| HN Mirror

    >All of your requirements for a good PM mean that the
    >PM needs to have the skills to be a developer as well.

I somewhat agree. The best PMs I've seen have had technical backgrounds, so a technical background seems necessary, but it is not sufficient. The best PMs have had a deep understanding of customer need, company/product direction, development feasibility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830892 said "president of the product" and I think that's nice. Given the invisibility of corporate "presidents", I'd suggest "CEO of the product" since you've got to have the ability to review the smallest issue while considering the long term effects.

Years ago, I was friends with the CEO of an hot CPU startup and I asked him what had most surprised him about his job. He was formerly the VP of a division of a public semiconductor company, so had serious experience. And still he said that he was astounded at the range of questions he got asked: VP of Finance raising some technical accounting issue; VP of Hardware knocking on his door to discuss process nodes and vendors; VP of Software looking for advice on ways to solve a complex problem; HR Director raising sexual harassment policies. Barring the sexual harassment policy, yeah, that sounds about like Product Management [and, yes, you will bump into "revenue recognition" while a PM].

EDIT:

... derp ... I missed this:

    >only an engineer will have the technical foresight
    >required to perform adequately

I think this was covered above, but I did want to address this particularly engineering-centric perspective. There are supremely bad engineers-turned-PMs because they think PM is Eng+[some vague management-y ring they should try to catch]. (There are also supremely bad marketers-turned-PMs... but we all know that...) Don't get lulled into thinking that you can be a good PM merely because you're an engineer. [You'll suck and be frustrated. And companies have huge problems with people doing jobs they shouldn't be doing, so be an awesome engineer/developer and you will be richly rewarded.]

The worst part of being a PM is that you won't be as skilled as your audience. You'll propose features, but you won't be as good at development as the developers who'll develop them, the salespeople who'll sell them, the marketers who'll market them. But you need to be good enough in any domain to call bullshit on any of them because everyone will be a passive-aggressive sand-bagger when they don't like your requests. [Once, as a PM, I proposed a feature and then, since I also had SVN access, built it in 3 hours. Was approached as I was building the feature. The Dir Eng was telling another PM the feature would take 3 days to build. Sand-baggers suck and developers sand-bag, too...]