I am currently in QA and am considering moving into Product Management. Previously I worked as a Support Engineer in the same company. Talking to my peers, it may be difficult to impossible to get into PM without any prior experience. I am wondering if anyone out there has been through a similar situation. Ideally I would like to switch roles within the same company but due to internal politics that may be difficult.
Try doing something between QA and PM. Try fishing a dev/pgm role or even sales engineer. It’ll be a tough leap from QA to PM.
What would be some roles *between* these too? Basically i wanna get out of coding/debugging completely.
Sales engineer, project manager, program manager
Try qa-> tme—> pm
What’s tme ?
Technical marketing engg. Lot of enterprise companies have these roles
Same here. Want to know the answer too
There are ways to do this without an MBA. From a QA to a Product Manager is a big jump and even if you get into it , it will be hard to survive. So look at roles within your company or outside which will act as a bridge between these two roles, and move to that first. The other way could be find a sponsor who believes in you and can take you in for PM role. In any case the jump isn’t easy but doable if you have a plan and work on gaining some relevant skills.
What are the bridge roles?
Try technical marketing - presale work. Pretty technical but no coding needed as such. What it needs is good presentation skills