Laid Off Product Managers: What's Your Next Move?

13 points by gr1zzlybe4r 3 years ago | 6 comments

I have a hunch that I'm not the only product manager here that's recently been laid off. What are all of you trying to do for you next role?

I'm having an internal debate about whether I want to continue in product, as it feels like a lot of my success was potentially driven by landing in good environment instead of being "good" at product work itself. It's also been sobering to realize that as a PM you're somewhat dependent on others to create a lot of stuff (i.e., you can't code enough to make your own site and potentially not enough connections to start your own business). So, I'm curious what other PMs out there are thinking about doing.

My general background is:

  - 5 years in product at fintech companies (credit cards, credit, and BaaS)
  - 2 years in management consulting
  - Can code enough to make a crummy CRUD app in Rails, some data ETL stuff in Python, and I know SQL well

This makes my potential next options (that I've thought of, hoping to see if there are others):

  - Another product role
  - Sales engineer
  - Bumping up my coding skills enough to be a dev
  - Attempting to do "solopreneur" type work

mateo411 3 years ago |

That's a pretty good technical skillset for a Product Manager.

You proposed 4 different roles.

- PM Again

- Sales Engineer

- Dev

I would pick one of the 3 that sounds most interesting to you. The one that you'll do the best at will probably be the one that you like the most.

I don't really know what it means to be a solopreneur, but I think you mean starting your own business or doing consulting. If you don't have a well developed plan there, then I would try to do that on the side.

Good luck!

akg_67 3 years ago |

Do you have MBA? If not, consider going to a top notch MBA program will be a good career move. After dot com bust in early 2000s, I know quite a few PM, who didn’t have formal business education and were laid off, went to MBA school, rode out the downturn, built connections, expanded network and went on to do very well in corporate world and early stage startups.

gr1zzlybe4r 3 years ago | |

I don't, but the opportunity cost of an MBA is insane. If you're making $150,000 and the cost of tuition + COL is say, $60,000, then you're opportunity cost for going to school is $420,000.

Which means you'd likely not make your money back in 5 years.

kingkongjaffa 3 years ago |

As a newly minted PM coming from customer success and then a non tech internal consulting / project management career in the past, I'm sort of worried that I've moved myself away from the profit centre by becoming a PM.

Idealistically I would love to get to the level of job security where I could job hop every few years. I guess the easiest path to that is to upskill in Dev.

imranq 3 years ago |

Ah man hope all is well. Layoffs are rough.

PM / Dev are two sides of the same coin. One decides what to build, and the other decides how to build it.

So instead of picking a role right off the bat, you should pick an industry and go deep into understanding it. Then decide whether your impact will be in the "what" or the "how"

jytechdevops 3 years ago |

you seems to have a pretty strong skillset in technical pm roles, i think you'll be fine. it's the pm's who don't have any skills but simply manage meetings and jira tickets that i'd be worried about.