[jsdwarf]

Sounds good in theory, but what if your company decides to reduce investments in the spreadsheet product and instead transfer the product team into a much faster growing product segment, e.g. SAP integrations?

Then the perfectly qualified PMs start from square one again.

IMHO it's an essential skill for a PM to familiarize him/herself with a new domain in short time. It also offers cross-pollination / the chance to do things different. Imagine Steve Jobs coming from a pure IT background instead of liberal arts / calligraphy -> Apple wouldn't have been so different any more.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Sounds good in theory, but what if your company decides to reduce investments in the spreadsheet product and instead transfer the product team into a much faster growing product segment, e.g. SAP integrations?

> Then the perfectly qualified PMs start from square one again.

Exactly the same point holds for programmers: what if (say, by becoming acquired) a company has to switch from being a, say, a Deno/Vue.js shop to becoming a Java shop? Exactly.

So the answer is: don't do such radical changes in the product portfolio and way of doing work if you don't want the employees to more or less to start from square one again.

[cutemonster]

Note: "were HIGHLY technical".

They had the ability to learn technical things once, then they can do it again. (In a short time? Not so easy to find out until after you've hired them, in any case?)

[flappyeagle]

The time constraint matters. A lot.