Has anyone changed their career from being in a technical role to a product manager (PM) role? If yes, then how did that transition look?

For example: you were a data scientist before becoming a PM for DS & Analytics

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Our PM left and CEO mentioned in all-hands that I'll handle product as well. 😂 Jokes aside, across companies I've seen a bunch of folks come from technical support engineer role into PM. Talk to your manager(and current PM/head of product) to get more customer facing work. Also a lot of convincing + expectation management internally if you can find it. Once you've done that, take more interest in analytics. There's a fairly detailed description of the entire product lifecycle and things you should be good at in a book called "Product manager's survival guide". I would strongly suggest you read that (or other similar books) before actually deciding this. PSA: from a dev POV, it feels like product has a lot of decision making power. But in reality it's all responsibility and almost no power. So be careful what you wish for.

Ah! the summary is apt.

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I have seen similar threads in past and curious to know, why do people transit from tech to PM role. Can someone share some reasons?

@wide-toddler-69594 For me: Dev feels like more backend work. I want to work on the frontlines and own more public facing responsibility. That combined with the fact that after a time, it all becomes just bug-fixing and coding doesn't feel like the “can create anything superpower”. I still get the kick when I solve a problem within the business logic, but not when I have to optimise database queries, etc.

Similar to what @strong-evening-37474 said, but I'll say it bluntly about my role: design just feels like digital manual labour where you're laying bricks (drawing rectangles) and painting the wall. Luckily in my company the PM responsibility is also shared with me (metrics, research, etc.). And it has become very hard for me to leave this company inspite of other bigger companies trying to poach. I know for a fact that my friends in Samsung/Msft/Adobe are glorified pixel pushers and nothing more, some of them even admitted it. It doesn't feel like the standard design role has any responsibility apart from making things look according to what the PM expects.

Talk to PMs of those places. They'll feel like they've no responsibility apart from making things behave according to what leadership/revenue expects. Talk to leadership and it'll feel like they're just doing the bidding of investors and key people at marquee customers. If you can't find a way to sell your good ideas and convince people at the designer -> PM level, you'll have a difficult time convincing leadership, devs, customer success and sales combined. Having said that, do not let me demotivate you. I don't know your life. If you feel like you'll do better in product, it's better to try and find out than to miss out because some random dude on the internet said so. Maybe you'll enjoy other aspects of PM 🙂

@dry-monkey-93718 I enjoy the PM aspect of my job more. Currently it's 50% PM, 50% product design if that makes sense.

Appreciate your response folks 🙂 🙏 From what I understand, a PM is suppose to have some knowledge on everything, create blueprints for the technical team to work upon after consulting businesses, end-user, time, budget etc. I am curious to understand, what is the kicker in this kind of a role? I mean, it is more about listening to what everyone is saying, come up with an optimal plan, and ensure the plan is executed accordingly. For a person who is a problem solver, the kicker is to experiment or develop a new approach to a given problem, similarly what aspect of a PM works as a kicker for you?

I don't think there's one answer to that. Every person has their own reasons. For the brief period that I was playing the role, for me it was a mix of trying to keep everyone healthy, bring some structure into how we make decisions and make something that's useful.

Have been a PM with a large and mid-size org, currently helping out an early stage company; PM role varies a lot based on the size, company category, your product type, culture. It has recently specialised a bit more in to Growth PM, Technical PM (for dev tools etc), Platform PM, B2C PM, B2B PM etc. People do move across early in their career but they specialise with experience. Given the knowledge base that a PM accumulates (sector, user, product expertise) these days you also see Ecom PM, Fintech PMs who stick to those sectors only. So the role is not standardised at all and is very different in different companies. Now coming to what they do. Its aligning teams and delivering value creating products for your customers and company. The critical question here is who defines what to align on and what is value creating; and what process is used to get there. This is where the experience of PM, trust others places in a PM, Org Culture etc matter and the day-to-day of a PM varies a lot. But in the end you have to deliver and that involves lot of people. I echo what Piyush said earlier. Be careful what you wish for. As a PM one can be anything from redundant to healthy nuisance to someone who can really level up the whole product and org. Best way to see this first hand is to partner with a PM as a DS/Design/Eng in a good product org. Happy to answer any questions in DM or here.

What do you guys think about EM roles? Anyone got an idea about the role?

Depending on the size/work style of the company, it can be a Tech Lead with some amount of management work. Or it can be completely separate from technical decisions altogether.