[d--b]

What I’d do (and I have no idea if it’d work), is go straight for the PM role, and sell your previous experience as a PM-ish role with a FE dev title.

My opinion is that there is very little opportunity moving up from FE to PM. So going for another FE role and hoping for PM is a weird message to recruiters. The guy who needs a FE dev doesn’t want to hire a person whose goal is to move out of the position in 3 years.

But it is easy to pretend that you’ve been a de facto PM in your previous position. You may have done user interviews, and may have setup usage analytics and discussed various strategies to enhance engagement and all that kind of stuff. Pick up a book and read about PM and see what you can relate to your previous jobs. To be honest, PM is not a very well defined job, a lot of it is intuitive and if you interview with someone who likes what you say, it should be fine.

Don’t downplay the FE dev experience either. It’s good to be a PM who has been in the weeds. It gives you a better idea of how much things cost. The downside is that you may be pulled back by that as well. You may not ask for something that you think is complicated technically, while some other dev may not find it hard. So beware of that.

And make sure you say that you don’t want to code. You may do code reviews to get a grip of who’s doing on what on the team, but don’t say: “oh and I could develop some features myself”.