[x0x0]

I run a product team.

I've successfully hired one person doing this transition, but that was to be a technical product manager. For everything else, I would skip your resume. If you want me to be interested, you need to be a PM for a year plus somewhere else.

My rationale:

1. as expensive and painful as eng hires are to get wrong, they have nothing on PM hires.

2. I have no idea if you actually like the work, and neither do you. It is very different from eng work.

3. I have no idea if you are capable of talking to customers and prospects. Capable can span a lot of things, but includes doesn't freeze up, can think on their feet, and doesn't say really dumb shit to customers (I have eng that got exposure to prospects and managed to talk the prospect out of buying by the way they presented info).

4. Frankly, PM roles often pay less, particularly as compared to senior eng. That fact does not work in your favor, because I'm basically guesstimating if you're worth 3-6 months of my time to spin up on a product.

Finally, your other issue may be that companies simply hire a lot more eng -- 6-10x or more.

As has been repeatedly mentioned in this thread, your best bet (imo) is to transition at your current employer.

ps -- nothing written in your post demonstrates much effort on your part. That's another huge turnoff were I to ponder investing my time into you.

[ddelt]

Thanks for your feedback as someone who hires for these sorts of roles; I appreciate it.

Here is my feedback to two of your points:

1. Totally acknowledge the 3-6 month ramp up time for a product, but engineers can easily take that long to be productive and fluent around the technology stack, so I would argue that unless you are hiring a domain specialist, a generalist of any sort will take that time and be a risk for around that long.

2. I acknowledge your PS and I intentionally did not this post a huge backstory because that is what an interview is for, and the point I was making by asking this question was how to even get to that point.

3. As another poster indicated (and as I am aware since I’ve been working for awhile now); obviously it’s easier to make a non-standard transition in your current organization, but it isn’t possible if your org/team doesn’t hire for these roles or if you’ve joined a team where there is already someone entrenched in that role. So in that regard, I believe going across-orgs is probably an easier move, and appreciate everyone’s advice in that direction.

[x0x0]

we're gonna disagree on the eng team -- the blast radius of a bad PM is wasting the time of $2.5 - $3m/year of payroll, not to mention the opportunity cost. Not sure if this is helpful, but that's the concern that the hiring manager has, at least when I talk to peers.

re, the ps -- if you've invested time, you should present that before the interview (at least in my case).

In your case, maybe you could have some luck digging up a manager who needs a pm (or even an EM who doesn't have a strong pm) and transferring to that team? Your other bet may be early startups who are more free to take a flyer on someone, esp an api-heavy startup. ala zapier or competitors. Or hell, start a company; that's how I became a pm.

[siquick]

> Or hell, start a company; that's how I became a pm.

Could you give a few more details on how this happened please?

[x0x0]

What are you interested in?

I founded a company. I somewhat haphazardly drifted into the product role over the first 6 months, and from then on embraced it. I was the first pm, first pm manager, first pm director, etc...

[ddelt]

Good stuff, thank you!