[codingdave]

Heh. The spirit of what you are saying is true, but believe me - I've worked under plenty of PMs who develop the ideal customer-focused product vision, but whom cannot get anyone to follow their lead. Look around HN discussions and you see engineers talking about how worthless PMs are, how they just fill space, etc. You cannot be a product leader if nobody follows you. And someone wanting to go into a PM role should do it with an approach that doesn't land them in that "worthless PM" zone.

Remember that my answer was not "How to be a PM", it was "how to transition from dev to PM". We are talking about a dev wanting to make a change. You lose all the value of past experience if you tell them to just go be the standard PM. That is my bigger point - not to ignore the customer, but to use their existing knowledge to do it all, and to do it better. To be someone whom the customer will trust and whom the team will follow. To make the experience of building the product as important as the experience of using the product, resulting in the mythical "high-performing team" who is able to deliver the product vision that yes, you also will come up with.

Both sides matter. Neither can exist without the other. And someone who has 15 years of building experience can be amazing at the side that most PMs neglect, driving their delivery teams into the dystopian scrum-hell with which we all are too familiar. So while your points do have merit, they miss the uncommon opportunity of an engineer's skills being applied to the whole picture.

Think less about what they will be in 10 years, and more about what they can be great at in 10 weeks. That is why I focused on what I did.