Product management is definitely not people management. If anything, it is closest to UX, but also combines strategy and marketing. In early-stage startups, th

Product management is definitely not people management. If anything, it is closest to UX, but also combines strategy and marketing. In early-stage startups, the CEO is most often playing the product manager. 70% of a PM's job should be speaking to users, both new and existing (usability testing of built features). In small startups, product management will likely be mixed with project management - you will probably have to manage the teams' Pivotal Tracker / Jira tickets. You will naturally work closely with UI/UX designers, filtering through user feedback. You're really the person that needs to know what your team should be building next and PM's generally head roadmap planning and releases. You also really need to be across the data/SQL and understand exactly what features users are using, when and have a good idea of why. As a dev, this is where it would be to your advantage - being able to setup mixpanel/tracking events or even pull & analyze the raw data yourself is going to be a big advantage compared to other candidates.