1.What is Product Management?

Product Management (PM), also just called "Product", is a job function within technology that is typically responsible for owning a product or part of a product. At a small company or for a product leader, that may include a large suite of products. At a big tech company or for more junior PM's, that may be a very small component on a very scaled product that impacts billions of people.

2. Why should I become a PM?

If you want to get into tech, the most impactful roles are typically Product Management and Engineering (and sometimes Sales). If you prefer to build stuff, go into PM or Engineering, if you prefer to sell stuff go into Sales. When deciding between Product and Engineering, you have to think about what you enjoy doing more and are best at. Engineers in a post LLM/Agentic coding world, typically have to be comfortable at coding, understanding large code bases, infrastructure and system design, and learning extremely fast to stay on top of the latest new tech. PM’s have to have a decent understanding of what an Engineer is doing, but will be focused much more on product strategy and vision, identifying key user segments, prioritizing user problems, developing success metrics and roadmaps, communicating with leaders, gaining alignment with stakeholders, and owning end to end product outcomes.

3. What other job functions should I consider?

There are other ways to create value within a tech company. Builders are typically either PMs, engineers, or designers. Most consumer tech doesn’t need a lot of selling but complex, mission critical business to business software often does. Other roles highly successful people often consider if they went into management consulting after school are Strategy and Operations (Strat/Ops) or Program Management (PgM). Both Strat/Ops and PgM roles often can transition to PM roles more easily since these roles have some overlap. If they went into investment banking after undergrad, they often consider Corporate Development (CorpDev), Investor Relations (IR), or Finance, Planning (FPA), and Accounting. The challenges with these other job functions though is that they tend to be farther away from the builders so, depending on the role, they may not have as much decision making power. Additionally, there are few roles and lots of high caliber people with relevant experience seeking those few spots. For PM’s, however, most companies need a large number of them, but there aren’t a lot of people with relevant experience (mostly because the industry has grown exponentially so quickly).

4. Who makes a good PM?

There is a wide range of different types of people that can excel in product. The general skills that are needed in most roles are pretty similar to management consulting or leadership roles. Most of the job is working with, influencing, competing, and communicating with people. Organizational and project management skills are important for most roles although many teams have dedicated Program Managers for a lot of this. Most importantly, PMs need to be able to work with many different types of people and job families to get stuff done.

Jack of all traits. PMs need to be able work with:

UX researchers to identify user segments to target and potential problems to solve

Engineers to figure out how they might solve those problems and how much effort each solution might take and to actually build solutions

Data Science to estimate the size and severity of those problems

Strategy/finance/business partners to understand the general positioning of the company, its products, and its business model

Program Management to actually execute on the plan and build stuff

Everyone to think and align on product objectives and success metrics to measure their products ability to complete those objectives and solve those problems

Everyone to combine all of this information, prioritize which problems to solve and the solutions to solve them, get alignment from leaders, and then go make sure the solutions get built

Communication and influence. Additionally, in most organizations, especially big ones, you can’t just go do whatever you want. Many people say being a PM is like being a mini CEO but without any “authority” but that is pretty far from reality for most Product roles. In most roles, you have to gain alignment from your Engineering partners first but typically you also need to get alignment from your leaders and other Product teams when there are dependencies on other job functions. Depending on the company, this can involve a large number of presentation and doc reviews. Given this, to be a good PM, you have to be able to communicate and effectively influence others to gain alignment on your product vision and strategy and to accomplish your objectives.

Product specific expertise. Additionally, the most important skills depend a lot on the product itself. The most important thing for a PM is to understand their users really well. For a health care product this might understanding the dynamics of the industry (doctors, insurance, patients, etc). For a consumer product, this might be understanding the psychology of a teenager. Other products might be purely backend APIs or used by software engineers.

One other important skill across all of this is to be able to have enough of an understanding of the technology that powers the product to work well with engineers. This means understanding what they are working on, what types of solutions are easy or hard to build and why.

Adaptability. Throughout history, new technologies often cause and massively accelerate disruption. Those that are best at adapting will thrive while others will struggle. "It is not the strongest, or the smartest species that survive, but those best at adapting" - attributed to Charles Darwin. This is especially true in technology as it is at the epicenter of change.

5. Why shouldn't you become a PM?

If you aren’t motivated by a fast changing environment, then Product (and the technology industry) is probably not a great fit. Most products require some technical understanding of how software works so if the idea of code scares you, then Product might not make sense. From a location perspective, although there are many remote Product jobs, the career path can be somewhat limited for PM’s outside of core cities (ex. SF Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, etc.) with the SF Bay Area still being the largest hub.

6. What type of a company should I join as a PM?

You want to join a company where PM’s are empowered to identify, prioritize, and solve user problems. There are many companies where PM’s are not empowered so you may have to avoid certain companies. Many companies for instance have product ideas and prioritization that are entirely passed down from the top. As a result, PMs end up spending most of their time implementing the product vision of their leadership and are often only responsible for implementation or very minor product decisions. This can actually be ok if the leaders are very strong, but might limit your PM experience until much later in your career. In non-tech companies, the leaders making the decisions are often not even in tech (ex. At a bank, it might be someone in risk management, at Walmart it might be someone in charge of physical stores). This can be more challenging as even Product leaders at the top may not be empowered.

