Product Management - a Career Path for a Machiavellian Developer
As a developer, I want to know if I should pivot to a career in product, so as to maximize my future career earnings.
Hello Product Folk,
Originally, this post was intended as a guest post for a developer blog. The lead has gone quiet, so I decided to share it for you all to enjoy here.
Cheers,
WB
Product Management - An Alternative Career Path
Becoming a professional software engineer requires some upkeep. New languages become the norm, new design paradigms catch on like wildfire, and new infrastructure technology is perpetually being developed. It requires you to keep a pulse on the technology scape to keep your skillset “fresh”. Add the fact that many of you are working multiple remote developer roles these days, and the need to keep up accelerates.
The most effective boss I ever had, a man now a tech executive for an industry-known unicorn, quit being a developer some years back because he didn’t feel like having to keep up with new programming languages as they came about.
The Role he switched to? Technical Product Management and its made him boatloads of money in his career.
In my time as a product manager, there’s been one clear trend I observed. The very BEST product managers had some experience as a developer. It’s not for everyone, but for a subset of developers reading this, product management could be the best decision you make to maximize your earnings.
Primer - What is Product Management?
Product Management simply put, is the middle ground between the engineering teams and the rest of the business. Evolving out of the Agile Manifesto, as commercial software development grew and grew, the need for someone grew for someone who could be involved in all aspects of the development process beyond coding as tech companies reached massive scale. Activities such as:
Soliciting the needs of the end-users for future features
Setting the strategic direction of the product to capture more marketshare
Aiding in go-to-market needs of launching a new product to support all other business operations associated with software
Ex-developers thrive in this role because, after soliciting the needs of the business unit, PMs are meant to break down the work into organized and digestible chunks of effort. They then collaborate with their developer counterparts to forecast and execute new features that solve the problems identified. Understanding how the dev teams actually function makes this process smooth and efficient.
The Benefits of Being a Product Manager
Innate to the role of a product manager is to be one of the most visible contributors in a tech company. As such, if you are savvy in your approach to corporatism, it positions you perfectly to consolidate power and resources for the most critical junctures of a company’s lifecycle.
A Product Manager who has proven to deliver regularly gets tapped to lead new initiatives and teams. In my own career, I’ve overnight seen a board flip corporate strategy overnight, and the next day I had 3 additional new dev teams working on my projects. I was successful with these teams and parlayed that success into an 80% raise and an off-cycle promotion next cycle well ahead of the norm.
Additionally, Product Managers are responsible for the work a dev team executes. That means, so long as your engineers are churning out working, useful code, no one really cares what you are up to. You are not assigned a ticket, with people checking in on your progress. You propose a roadmap of features to be developed over a period of time, then communicate the progress against that roadmap. I’m constantly fucking off for the random afternoons to take care of my WiFi business because my teams are well organized and churning out results. The amount of autonomy a Product Manager is given can be tremendous.
What Product Manager Needs to Succeed
At its heart, being a product manager is tantamount to being an information broker. You are expected to know and speak to regularly
What the end users want and need
What the development status is for any feature your dev teams are working on
What industry trends are occurring
What your competitors are up too
Ideas on what to build out in the near, medium, and long-term future
Product Managers are turned to for answers. Half the battle is simply to be able to speak clearly and concisely, to any topic or problem that comes up in the operations of a business.
People want a confident and curious product manager. The reason is as a PM, you are the “Face” behind the product you own. For better or for worse, if anyone has anything to say about your product, they come to you. The end result of this is an amplification effect - you get a disproportionate amount of credit when your product gets traction. You also are the main person to blame if your product flounders.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
It’s not for everyone, but a product manager is a great career choice for those with an appetite for calculated risk in a corporate setting. You can win BIG.
Are You a Developer Who Should Pivot to Product Management?
I’ll be frank, most of you developers should stay developers.
Product management is a very different type of work and it’s certainly not for those of you who are focused on 2 or 3 jobs focused on minimizing engagement with others
Who is it for then?
My former boss mentioned above is a great example. He was a developer, and also played D1 hockey. By playing team sports, he was used to working with a team, towards a common goal, and barking out orders. An understanding of systems, code, and the ability to lead men are the makings of a killer Product Manager.
Product Management is for those of you who are ready to pro-actively engage who they must. Success means you’ve successfully taken the lead on where your product is going. You hit a stride when everyone, from Sales to CS to Development, has faith and bought into the direction you put forth.
What You Stand to Gain In Pursuing a Career in Product
In the case of my former boss, during one of the more chaotic moments in our company’s history made one of the largest powerplays I’ve witnessed.
After a 100mm+ acquisition, the board decided clean house of executives, and replace the CTO and CPO with the execs of the newly acquired company. This was accompanied by a complete 180 in strategy, and a new roadmap was forced down everyone’s throats.
The new roadmap was frankly, borderline impossible. 3 years’ worth of work needed to be consolidated into 6 months. Anyone who touched any part of the changes required thought the new timeline impossible.
Not my former boss. He had institutional knowledge of the teams, the architecture, and the company itself. He had reservations personally, but he was the only person capable of stitching together an even plausible plan to execute this roadmap change.
The new guard liked his plan, and with him being the only person who proposed the path forward, he had the company over a barrel. He got double promoted to a tech executive role and was given free rein over the entire product and tech org, restructuring teams as he saw fit to execute his vision. It was a site to see.
The Best PM I’ve Ever Seen
The best product manager I ever worked with, however, was not a product manager at all. They’re the CTO where I’m currently employed. They built the intial MVP that launched the business solo over a week’s time. This was the first iteration of the product for a company now valued north of $100mm+. When they hired me as the data product lead, I was told “So, I’ve been the Data Product Manager, and I’m looking to you to replace me with a full team”.
They had the ability to code work products (developer skills), the ability to diagnose the market for needs (product skills), and the ability to spec out and deliver an MVP (tech and product skills combined).
This is a deadly combination for someone looking to build.
Conclusion
Product will provide you the opportunity to develop skills useful for starting your own WiFi business or provide opportunities to skip steps in the corporate ladder through cunning and strategy not provided in other types of roles.
Think Product Management could be for you?
Consider a paid subscription to Pivot to Product, the internet’s best insider guide to all the dirty details of technical product management.