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

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.

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!

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.

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.

- 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

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).