For the last few years, every few weeks I’ve gotten connected with someone interested in transitioning to PM. While these reach-outs come from a huge range of different backgrounds (engineering, program management, science, sales, design, marketing, etc.), >50% of the conversations are identical. I thought it would make sense to write down my advice in case it generalizes to others considering this career move.

First, why PM?

There are lots of good reasons to work as a product manager. From my perspective, they include:

• Early participation in important decisions. Even junior PMs often get to drive product direction in a way that is generally not offered to junior employees in other roles. For example, months into my first PM job at 3D Robotics, our CEO asked me to come up with an enterprise strategy from scratch that resulted in a product still being used by customers all over the world.
• Opportunities for learning and flexibility. As a PM, you have the opportunity to go deep into wherever your interests and the needs of the team/product align. This flexibility has let me span the range from digging into marketing funnels to debating the merits of different ML modeling approaches to interviewing users to drive product roadmap.
• Exposure to many (internal and external) partners. Because PMs are frequently working cross-functionally across a company or domain, they find it relatively easy to achieve some level of name recognition. This translates into knowing lots of people (fun!), getting invited to speak at conferences (fun!), developing a surface-level understanding of lots of things (fun!), and various other generally positive outcomes.
• Faster career trajectory. I don’t have concrete evidence to support this one, but I sense that it is easier for PMs to get promoted, especially at higher levels, than other functions.

(There are probably a few missing and obviously many disadvantages, but I don’t want to make this a post about why being a PM is/isn’t great.)

However, while a PM role bundles these attributes, subsets of these are available in many/most other roles, especially at higher levels. When I interact with a senior person, I often don’t even know what ladder they started on.

Before setting your career back (a function change inevitably costs time, level, comp, or some other valuable resource), I think that it’s really important to think carefully and make sure that you want to transition to PM. If you sit down and write out your career goals, it’s possible that it is more efficient/pleasant to achieve them without becoming a PM.

A good half of people reach out because they are frustrated with their career trajectory and think that changing roles can accelerate things, but the opposite is generally true. Before making the leap, make sure that you think deeply about this.

(Note that the advice directly above applies mostly to roles that are quasi-equivalent in pay/status to PM, e.g. eng, design, UXR, product marketing. There are roles for which a transition to PM is essentially always a step up.)

Three paths

Once you are certain that you want to transition to PM, it’s time to start thinking about how. I see three primary paths. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

[My route] Leverage unique skills to join a startup

I’ll briefly share my career story. I studied Physics as an undergrad and Chemical Engineering in graduate school. I was certain that I wanted to be a university professor until I learned:

• how little teaching was valued
• how painful it was to write grant applications for so little money
• how easily the publication incentives could be gamed

From that trough of disillusionment, I began playing with robotics, developed expertise in how they were used, and somewhat randomly landed in my first PM position based on that exploration. I’ve found that this is a really common PM origin story.

To replicate this a bit more intentionally, you need to figure out what you are interested in, go deep with some kind of project, and connect with founders in the space. There is a pretty good chance that they will weigh your knowledge and enthusiasm more than your inexperience as a PM. 

While this approach could work at a larger company, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a super-talented person without any PM experience getting hired as a PM at either Meta or Google. The HR and hiring process is too structured to handle special snowflakes even though I believe both could probably benefit from considering less traditional candidates.

This was my approach and I recommend it to almost anyone who asks. I think that startups are neat and loved my experience growing as a PM at 3D Robotics. If you do this right, the pace of learning will be unmatched, you will naturally love your job because you selected it based on your interests, and your enthusiasm will attract the attention of company management. Potential pitfalls are a lack of good mentorship, career opportunities being inextricably linked to company performance, and likely lower liquid comp.

Ladder change at BigCo

Meta, Google, and other big companies have created programs to help employees change functions. The XX → PM ladder change seems to be very popular, probably because most other functions can conceivably perform as PMs without extensive retraining or study.

I think that these programs are great for the right people because they typically are low-risk and continue to pay high salaries through the transition. However, at places like Google, they are simultaneously too rigorous and not rigorous enough.

(I don’t try to cover the range of internal transfer opportunities here because the vast majority of my experience with ladder transfers is at Google and Meta.)

What do I mean by this? At Google, PM rotators are thrown into a new role without much (any?) formal training. Nothing is intrinsically wrong with this, but the prospective PM’s experience is entirely governed by the quality of the mentor, and mentors are not strongly incentivized to train the mentees beyond what’s required to land impact on their projects. This leads to a super high variance in PM transfers, which is frustrating for both them and their peers. I don’t know that this happens at other companies (I’ve run into very few PM transfers at Meta), but I suspect that it does.

The process is also too rigorous. I know a dozen or so people at Google who are sitting in various PM rotations waiting… and waiting… and waiting. This experience is Google-biased, but it was never clear when a rotation would end, whether headcount would open up, and whether the PM transfer would solve their problems with the new role.

And all this waiting is inevitably distracting from other priorities. While the aspiring PM could be learning new skills or reframing her job to include PM-adjacent work, she is instead distracted by the formal process that could take years.

{R,A}PM programs

Some of the highest-quality PMs I’ve worked with have come out of rotational programs. They are typically offered by bigger companies and offer people with little work experience a clear path to a PM role. {R,A}PMs tend to be treated like gold, offered incredible training, and exposed to top company execs.

Many more experienced candidates consider these programs a “step down”, but I would absolutely take a pay cut or level hit to participate in one of these if I were serious about transitioning to PM. The primary disadvantage is that they are extremely competitive.