should be trivial. Just apply for them. My company does product owner/product management as a professional services job and we love ex technical people. They make great product owners.
We would probably hire you right now :)
Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#12The only/ or best option you have is to speak with current managers, and go higher up.
Unfortunately, there is no way to pass it... it would be a waste of time to try and hack it :)
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#13should be trivial. Just apply for them. My company does product owner/product management as a professional services job and we love ex technical people. They make great product owners. We would probably hire you right now :)
I’m curious. What’s your company? I work in software consulting and often find that our enterprise clients are unwilling to hire product managers.
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#14should be trivial. Just apply for them. My company does product owner/product management as a professional services job and we love ex technical people. They make great product owners. We would probably hire you right now :)
I’d be interested in reaching out to your company if that is the case. Would you mind messaging me what it is?
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#15I run a product team. I've successfully hired one person doing this transition, but that was to be a technical product manager. For everything else, I would skip your resume. If you want me to be interested, you need to be a PM for a year plus somewhere else. My rationale: 1. as expensive and painful as eng hires are to get wrong, they have nothing on PM hires. 2. I have no idea if you actually like the work, and nei…
Thanks for your feedback as someone who hires for these sorts of roles; I appreciate it.
Here is my feedback to two of your points:
1. Totally acknowledge the 3-6 month ramp up time for a product, but engineers can easily take that long to be productive and fluent around the technology stack, so I would argue that unless you are hiring a domain specialist, a generalist of any sort will take that time and be a risk for around that long.
2. I acknowledge your PS and I intentionally did not this post a huge backstory because that is what an interview is for, and the point I was making by asking this question was how to even get to that point.
3. As another poster indicated (and as I am aware since I’ve been working for awhile now); obviously it’s easier to make a non-standard transition in your current organization, but it isn’t possible if your org/team doesn’t hire for these roles or if you’ve joined a team where there is already someone entrenched in that role. So in that regard, I believe going across-orgs is probably an easier move, and appreciate everyone’s advice in that direction.
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#16I've only seen this as an internal move, which is how I did it. Ask to take ownership of a project, even a small one. Do it successfully for at least one delivery. Learn the technical ins and outs and the political relationships within the organization. Become known as the $PROJECT person. Every organization handles projects differently so learn and use the specific lingo and process in yours.
Once you do that, you can formally ask for the role.
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#17Product Manager is a term that was borrowed from Industrial Manufacturing. Just like Software Engineers are not necessarily “Engineers” in a regulated profession sense, Product Managers in Software are basically glorified Requirements Analysts. What used to be senior Requirements Analysts during 1990s are Product Managers now.
Basically you need to “speak the made up software Product Management lingo” watch YouTube videos. There are literally 1000s of hours of them with everyone and their grandma blathering their version of product management.
Basically the first step is start to think you are a product manager. Read the low quality crap your current product managers produced. It will turn out not to be to rocket science.
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#18I run a product team. I've successfully hired one person doing this transition, but that was to be a technical product manager. For everything else, I would skip your resume. If you want me to be interested, you need to be a PM for a year plus somewhere else. My rationale: 1. as expensive and painful as eng hires are to get wrong, they have nothing on PM hires. 2. I have no idea if you actually like the work, and nei…
Thanks for your feedback as someone who hires for these sorts of roles; I appreciate it. Here is my feedback to two of your points: 1. Totally acknowledge the 3-6 month ramp up time for a product, but engineers can easily take that long to be productive and fluent around the technology stack, so I would argue that unless you are hiring a domain specialist, a generalist of any sort will take that time and be a risk fo…
we're gonna disagree on the eng team -- the blast radius of a bad PM is wasting the time of $2.5 - $3m/year of payroll, not to mention the opportunity cost. Not sure if this is helpful, but that's the concern that the hiring manager has, at least when I talk to peers.
re, the ps -- if you've invested time, you should present that before the interview (at least in my case).
In your case, maybe you could have some luck digging up a manager who needs a pm (or even an EM who doesn't have a strong pm) and transferring to that team? Your other bet may be early startups who are more free to take a flyer on someone, esp an api-heavy startup. ala zapier or competitors. Or hell, start a company; that's how I became a pm.
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#19Judt start doing it in your current role. Be the person who sees the end to end, knows how to deliver it, and show others how to do it. The person writing tickets probably is tired of doing that. Help him out. Make connections with business side. Explain to them the technical nuance in human terms. Work the role. Next time when recruiting, tell your story. The title doesnt matter - principal engineer, tech lead, requirements ninja, all the same
Re: Ask HN: What is the secret to getting a product owner job as an engineer?
#20In my experience as someone who made the transition from engineer to PM and have seen many others do it, an "official" transition within a company is hard-to-impossible if your company doesn't explicitly have a track for that. (Megacorp tech companies often do, mid-sized and below often don't.) If you're a good engineer, they don't want to give up your proven skills for an unproven lateral move. What I've seen happen…
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