7. What is the PM career path?

At most tech companies, Product is a distinct job family that ladders up to the Chief Product Officer. Other companies, such as Amazon, have shifted to a “builder” roles where leaders that manage more than a dozen people have to manage multiple job families: typically Engineering and Product Management, but can also be any combination, including job families such as Data Science, Design, Marketing, Sales, Operations, etc. Since vibe coding has become so easy, some companies (ex. many start ups or even internal innovation labs at Google) have even shifted towards Individual Contributor (IC) builder roles. In these IC builder roles, PM’s are responsible for vibe coding prototypes and even deploying changes in production. Engineers may be more responsible for code reviews, big picture infrastructure design, services architecture, compute/storage/resource management, etc. As a result, the career path of a PM can be very different at different companies.

8. How hard is it to get into Product? How to get your first job in Product?

Since many people switch jobs very frequently in Product to chase the next big thing (ex. within 2 years), hiring managers are reluctant to hire people that require any real training. Although an ivy league educated, ex-consultant might be a great long term fit for a PM role, it may take them some time to learn how to become effective. Even when in the Product job family, many hiring managers are extremely specific with the skill set that they are looking for. If you have been making salads with lettuce for 5 years but they are hiring for a “Kale Salad Maker”, then they might pass you up for someone with experience in Kale salads. That being said, the most important thing, as in most industries, and as is true for most non-entry level jobs, is networking. Most hiring managers prefer to hire someone that they know and trust or someone with a highly favorable referral from a trusted colleague. As a result, if you are looking to break in, or looking to switch job functions, your best bet is to either make friends, go to a company where you can work with a leader who will sponsor your job family change, or be lucky enough to enter a PM rotational program out of undergrad.

9. Should you join a big "brand" name company or a hot new start-up?

In many “industries”, there are “brand” name entities that signal to others in that industry that you are elite, the best of the best. For example, McKinsey in management consulting, Goldman Sachs in investment banking, or Harvard in higher education. These institutions are elite year after year, decade after decade, and generation after generation. This is because the industries don’t change very quickly, there is a very structured and defined recruitment cycle, and there are somewhat objective and very selective criteria to get in. These factors don’t exist in tech. Tech moves too quickly and the most innovative people can be extremely fickle when an organization becomes too bureaucratic. If you read a Product Management book in 2000, the most exclusive company to get a job at might have included AOL; in 2010 it might have included Yahoo.

Today, the large tech companies tend to pay the most (ex. Meta has made headlines for paying top engineers $100M+) and tend to have great work/life balance (ex. working only 40 hours per week is often standard). As a result, they often attract top talent. However, most large companies can become organizationally complex and when top talent spends too much time in alignment meetings or providing updates to stakeholders and leaders, they may get discouraged and leave. Historically, large companies also typically offered job stability as a key benefit, however, since the tech winter of 2022 and the recurrent headlines of AI related layoffs, this has become less of a reason to stay in big tech. Additionally, most big tech companies aren’t growing that fast (ex. less than 10% per year) so upward mobility can be slower than it was for people who were there 10+ years ago.

Start-ups on the other hand offer a very different value proposition. When a start-up grows exponentially, there is often more upside and more opportunity to grow your scope extremely fast, moving from an Individual Contributor to a manager of hundreds of people within a handful of years. Start-ups also typically allow for more job function flexibility and ownership (i.e. less stakeholder alignment; less fighting for scope). This is often a reason why top talent (especially engineers) likes working for start-ups - they can spend more of their time building cool stuff and working on tough, intellectually stimulating problems, instead of spending it in meetings and gaining alignment. Given the importance of the company’s success for anyone and everyone to do well, start-ups often tend to be much more collaborative and team oriented. Everyone is working towards the same common goal. However, many start-ups will require you to work 60+ hours per week and the cash compensation is often lower than big tech companies, so if the company doesn’t succeed your total compensation can be much less. Additionally, the company culture of each start-up can be extremely different and the CEO can often either make the company an amazing place to work and an extremely toxic one. In summary, the range of outcomes for a start-up are often much larger.

10. Why should I become a PM now?

You may have heard the expression that “software is eating the world”. Well if that is true PM’s and engineers are at the center of that. Even before the most recent AI boom, large tech companies were growing and adding value at massive scale with multiple companies exceeding a trillion dollar market capitalization.

Product Management is a relatively new job function that has grown exponentially in importance as the technology industry has grown exponentially in the past 30 years. In 1996, the top 15 most valuable tech companies were worth less than $1T. In 2026, the top 15 were worth $34T+.

If you look at the long history of industries and businesses over the past couple of centuries or even millennia, you will find that at various points in time, certain industries grow and become very impactful while others shrink. Many of the business leaders of the 19th/20th centuries are still known today because of their contributions and shaping of growing industries: Rockefeller (Oil), Carnegie (Steel), Vanderbilt (Railroads & Shipping), and Ford (Cars). Today, the 8 richest people in the world are all self-made tech entrepreneurs: Musk, Page, Brin, Bezos, Dell, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Huang. As Warren Buffet once said, “When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” In other words, even the smartest and hardest working individuals will likely get burnt by a bad industry. On the other end of the spectrum, in tech for example, you hear people like Sheryl Sandberg say “it doesn’t matter what seat you have on the ship, as long as it is a rocketship [and not a sinking ship.]”.

With the advent of AI, engineers have now become 10x+ more productive and it is far easier for PM’s to build their own prototypes or even become engineers themselves as needed. In the short term, this may mean that you actually need less people (one of the reasons why there have been layoffs in 2026). However, in the longer term, this just means that the value each person can create and the number of products that are built can be 100x what was possible before. The capabilities of technology have now improved in a once in a century kind of way. This means that the number and extent of disruptions across different industries will be massive and we are just at the beginning of that new super cycle. Since Product Managers and Engineers are at the center of that disruption and value creation cycle, they are well positioned to create value and impact.