Ask HN: Going into product management?

Depends on the company. There's a need for more people who actually understand more of the aspects of the roles across silos than just being good at your functional area and that's it. But it's horrifically company dependent and it's way different in enterprise where people still don't even know WTF product is outside of a few firms than in SF or NY startup land.

So define your target.

Your individual experience will vary with the company, but here's some generalities about product management.

First, product manager != people manager. Despite 'manager' in the title, a typical product manager is an 'individual contributor' with no direct reports, just like a typical developer. Every company's title structure is different and titles and reality are often disjoint, but you'll generally won't get to do people management until you're a 'director of product management' or at least a 'senior product manager'.

Being a product manager is similar to being a people manager in that you won't be doing any coding any more. If you want to code, stay a dev.

Early-stage startups generally don't need product managers - one of the founders is almost always the de facto product manager. So by becoming a product manger, you're effectively saying 'I don't ever want to work for extremely small startups', because those guys just aren't going to hire you. Be aware of that before you jump into it.

Salaries are generally the same as developer salaries - in some places a little higher, in some places a little lower, depending on how respected product management is at that organization. In my opinion, if you're just looking to get to an executive role and maximize your salary (and hey, nothing wrong with that), it's usually a bit easier to climb the ranks in product management. Although I can think of a few large companies where the opposite is true, generally competition is lighter and if you're good you'll get to advance more quickly. Note that 'good developer' does not necessarily mean 'good product manager'.

In some places product management has a lot of power and influence and the ability to really make strategic decisions on behalf of the company, and in other places they're overpaid administrative assistants doing meeting scheduling and filling out TPS reports. Whether you like it better or worse depends a whole lot on that.

Any specific questions, feel free to email me.

One thing I love about the product management role is that it exposes you to a much broader range of skills to learn (beyond product features and people management), including design, user behavior, as well as business aspects including go to market, sales strategy, pricing, etc. Just like a developer lead becomes the de-facto CTO for a product/start-up/business unit, the product manager becomes the de-facto CEO for the same.

Product management is an interesting position and will depend a lot on what kind of authority you possess. In certain cases you will incredible authority, while other times you have no actual power and are just an overseer over a given group of people who has to report to higher ups. Overall, project management is a people job, the people you manage and your relationship with them will determine your success. Its good to have a technical know how in PM, but if your people skills are not up to par your going to have an incredibly difficult job, especially the less formal authority you have.

Product management is definitely not people management. If anything, it is closest to UX, but also combines strategy and marketing.

In early-stage startups, the CEO is most often playing the product manager. 70% of a PM's job should be speaking to users, both new and existing (usability testing of built features).

In small startups, product management will likely be mixed with project management - you will probably have to manage the teams' Pivotal Tracker / Jira tickets. You will naturally work closely with UI/UX designers, filtering through user feedback. You're really the person that needs to know what your team should be building next and PM's generally head roadmap planning and releases.

You also really need to be across the data/SQL and understand exactly what features users are using, when and have a good idea of why. As a dev, this is where it would be to your advantage - being able to setup mixpanel/tracking events or even pull & analyze the raw data yourself is going to be a big advantage compared to other candidates.