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

TL;DR -- The ability, innate or learned, to reason about products is extremely helpful. Being good at working with others, conflict resolution and prioritization are critical. Best tip is to begin working on these skills and start framing yourself as product centric (on LinkedIn, within your company, etc.) and make the leap when it feels doable.

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My career was mainly in engineering. I started while I was still in college and left college early to enter the work place (it became easy to get a programming job w/o a degree in the late 90s).

I've always been interested in building things (including businesses). It started when I was in elementary school and I would buy zots candy for $.02 and sell them for $.05 out of my locker. Anyways, I went on to start 2 startups (1 failed and the other had a soft landing).

PMing came natural to me because of my experience starting the startups. I didn't have any formal experience doing it but companies like Google will look past that.

My engineering background has been very helpful but the most helpful was my ability to think and reason about products.

I would argue that the above aspects can come from any discipline. I've recruited Pm's (via internal transfer) who worked in accounting/finance as well as one who worked a supply chain position.

Regarding my path, i also didn't follow a standard trajectory. I had been building websites (sometimes programing, sometimes writing content) with friends for a few years in college as a hobby. I stopped attending college and began a 4yr career as a professional gamer. During this time, I continued to work on side projects with friends, usually in an 'editor in chief' capacity for a small blog or website.

When my pro gaming stint ended (short answer: it was not a consistent enough income stream as most revenue came from tournaments), I was offered a job as community manager of one of the tournaments I competed in. They hired me because of my regular posts about the rules and games and felt I would be good at representing the community's needs. I went back to school (studying creative writing) and worked this remotely.

From here, a friend who i met via working as community manager recommended me from an open editor in chief position at a small (unfunded) startup. In my first meeting, they showed me the redesign they were working on and I asked a lot of questions about their thought process and why they did certain things that didn't make sense to me. The designers loved this feedback (they had never received anything actionable before) and we ended up meeting regularly. This company was acquired (small talent acquisition) and the CEO of the new company was excellent at mentoring people and quickly told me (based on what I was already doing) that I should be a PM.

In summary.. The best way to become a PM is to start doing it. Find side projects and contribute however you can (writing, coding, design, customer support, etc) and while you're there, ask lots of questions to try to deeply understand the product, the users, and the decisions that the organizers take.

Fundamentally you want to answer (or help them answer if they can't) three questions: 1. Why does this product exist in the world? 2. What does success look like? 3. How do we get there?

Happy to do a 20m call if you have further questions, my email is in my profile.

As a freelancer you usually have a lot of discretion in what you build so you develop a sensitivity about cost/benefit tradeoffs and quality of deliverables. These are essential for the PM role. In larger organizations, roles tend to become more specialized and therefore keeping a broad perspective is very important.

In my experience, the background in engineering has made it easy to gain credibility with technical people. I have seen the same sentiment in some of the other comments and it's hard to overstate it.

My key base skill is speaking multiple languages: the engineering language, the design language, the people language and the business language. That can be applied to many things, PM being one of them. If you are strictly an engineer, gain experience and exposure to other things.

Background: I don't think I picked product management, it sort of picked me. When I was a really junior engineer I worked in a small team environment with much more senior engineers. We didn't have product management support, so someone needed to talk to the customer and figure out what they needed, and then later have the hard conversation when we were slipping our date. That ended up being me. Someone needed to document what we were doing, that was me. At the end of the day when we had little management support, someone had to represent the needs of the team and hold the team together during an aggressive corporate downsizing. The team looked to me to do that. I sort of drifted into this role without ever being asked to do it. I loved coding, but turns out I liked solving business problems just as much. My path to proper product management went through program management at Microsoft which was a bit of a half-way house. Good customer passion but more focused on execution than on the health of the business.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but I hope is helpful: what are the attributes I have seen of successful PMs? * Have good technical instincts. You don't necessarily have to code well but you need to smell credible to engineers and not have them flip the bozo bit on you. I watched a product guy argue that we should figure out how to reduce latency between global data centers and then someone kindly point out that speed of light was the problem at hand, and we really couldn't do much about it. Don't be that guy, you will never come back from that point. * Champion the customer. Product managers have to really 'get' their product deeply, understand it, use it, live with it. They need to be able to see it they way a customer sees it and represent the hiezen-customer to the team. The primary work product of the PM is the PRD (product requirements document) and the customer should shine through. * Own your business. It isn't enough to build neat technology, that people love, but if no one knows about it or you can't sell it you are wasting your time. Know your sales people, know your marketing strategy, understand the pricing model. Make sure they all get what the product does and is good for. * Be the janitor before you try to be the CEO. There are a million things a team needs to do. The product manager needs to fill the gaps. Win by doing the things the engineers can't or don't want to do, but don't 'wall paper' over problems with the team structure. Remember however that doing a gap job well indefinitely gets in the way of creating high functioning teams. You need to work your way out of a gap filling job. * Knowledge is currency. To lead, you have to have something and see something the engineers don't. Understand your competition, use their products, speak to a lot of customers, bring that knowledge back to the team and they will start to trust you. * Stay out of execution: you are not a project manager. The eng function should not be babies, they need to hire their own project managers to run their scrums, organize execution, etc. If things go well for your product you are going to be talking to customers, negotiating partnerships, etc just as the team starts to hit an inflection curve in execution, you can't afford to be trapped in the office running their processes.

Hope that helps.