Ask HN: Moving from Dev to PM

I did it for about a year, in kind of a hybrid product owner / scrum master role. I was filling a gap due to a rather toxic product owner that the whole team wanted out. I expected I could keep working on some user stories as well, but that wasn’t realistic.

I think having the background in development makes things much easier, as you’ll actually understand what’s going on. My current scrum master has no idea what we’re talking about and can’t speak to anything we’re doing, which is a problem.

My biggest piece of advice in a role like that is to show up to meetings prepared. Starting a meeting with an empty sheet often ends with an empty sheet. Spending the time to put together some kind of framework to organize thoughts, even as a jumping off point, pays dividends. Build systems for the team and eventually things hum along pretty smoothly.

I ended up switching back into a dev role. While the team was considered successful, and the team members seemed happy, I was miserable. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, which is a burden I’m used to placing on myself, but wasn’t something I felt comfortable pushing on other people, because I know the weight of it. This led me to not give feedback I should have given, or letting work go that was “good enough,” but really should have been better. The work wasn’t up to my standards, and I was accountable for it, even though it wasn’t work I personally did. This slowly drove me mad, even though all external feedback was glowing. This is just a long way to say, know yourself, but also that it may simply take time to adapt and grow into the role. It’s a big mental shift, at least it was for me. Going back has also been a bit rough.

I did find it to be useful to be on that side of the house for a while. It gave me a little more empathy for people in those roles. I was pretty hard on them in the past and have eased up a lot.

Just be super clear what you want to do because there are three wildly different roles that most companies bastardise quite a bit.

Product owner

Project manager

Product manager

Are all wildly different job roles.

Do you want to track and ensure deliver across multiple projects = project management

Do you want to be close support to dev teams and organize backlogs etc. = product owner

Do you want a business role talking to customers and deciding _what to build_ and why (product strategy) and much less focusing on the how to build it part.

I think it's a terrible role/totally unappealing to me, but as a career move I think it's decent. Plenty of job ads specifically for this. Get a scrum, prince2, PMP certification or two + your real world dev background and you're pretty set.

You don't need to be swayed by job titles. What you need is to know who you are right now.

I studied to be an IT specialist at the Polytechnic University, I thought to connect my life closely with IT, time has shown that there are IT specialists under every bush, even a dried-up one, as my son was born in 2008, then in August the crisis hit, the soap bubble burst, and I flew abroad to earn money, since at home the prices for my services fell threefold, and I worked as a caretaker, then a warehouse manager, a part-time foreman for 15 years, the coronavirus ruined my health, then the war (I'm from Ukraine), well, and now I'm unemployed, and no one needs IT here.

If you live in a peaceful state, my advice to you is to learn to bake bread, cook, or drive a truck, or if you have a medical education, become a paramedic. The world always needs food, logistics, or medicine. if you are a complete idiot - go to a construction site, they pay well there, and you will not work 16 hours a day like any IT specialist (don't tell me that you work 8 hours, I won't believe you, an IT specialist thinks only about IT all the time, both at work and after work, even on the toilet, and during meals).

when I moved away from IT I felt freedom, I could think not about IT, I worked only the time I was at work, I didn't think about work outside of work at all, because work remains at work, and that's great.