Ask HN: Move to product management at 35?

My experience so far: the role is very broad, and the responsibilities are -very- different across companies and products. The specifics depend on many things, like maturity/size/culture of your company, pricing of your product, whether or not it is open source, etc.

On one side of the spectrum you have PMs who are very close to the development teams, and you might still be contributing code regularly. You might be a sort of architect who also makes sure documentation is in order and who handles user feedback/discussions. These PMs are typically "user-focused", in that they try to improve the product for the end user.

On the other side you have a much more market-focused role (MBA type) where you'll do market analysis, pricing, marketing, sales materials, etc. You might see the dev team once a week, or maybe only the engineering managers. These PMs are typically "customer-focused", so targeting the buyers of the product (who might not be the actual end-user, but for example a CIO, depending on your market).

In any case: age/wisdom/maturity matters, it is not a junior role. You will also be in a lot of meetings. You will be the face of the product and you need to enjoy interacting with people.

edit: added the sentences about "user-focused" vs "customer-focused".

To me, what matters for the OP, is that you are actually a product person? In my experience too many people are just terrible at understanding their field, products, how to actually break down product problems to their basic pieces and build solutions up from there. Being able to trust their designers, ui/ux, engineers to take their vision and execute (or simply just being good at transferring the vision in their head to being executable by others.

If you're not great at the above, please don't try and shoehorn yourself into product management. I've had too many terrible product managers that should have been something entirely different in my day that just literally ruins years of people's lives.

If you are not interested / good at the above, I'd consider a more Project Management role, which is about figuring out how to take a team and turn them into a well-oiled machine that loves working together towards common goals.

In many places (like startups) the line between the two above obviously blurs, my only concern is moving into Product Management role that you're not fit for. I say this more in general for people thinking about this themselves - mostly because of all the Product / Project Managers I've seen, I'd say 2/10 of them I'd actually want to work with again (though they both had engineering backgrounds which works in your favor).

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