Virtually everyone in Product Management previously held other roles before becoming a Product Manager. It’s that whole “accidental profession” thing.
And while the range of previous jobs held is incredibly diverse, the key questions are:
1. What prior job(s) best prepared you to be a PM?
2. Why?
Leave your answers in the comments section of this post.
My response:
For me, there were two prior jobs that served me best — technical writing, and running my own business.
I’ve met a lot of PMs who were former tech writers. That job really taught me how to communicate with both technical and non-technical people, and the tech writing jobs I had were in small companies, so I really had to understand the entire product I was documenting.
The range of products I documented included programming languages, class libraries, applications and infrastructure. I really learned a lot about the entire software development process in this role.
As a business owner – and it was a really small business to be honest — I learned about selling (via lots of rejection), customer satisfaction, project management and people management. Overall a good complement to the technical skills I got as a tech writer.
So there you have it.
What about you?
Saeed