like and do u regret/not regret about the jump? Also, what's the career outlook and TC like for PMs vs SE?
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“They are just going to a lot of meetings and come up with subpar PRDs” is a little like saying that engineers just “sit in front of their computers and write buggy code.” I don’t believe that, to be clear, but maybe spend some time talking to the PMs you work with to understand their work more. If you want to read something more comprehensive, check out ‘Inspired’ by Marty Cagan.
There is no generalization for any role. Some PMs are crappy doesn't mean profession is crappy just like some SEs are crappy doesn't mean anything. Having said that it totally depends on your interests and what motivates. If you feel like you need to make things work for you to feel that you contributed then you won't respect the PMs role. But doing market research being customers point of view and thinking of big picture is your thing you could be a good PM. Although unfortunately there are very few good PMs so it's hard to find inspiration
If you have to ask, don't switch yet.
Agree. Different skillsets & responsibilities needed for success. Also, technical vs. customer focus.
I came here to say just that.
A good PM helps articulate what a great product needs to do and let’s the engineers figure out how to best do it. They fuse the engineers perspectives to understand what is possible with the customers needs. They have strong empathy for their customers and engineers, but also have a better big picture vision for how to serve their customers then a customer could come up with themselves, and also better then what most engineers could produce. However, most product managers are not good. An average one goes to meetings so engineers don’t need to.
Here is an interesting take- https://youtu.be/kLlD-N3cj9g
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