What are my career options after product management?

Growing as a product manager Leadership
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I’ve been a PM for 10 years now and I’m just not feeling it anymore. Love my salary, love the feeling of learning customers’ needs. Hate documentation (not sure that’s ever escapable) and always changing priorities that we have to jump on immediately.

What are non PM positions to move to after PM? What skillset does this translate to? Even non-software/tech?

Feeling like I need a change. Thanks for any help

2 Likes
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Good questions. This is what I have seen in my experience -

Business side:

  • product marketing
  • general management (CEO / COO / CRO / CGO / head of a BU)
  • strategy & ops
  • corp dev
  • biz dev / partnerships
  • b2b tech customer success / account management
  • VC
  • venture backed startup entrepreneurship
  • traditional entrepreneurship
  • management consulting
  • digital consulting
  • b2b tech sales
  • b2b tech professional services consultant / solutions architect
  • technical program management
  • wealth management (if you know a lot of successful IPO lottery winners / execs @ big Cos)

Technical side:

  • software engineer
  • product designer
  • data science & analytics
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SWE after PM. Really?

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Yep, not particularly strange if they skilled up. People have made more bizarre transitions into SWE. It depends on the technical background of PM, but in most cases would be strange if you don’t have Software Engineering experience before.

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Questions like these are always difficult because I don’t think there’s one skill set or personality that covers all or even most product managers. So it’s really going to depend on your own personal interests and skills.

I have very little technical knowledge when it comes to engineering. I can speak intelligently with developers about most of the things I need to discuss with them, but I cannot do what they do at all. Some product managers can.

I’ve met product managers who came from marketing, from sales, from UX, from research positions, customer support… the list goes on and on.

One memorable career path is a friend who went UX designer → product manager → switched careers to newspaper page designer → head of advertising for a newspaper.

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I think it’s more about where does your interest lie. Not only for PMs but anyone in general.

I am in the same boat and for more or less the same reasons. I don’t get excited thinking about product management anymore (been in the industry for 7 years).

In my case, I have a huge creative side that has been suppressed for a long time. So to explore more I started a YouTube channel, an Instagram page, and currently building my own product.

I think you can go in any direction from here. A lot of options have already been listed below. It all depends on what you are looking for.

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