I started off as a developer... but not a terribly good one. Got to know our product inside and out... and as the company grew my role transitioned into produc

I started off as a developer... but not a terribly good one. Got to know our product inside and out... and as the company grew my role transitioned into product owner sort of organically... I found that I was pretty good at writing requirements (at least avoiding some of the pitfalls that non-devs made when writing requirements), and running meetings, and communicating with a variety of teams in the organization (and nicely saying, "No," to a variety of teams) ... and it all evolved from there. I liked the work more since I got more praise at it than I ever got for doing dev work. 20 years later... I've done product / project / process / program... a bunch of P. Manager roles... It helps to be interested in a lot of things. Understand enough about things at the 50,000 foot view level... Helps to listen to a lot of people -- and care about their success. