[rsclient]

When I moved to Microsoft 15+ years ago, I went from being a developer (for 20+ years) to a PM. 9/10, would recommend. But also know that it's a very different skill set that you'll need to learn.

The simplest example of this: as a programmer, when your boss says to code a feature, you code it. But as a PM, you have to get a team to make it.

A PM's job is to figure out what the feature really is, and how complex or configurable it should be, and what the target audience is, and how you'll measure success. It also involves making sure that you feature works well with other features, and that your team is moving in the same direction as the rest of your company.

Be prepared, BTW, for the constant assumption that you became a PM because you couldn't hack it :-)

[mr_00ff00]

Thanks for advice, and yeah that makes sense that I’ll have to learn a whole new skill set, but I enjoy learning.

When talking about a feature, am I doing basically high level system design? Similar to what a senior engineer does (aka this should be a cache, it’s best to change this to streaming so let’s remove the audit db, etc) or is it even more high level than that?

Also lol at the last line, never heard that but I can see why people might make the assumption.

[rsclient]

I literally had a dev manager say it to my face! "I guess you were a mediocre programmer or you wouldn't have become a PM"!

No, you aren't doing that kind of high-level design. For example, I was the PM for the "connect to Wi-Fi via a QR code" feature in Windows (you're welcome!). As PM, my job was to :

- demonstrate that this was "thing" people would want to do - demonstrate that it slotted into the existing feature set (the existing Windows camera already reads QR codes, so we just had to use their existing hoooks) - do a quick evaluation of the WIFI: protocol (which, BTW, sucks; it's one of the worst standards I've ever seen) - do an evaluation of the overall market (like, what do other operating systems do)

There was also some discussions with the Windows Wi-Fi team for how to store the connection data since it wasn't a perfect fit for the our existing connection store, plus a security evaluation. You won't do anything about caches or streaming except that they will naturally fall out of your spec.

You'll learn a ton about writing convincing documents, how to find users and partners, tracking schedules, and stuff

[mr_00ff00]

Haha that’s a crazy thing to say to someone.

And thank you so much for all the info. Very cool you were PM for the WiFi QR Code that people use every day.

I appreciate all the info! That gave me a pretty good idea of what to expect