Ask HN: Product Managers, how did you get there and what's your background?

We actually DO have junior PM roles -- "Associate Product Manager" positions that are designed to ease people into the PM path and let them grow into the full skill set.

Key skills are ruthless prioritization (project manager skills) plus product vision. A great PM can look at a bunch of information (our current assets, market trends, internal and external data, etc), develop a vision of what our future should look like, convert it into a practical roadmap to get us there, and herd all the cats to actually make it happen.

I studied computer science as an undergrad but was pretty rubbish as a coder to be honest. I spent 4 years at Intel in their technical sales program, which was a nice way to learn business skills and particularly B2B selling skills in a non-salesy environment. They also paid for graduate work in MS&E at Stanford which was a nice bonus. By luck, I had a friend of a friend at Google and sent in a resume and got a call back to join their associate program. Spent 4 years there, mostly as a Product Manager in ads.

I think having a technical degree was quite useful to build trust with engineering. Particularly with very talented engineers you need to develop a level of trust to make decision making collaborative, where you can synthesize the need from users/internal teams and then work with engineering to understand tradeoffs, timing constraints and critical features vs longer term features. I'm a lousy dev but it was helpful to be able to run mapreduce jobs to do analysis and present that back to engineering when making decisions, or doing the one-off jobs that they didn't find exciting but were useful to making their jobs smoother. And that credibility goes a long way - developers are far more willing to work above and beyond if they trust you're asking them to do valuable things that won't be discarded on a whim by the organization.

The one key skill IMO for anyone in PM is managing without authority. As a PM you rarely have direct reports (except other PMs) so you need to often shape the direction of sales, marketing, eng and support without actual authority over those teams, so it requires a mindset to find compromise constantly but then also fight when necessary or at least lean on people for help that don't necessarily have you as a priority in their own job. You're the intern CEO - you often are the gatekeeper for all sorts of things left and right, but you can't actually compel anyone to do anything except with persuasion and logic.

Also you have to balance in-office time with getting out and talking to stakeholders. I travelled to almost every remote office we had and tried to meet w/ salespeople and customers. It's not always high ROI but it builds relationships and creates a further rapport that comes in handy again - I would often meet publishers outside the US and take feedback from them that was really helpful and we wouldn't have otherwise thought of in Mountain View.

After PM I got into venture capital and it's a similar skillset of soft management. I think PMs make good VCs later in life. Being a board director is similar in a way that you have the ability to do things but if you need to command things, the battle is probably already lost.

Product managers are responsible for dealing with roadmaps and timelines. Managing expectations is necessarily part of that job.

Add in agile practices where the PM may also be a PO directly managing a backlog and the line gets fuzzier still.

It's part of what makes that job so challenging, as you have to wear so many hats. It also makes the job very difficult to define, and I think, makes the question itself a little tough, since a PM in one org might be a very different role from a PM in another.