Ask HN: How to grow into a Technical Product Manager role?

5 points by movingmove 2 years ago | 6 comments

Not sure if that‘s the audience here, but after 15 years in the field, I am loosing appetite for the ever repetitive nature of software engineering! Now I switched stacks (did Mainframe, Backend, Frontend, Systems Engineering, p2p…) But all companies I consultated for or was emoloyed with were winning or failing not based on technology, but product market fit etc. None of the technical choices made a huge impact.

Did someone here move from IC to a technical product manager role? If so, can you recommend readings/courses or actions you took? The company I work for now has mentioned thar if I am open to lean more to product, I can allocate more time towards that! However, I am not sure how exactly I should get more involved in, and how to skill up or what I can contribute to have an impact!

bobbiechen 2 years ago |

I am a technical product manager, used to be a software engineer, and made the switch a couple years ago now - wrote a bit about it here https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2021/11/28/moving-to-product-man... , but here's some more notes:

1. Actions - my manager also offered that I could spend more time doing something more product-oriented in a transition period. My team owned an internal tool for managing firewalls with many long-standing UX complaints, so I took the opportunity to redesign it - collecting and summarizing the past complaints, putting together a new design, and testing it with users. Then I implemented it myself, shipped it, collected relevant metrics, and made some tweaks for later feedback. This was pretty successful, I liked it, and I took the chance to switch to be a PM full-time when a new role opened on a different team in the department.

2. Resources - Inspired (Marty Cagan), and Escaping the Build Trap (Melissa Perri) are good starting points. My company also sent me to Pragmatic Institute training, which didn't cover new ground but did provide lots of template docs if that's your style.

3. A note of advice: going from dev to PM gives you certain strengths. You're naturally going to have a stronger opinion on developer-focused products, APIs, SDKs, etc., and better ideas of what's easy/hard/impossible to implement technically. This is good, but it's not a substitute for talking to your customers/prospects and engineering team. It's really important to actually talk to people, whether by video meetings or chat/email/doc comments.

Also happy to chat in more detail, I'm reachable by the form on the homepage of my website.

bibryam 2 years ago |

I did. My path was: software engineer, consultant, architect, TPM - driven by desire to have impact and move one the moment I noticed stagnation of personal growth.

Definitely having technical background helps with managing products that are highly technical or for technical users.

W/o going into the whole rabbit hole of PMing, here are a few links I found useful on my journey

Must read book https://twitter.com/bibryam/status/1629768021391572995 Most popular PM podcast https://www.lennyspodcast.com/ https://www.sachinrekhi.com/top-resources-for-product-manage... I was lucky to attend many courses here pragmaticinstitute.com

That alone is a lot to read. Good Luck!

mapasj 2 years ago |

I think taking that opportunity with your current company to do product work is a great way to make this career shift. In a software engineering role in the past, I had a chance to work do product work because it was a new product and so there weren’t any existing PMs already working on it.

If you say that you’re not sure how to get involved, I would just suggest that you work to set boundaries as clear as you can with management about what your responsibilities and ownership will be. That could be a tricky thing if your colleagues think of you still as an engineer. The line between developer and PM can already be a fuzzy one, and it could be even harder to make sense of if you’re just starting to do PM work.

Other advice would be to pay attention to how you communicate your ideas, sell your ideas, and your writing skills. Things that PMs need to do a lot, but software engineers often undervalue. Work to develop those skills.

austin-cheney 2 years ago |

I can remember when Travelocity was failing in its final days before becoming an Expedia white label. They brought in some top product management consultants to advise on strategy. Their guidance was mostly common sense but put the internal product managers into an impossible position.

As a world class product manager you must be willing to advocate for positions that are career suicide at most large corporations. For example, tech stacks become more expensive and less flexible over time, so in order to pivot a product to achieve greater market penetration might mean abandoning the current stack. Tech teams will fight you to death on this because their first priority is to remain employed everything else be damned. As a result most product managers are hardly world class.

danwee 2 years ago |

I think the technical product manager role is the worst of both worlds:

- not enough tech: so you don't get to work on the nice and interesting stuff

- it has it's management part: so you get to work on the boring stuff

datadrivenangel 2 years ago |

Take your company up on their offer! Work with the existing product people.

The big thing is setting up the process to find opportunities that are triple win: win for the business, win the customer, win for technology (which is really a win for the business, but it's helpful to call it out as a unique dimension that needs to be won).