I’m relatively knew to SWE (5 YOE), but I’ve lost a lot of passion for my work.
I am thinking of switching to technical product management or maybe just managing, but was recently laid off so I have no company that I can switch to another team with.
Was looking for stories and advice. For anyone who has switched, what new roles have you enjoyed? Is it hard to land those roles with only engineering experience and no PM or managing experience? I am a dual citizen with US and EU, is it worth trying one over the other for the switch?
rsclient•1h ago
The simplest example of this: as a programmer, when your boss says to code a feature, you code it. But as a PM, you have to get a team to make it.
A PM's job is to figure out what the feature really is, and how complex or configurable it should be, and what the target audience is, and how you'll measure success. It also involves making sure that you feature works well with other features, and that your team is moving in the same direction as the rest of your company.
Be prepared, BTW, for the constant assumption that you became a PM because you couldn't hack it :-)
mr_00ff00•1h ago
When talking about a feature, am I doing basically high level system design? Similar to what a senior engineer does (aka this should be a cache, it’s best to change this to streaming so let’s remove the audit db, etc) or is it even more high level than that?
Also lol at the last line, never heard that but I can see why people might make the assumption.
rsclient•1h ago
No, you aren't doing that kind of high-level design. For example, I was the PM for the "connect to Wi-Fi via a QR code" feature in Windows (you're welcome!). As PM, my job was to :
- demonstrate that this was "thing" people would want to do - demonstrate that it slotted into the existing feature set (the existing Windows camera already reads QR codes, so we just had to use their existing hoooks) - do a quick evaluation of the WIFI: protocol (which, BTW, sucks; it's one of the worst standards I've ever seen) - do an evaluation of the overall market (like, what do other operating systems do)
There was also some discussions with the Windows Wi-Fi team for how to store the connection data since it wasn't a perfect fit for the our existing connection store, plus a security evaluation. You won't do anything about caches or streaming except that they will naturally fall out of your spec.
You'll learn a ton about writing convincing documents, how to find users and partners, tracking schedules, and stuff