How to move to product management from technical roles
I often get questions about how I decided to become a product manager, and what I learned over the years being a PM at three startups — ClickHouse, Elastic, and ExtraHop. I shared a chronology of my career in a blog titled “My journey as a serial startup product manager” on clickhouse.com website. In the next few articles, I will share my answers to frequently asked questions I get from other product managers or folks that want to get into product management.
One question I get asked is — what do you do if you already work in another role in tech, but suddenly decide that you want to do product management?
If you are in a company that supports transfers between roles, I’d recommend exploring opportunities there, before exploring roles outside. The reason is — you have already established your reputation, and now it’s a matter of gaining and showing off transferable skills. I have seen and supported successful transfers to product management from sales engineering (or solution architecture), consulting, software development, and design. There are surely other paths, but those are the most common that I have seen. Some of the best PMs I have worked with have come from these backgrounds.
If you are in the field (consulting, training, solution architecture, etc..) consider helping define detailed requirements for a new feature already on the roadmap, bringing in specific examples from the customers you are working with. Connect product managers with these customers, but also write down and share your thoughts in a helpful way. In parallel, informally share your interest with a hiring manager you trust on the product side, and ask for coaching, as well as advance notice if they plan to open product management roles on their team.
If you are on the engineering side (software development, design, etc..) consider asking for more direct customer exposure by joining PMs or support on customer calls to observe and learn about user and market needs. If you work at an open source company, take initiative to support open source users by answering questions in forums, Slack, Github, etc.. The more you know about customers’ needs, the more ideas you’ll have on how to solve their problems. At that point, you can either make a business case for a new feature or product, or even quickly build a prototype to show the business what is possible.
If you don’t get a chance for a role change inside the current company, it’s perfectly valid to seek roles outside by applying for product management roles directly. One area of product management that is often a great fit for field engineers is ecosystem integrations or partner product management, because practical field experience often results in broader perspective compared to “career PMs” at bigger companies who have had to focus on a particular type of product or market. If you have a software development background, you may consider applying for “technical product management” roles that may have a much higher technical bar to meet and are often hard to fill with more traditional candidates that have less recent hands-on experience. Finally, if you are a designer or a user experience professional, you may be a great fit for a product that has complex user interactions as a big part of the scope.
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