[fatnoah]

My current company has a lot of domain experts from a specific industry that became product managers. It's been a mixed bag of results. They're obviously very knowledgable about the market we serve, but completely naive to the process of making software products. Clarity and appropriate levels of detail in requirements definitions and creating coherent "products" vs. clumps of features are the biggest challenges.

Fortunately, all are willing to learn and work together to figure it out.

[idopmstuff]

I've seen this happen, and it can definitely work, but only if you've got someone really focused on training the PM skills. A PM who both has the core skillset and domain expertise is awesome, but trying to just drop someone in because they have domain expertise without the skills for the job itself generally turns out how you're describing.

In my view the most practical thing to do, if you can swing it, is to have a subject matter expert who's just a general resource for everybody. They help product make decisions about what to build, marketing with how to message and sales with closing the deals. We just brought somebody on in this capacity at my company, which is a startup in a highly regulated industry, and it's honestly just a dream setup for me as a PM. Things that would take me a lot of research or experimentation to figure out instead get answered in a 30 minute call.

[fatnoah]

We ended up going with the approach of bringing in dedicated Product Operations people who act as Product Owners for the Scrum Team and also interface w/other stakeholders. That's also worked pretty well once they got up to speed.