[storgendibal]

This is an interesting point. The first several years of my career, I was an engineer working on low level operating system stuff. I later switched to product and my technical chops really helped me earlier in my product career. As I got more senior however, the business, strategy, and product vision components of the PM role became more important and my technical skillset was less "directly" useful. It was more helpful in getting me trust with senior engineers, and therefore transitive trust with executives (because eng directors are often the first people a new exec will turn to to "read" the org in a large company)