One of the most desirable roles in the tech industry is product management (PM). As the main advocate for the customer, the product manager is there to ensure smooth execution at every stage of the product or feature lifecycle. More senior-level PMs are involved in defining roadmaps and strategy for a business unit or a whole organization.

While the PM role is most prevalent in software companies, it is permeating hardware and non-tech businesses as well. Today’s customers demand a lot, so it’s important to have someone who is in touch with the voice of the customer who also has influence across teams.

For those looking to build their career as a product manager, this article provides guidance for building product skills in adjacent roles, increasing your ability to be a strong PM over the long term.

As someone who has worked in product as well as a number of adjacent roles, I have noticed that the strongest product managers—those with the best product intuition—rarely started out in product directly. Instead, they somehow worked around product for a significant amount of time before explicitly having the PM title. Their backgrounds include a range of experiences from other roles—engineering, finance, design, sales, and more—and often multiple industries.

Very few companies offer entry-level product management roles. The two exceptions are PM intern roles, usually reserved for MBA candidates, and associate PM roles, only offered by a small number of big tech companies (who, coincidentally, have hiring freezes at the time of this writing).

There is no college degree to become a PM. While useful PM courses exist from the likes of Reforge, these are targeted at those already established in their careers looking to improve their product intuition. A number of people who want to get into product management pursue an MBA degree, which can be useful for developing business intuition, but it is by no means the only way to become a PM. And people usually work at least a few years before getting accepted into an MBA program.

In some ways, the PM role is a “management” position—it’s right there in the title—even though many aspects of PM are more closely related to process management as an individual contributor than people management as a manager. As PMs increase in seniority, their area of responsibility will generally expand from working on smaller features to working on larger product areas, focusing more on strategy, and managing individual contributors or teams of teams.

Finally, PM is highly competitive. Numbers vary by company, but as a rule of thumb, you can expect to find 1 PM for every 3-10 engineers.

In summary, it’s difficult to become a product manager without prior experience within the same company or industry.

To day-to-day activities of a product manager tend to involve:

Different companies will have different expectations for their PMs. Some PMs will be relatively non-technical and much more focused on optimizing the user experience, while others will be less close to the customer and work more heavily with development teams. This will largely depend on how much the company relies on adjacent (often sales) roles for talking to customers and how much industry-specific technical knowledge is required to be a strong PM.

The product management role should not be confused with the similar-sounding, but quite different, roles of project management and program management. There are some transferrable skills between these other roles and product management, but I believe there are other adjacent roles that are more relevant.

Program management is generally focused on the execution of internal initiatives to meet company objectives, as opposed to focusing on specific features or products. Some tech companies, notably Microsoft, have blurred the lines between program and product management, but we’ll stick with the generally-accepted understanding of product management. In my opinion, program management is good for understanding organizational dynamics, but it’s a bit too far removed from product development and go-to-market activities for aspiring PMs.

Some businesses treat product managers, especially those early in their careers, more like project managers. Essentially, the business is more concerned with time/resource allocation and the execution of a tightly-defined goal than the ongoing development, launch, and iteration of a product or feature so that it truly resonates with customers. Both roles are important in the product development process, but they are distinct.

While I believe PMs should participate in Objectives and Key Results, companies that conflate project and product management are generally not great places to grow as a PM. Why? Because critical customer development steps get deprioritized when there is too much pressure to achieve short-term results. Unreasonable demands to grow massively early on in the development cycle cause PMs tend to get frustrated and leave, meaning there is limited opportunity for mentorship from more senior PMs, and the cycle continues.

This list is not exhaustive, but I believe great product managers will have developed many of the following skills before starting as a PM:

There are a number of product-adjacent roles that will help you develop many of the product skills listed above. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Some of these roles have a technical barrier to entry, while others don’t. Start somewhere that complements your existing skillset and interests, and hop around if necessary.

First, a business school-style matrix of the roles:

Brief descriptions of these roles and how they relate to product management:

Hopefully this gives you an idea of some adjacent roles to start developing your skillset. Perhaps you are already in one of these roles. In that case, consider whether you need to round out your skillset with another adjacent role or if it is time to make the switch into product.

My challenge to you: become a product manager without explicitly having the title. PMs typically do not have direct authority over other teams anyway, so you can leverage your product-adjacent position to have more influence on the outcome of the product.

Figure out how to work with the product team, now matter which role you are in: