| This is really good advice. Technical PM in big tech here. Going to chime in with some thoughts as I made that same transition after 5 years in engineering. And been doing it for the last 5 or so years. Given that PM has two definitions: Product manager - what & why Program manager - when, who, how Some companies simply get these two disciplines mixed up or a single PM handles both(hard job). Some PMs act more like engineering managers & other PMs act more like MBAs. The number one way to grow as a PM? Read and embed yourself with your users & product. Learn from other accomplished individuals, find mentors on what works and try new things for yourself. It's amazing to me of how many complements you may get about some strategy or tactic we used as a product team successfully that just came from a book & applied to our space. Lenny's newsletter is great too, but even books about successful / failed products are just as helpful. > Don’t let gaps form between you and your customers and between you and the builders This is commonly an Ivory Tower problem in which teams don't do any customer research or get out of the building to talk to people they're building for. It's hard to blame them when they've never done it before to be successful nor have a PM who understands the value of embedding themselves in the product they're managing. > People matter most My personal motto for any new product or effort is to "work the people, then the problem". It doesn't matter if there's deadlines if nobody is talking to each other or learning from the very people you're building the product for. Once everyone is rowing in the same direction & agree on a common vision, it's smooth to execute upon it. > Write your resume in ten years. My ten year plan when I first started in software was to become a DBA(wrote it in 2010). And that DBA dream was more close to modern data science today. The data science side of PM work is an absolute joy and fun. It's exactly what I wanted when I wrote that 10 years ago. Oh how things have changed. Now that I'm a more senior PM, that 10 year plan has shifted to be a director and/or running my own successful product with all the skills learned over my career. > The “art” of product management matters more than the “science” over the long term. The art is the right brain(creativity), the science is the left brain(logic). I personally like to see this as emotions vs. facts. How you feel about something is much different than the reality of it. The art of being a good PM is by invoking emotions. How engineering feels about the backlog priority? How do users feel about an upcoming feature/change? How do leadership feel when you present your next year plans? There's a reason why many popular PM books are called "Inspired" or "Empowered". It's because of the emotion being invoked when your team is firing on all cylinders and your users are happy with your product decisions. |