| Head of Product @ Stormpath It doesn't really matter where you start, as long as you can relate to the product and its customers. I've seen great PM from every beginning. My beginning was a normal comp sci background -> dev -> customer success manager (any support role is a great segway into product management role) -> PM. Having managed many PMs, it boils down to this: Can you be an advocate for your customer for your product, regardless of intercompany demands? Can you communicate your vision for what needs to be built effectively across the whole company? Those are the two main skills that I try to distil for any PM that I hire. There is a 3rd which I call the auxiliary skill (these can be taught easily, hence auxiliary). How do you validate your assumptions, remove cognitive biases to come to the best decision about the priority on what should be built when? And a fourth, which comes down to background and personality: Can you be a swiss army knife and help wherever the team needs you? The product I currently manage is a developer tool, so taking a look at an example based on the 4 points: 1. Can you relate to developer pain points, market problems with identity, create great developer experience and understand where there are holes in the current product? 2. How can you use the tools at your disposal to communicate what we need to build to the engineering team, marketing, and executives. Technical and non-technical folks alike, even for a technical product that is sold to devs. 3. How can you manage feedback / signals from sales, developer evangelism, customer asks, and visionaries to create a roadmap 4. Demonstrate how you have needed to step out of your comfort zone to get the job done. When interviewing, having a developer background is a must (but it is only a must because my product is currently catering to the developer persona), but replace a developer product with a dental product that is sold to dentists. That hiring manager is going to want someone that more than likely understands dentists and their pain points that the software is currently solving for. They could come from, office manager, dentist moving to software (it happens), someone from the insurance industry... you see the point. Hope this helps, I'm always happy to help and advise. Snag my twitter handle from the profile and shoot me a DM. |