It was totally random. I was an English major / mass communication minor planning to be a reporter until I started playing around with HTML while editing my college newspaper (way back in 1995). I snagged a grunt job at Cooking Light magazine putting their content online, and just went from there. I don't know of anyone who set out to become a product manager, but it's a great career for certain people. Having an engineering, UI design, or even customer service background helps a lot. For consumer-facing web sites, just being a very heavy web user is an absolute requirement. Some MBA's are good in the role, but too often they see the role as a stepping stone to other opportunities. Hope this helps.