[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!