Product management isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a people management position. It’s a cross between inbound marketing, product design, and high-level prioritization/planning.
Done well, it’s essential to creating products people love. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do poorly. Done poorly, it looks like bad project management: shuffling Gantt charts and micromanaging engineers.
Reading this thread had me questioning my own understanding of what a Product Manager is. Engineering has little day-to-day involvement with the product managers as they are busy working with customers, setting roadmaps, and determining requirements for products. Interactions are typically to demo what we have built, get feedback on a new feature or deviation from the product requirements, or in a weekly status update meeting.
A lot of people here are describing a position I would just call project management with a bit of technical management thrown in.
plenty of engineers have created successful companies on their own. On the other hand there's literally never been a non-technical founder who created something because by definition if you don't have the technical skills you can't build something, even if you have a great idea or problem to solve
While as a product owner I'm not primarily a people leader (although I do) I got a significant pay bump switching from a lead engineer to a product owner at my company.
Done well, it’s essential to creating products people love. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do poorly. Done poorly, it looks like bad project management: shuffling Gantt charts and micromanaging engineers.