I feel many comments here are confusing "Product" Management with "Project" Management. Many describing being a "people person" which isn't (in my eyes) a needed trait for a product manager, but is for a project manager. There are obviously social aspects of being a product manager, but much of it has to do with relaying what's in your head moreso than trying to manage people day-to-day.
To me, what matters for the OP, is that you are actually a product person? In my experience too many people are just terrible at understanding their field, products, how to actually break down product problems to their basic pieces and build solutions up from there. Being able to trust their designers, ui/ux, engineers to take their vision and execute (or simply just being good at transferring the vision in their head to being executable by others.
If you're not great at the above, please don't try and shoehorn yourself into product management. I've had too many terrible product managers that should have been something entirely different in my day that just literally ruins years of people's lives.
If you are not interested / good at the above, I'd consider a more Project Management role, which is about figuring out how to take a team and turn them into a well-oiled machine that loves working together towards common goals.
In many places (like startups) the line between the two above obviously blurs, my only concern is moving into Product Management role that you're not fit for. I say this more in general for people thinking about this themselves - mostly because of all the Product / Project Managers I've seen, I'd say 2/10 of them I'd actually want to work with again (though they both had engineering backgrounds which works in your favor).
I do think Product management is more people facing than project management.
You can't really build a product without talking with the customer or talking to other departments especially sales/marketing/customer service. They know what the users want, what the bounce rate is, what metrics the company is lagging at.
>> You can't really build a product without talking with the customer or talking to other departments especially sales/marketing/customer service
A friend of mine works at a large enterprise company on a multimillion dollar software project. Their dev team has never spoken to a customer or product manager (there is a PM team, they've just never spoken with the devs). It also takes them a long time to ship software. It's very odd.
On the contrary it seems predictable. Product managers tend to come from the agile way of working. Enterprises do waterfall. I suspect there are layers and layers of formalised specs, but no real understanding of what the customers want (rather than what they say they want), by the pm or the devs
"In my experience too many people are just terrible at understanding their field, products, how to actually break down product problems to their basic pieces and build solutions up from there."
How does one go about understanding whether one has the right product skills, or has the ability to pick them up (apart from actually jumping in)? As an engineer, I feel I'm somewhat good at breaking technical projects down and solving them. Are any of those skills transferable?
To some extent the environment you work in can be helpful / detrimental to figuring this out.
At a startup / workplaces with that vibe where you don't actually have product influence what you want to do is track how the product progresses in relation to your thoughts on what you would do if you were able to influence the product. Consider literally every product decision and if you would have done that, or something else, and why / why not you think it would work. At some point you'll be able to see if those product features work out, or don't, and can compare that to your ideas on the subject. Hopefully whatever your thoughts are (whether constructive or destructive) towards the product decisions match what actually transpired more often than not, then you probably at least are able to have a finger on the pulse for what's good / bad. For me, a lot of it isn't always knowing what the right decision is, but knowing what the wrongs one are (going down the wrong path too often or too deep is really how bad products are made).
If you're at a startup / workplace where you are able to insert yourself / your input into the product pipeline, then do so and see what happens. If you actually have good / valuable ideas and are able to push them into fruition through whatever current product infrastructure that exists at your company then that should be a plus as well.
I personally believe there is no replacement for having done it before yourself. As an engineer, building products for people whether they are clients, consumers, other business, etc directly are what can give you the best product knowledge feedback. The most I learned as an engineer about building products people want was through personal interactions with consumers of a game I built, along with interacting with clients for applications being constructed and fielding feedback directly from their consumers.
Most of the above handles the "Product" side of Product Management, the rest is of course how well you work with people, but that probably goes without needing be said.
Both of these roles sound super interesting to me, but I am only a freshman undergrad (studying marketing or finance? & computer science).
I really hate the business school in all honesty. Initially I thought it would be full of people who are passionate about finding what a consumer wants and building it. The reality is that many of these students just want to be suites in either consulting, investment banking, or corporate roles. I am super passionate about building great products and working with A players, but I don't want to be another "pointy haired manager."
Wondering if any of you have advice on how to break into the UX research roles with hope of becoming a project manager or product manager further down the road.
UX is a tough one, I'm still unsure what the magic bullet there is as I personally believe a lot of itself is generally handwaivy. It's one of those things that you just have some magical touch with (which approximately no one has so don't be foolish and believe that you're the one), or something you gain over time through trial and error.
It's probably hard to get into a UX role that doesn't involve UI as well. So one side of that is being able to actual design UI, and build out some random "product" ideas with the various current tools available which allow you to design UI + make prototypes that seem real (something like Sketch, there's tons of others). This can be helpful for getting some experience together on your own time which hopefully could get you a junior UI/UX somewhere.
The other side of things is being a UI driven developer and try to get in as some sort of frontend UI/UX engineer which deals more with making user experience better vs fleshing out the business logic / internals. These sorts of jobs tend to exist more at larger shops / enterprises than smaller ones.
The third side (yea, this one has three sides) is to just try and get a foot in the door as a junior PM and grow from there. I honestly don't believe this is the best route as I think all it does is breed "pointy haired managers".
I really believe you need some experience in a space before being able to be a good "* Manager" of any kind, whether that be project, product, engineering, or otherwise.
To me, what matters for the OP, is that you are actually a product person? In my experience too many people are just terrible at understanding their field, products, how to actually break down product problems to their basic pieces and build solutions up from there. Being able to trust their designers, ui/ux, engineers to take their vision and execute (or simply just being good at transferring the vision in their head to being executable by others.
If you're not great at the above, please don't try and shoehorn yourself into product management. I've had too many terrible product managers that should have been something entirely different in my day that just literally ruins years of people's lives.
If you are not interested / good at the above, I'd consider a more Project Management role, which is about figuring out how to take a team and turn them into a well-oiled machine that loves working together towards common goals.
In many places (like startups) the line between the two above obviously blurs, my only concern is moving into Product Management role that you're not fit for. I say this more in general for people thinking about this themselves - mostly because of all the Product / Project Managers I've seen, I'd say 2/10 of them I'd actually want to work with again (though they both had engineering backgrounds which works in your favor).