Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

There's also "Product Owner" and "Business Owner". And other overlapping titles too. Often driven by things like SAFe.

I wish! I suspect I’d be good at it, but I have no idea how to get a PM job as a mid-career person with no useful network. I have 10 years experience in marketing, project/team management in nonprofits (good network in that industry) and a few years experience writing code too as a freelancer (but with some decent size projects and clients).

Admittedly, I haven’t tried too hard because the freelance work is very comfortable, but every time Ive applied for a PM role it’s been a total bust.

Product owner/manager often works out fine as an informal position, where certain people in leadership roles are making decisions because they have an excellent aptitude for doing such; they especially have the ability to understand and empathize with their user base.

That works fine until it stops working, and then it works horribly, because engineers have asserted themselves as antagonistic product owners: I know what customers want! And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.

I didn't even realize how important this role was until I was working with people who clearly had no business asserting themselves into it, and I'd rather have someone less technical doing it than an engineer who is awful at it.

Basically my experience as well, what I'd like to add is that the best product managers I've ever worked with had good taste and also an intuition to balance good taste with the constraints of where they are working at, both market and company.

On the other hand I've seen atrocious data-oriented PMs which get so hyper-focused on metrics that completely lose the sense of taste, their vision is completely clouded by whatever KPIs they want to reach, lacking the ability to re-assess those metrics if they get in the way of making a good product. Some products don't see a change in metrics easily, it might accrue over time and only a strong, enduring vision can get business people over that hump.

There was another post a while ago, that showed how all the money in Tech was gathering people from all other professions like Finance, Law, etc. And that's how tech workforces ballooned in the last decade, and exploded during the pandemic. Now a lot of that is being dialed down, with cost controls.

But, it's a result of where the money lies. And has been done in industries and periods past. Tech realized that every company needs to be honing their product strategy, it's not cool that your tech is awesome, but you need sell it. I think this group structure is more useful than the legacy agile/ with a scrum master model. PMs can steer the ship and handle all the roles of a business analyst, scrum master, and to some degree maybe even merge with an engineering manager (might be going towards that), but perhaps it was a good idea to separate engineering and product/business decisions.