Should I switch from Engineering to PM role?
(disclaimer- There are a lot of different pivots on which one can answer this question, and this is just one of them, the one that worked for me when I made the switch few years back. )
First, let’s dis-ambiguate the space a little, there are atleast three common PM roles that we see:
Product Manager Role, Project Manager, and Program Manager role. Along side these three there is a TPM role to which i will dedicate a separate section all together.
Please start here to understand the difference in these three key roles.
The best answer to this question is – another question, and only way to answer that is honest, introspection. You need to be brutally honest with yourself though – Ask yourself, why did this thought come to you ? Why do you think you want to be a PM ? Write it down, or think about it and then come back continuing to read –
Is it because –
- Your last review sucked ?
- Your friends became PM’s and they seem to be doing well ? You think they were incompetent, and now they are making more / getting better reviews / seem happier ?
- You cannot compete with younger & faster dev’s in your org ?
- You cannot cope up with ever expanding tech scene and feel outdated ?
- You think, PMs don’t do anything anyways, so I also want to get some time for my interests and hobbies while making money ?
- Being a PM you will grow faster or collect more Patent cubes or make you go to conferences or out of country trips ? (yes, I have heard this one)
- In your mind, being a PM is the only way you can design things and influence product changes ? (ever heard of s/w architects / EM’s ?)
If you answered yes to anyone of the questions above, then you are in it for the wrong reason, go back to Visual studio and get back to checking in some good quality code.
If your answer does not contain the word Customer or Ambiguity in it, then again, you are not being honest with yourself.
Being a PM is indeed harder than it might seem especially to those who have only seen it from the periphery. Problem statements are vague, there are often times, no right answers and engineers don’t give a rats a$$ to you because of #5 above. Take one of my current projects for example. Problem statement was: make sure that our current org is compatible with new DoD Compliance requirement REQ1. The more I kept digging around, I kept untangling dependencies between various cross group teams, I kept peeling the never ending onion and am still not done with it, after being 2 months into it. Not a single line of code written.
I will tell you that though, I am loving doing that – and that attitude is what makes all the difference.
If you get in for the wrong reasons, you will, –I repeat– you will repent / panic and lead to your own downfall. Most PM’s I know are not designing Cortana’s and HoloLens, they are submerged in data, powerpoints and excel sheets.
If you do not champion the customers voice at every possible design decision and every possible bug fix, you either need to imbibe that attitude in your red blood cells, or not do this. You need to get that ‘aha’ and ‘wow’ when you are able to identify, what a customer really needs, as compared to what he thinks he needs. That joy, which a tester gets when he finds an obscure race condition bug or the joy when a dev isolates that small part of the algorithm which alone was taking 30% of entire execution time. You enjoy being the person where the buck stops. Being the salesman & marketing person of the team when a dev asks a question or a random person from an unknown org pings you in the middle of the meeting. Owning the whole piece – end to end. Being able to get in deep, and then come out occasionally to make sure that work is still relevant. Being able to go broad or deep depending on what’s needed by the team.
Make a difference if you do decide to come over. Don’t get in and be ordinary. This role has a responsibility to it, just like shipping code has towards a large scale production app. There are a ton of resources on quora/slack/youtube/udemy/pluralsight and all on how to do it. I will not waste our time on giving you all that info but my intent with spending last 20 mins was to make sure that you are aware of why you are doing what you are, and are committed to it.
All the best !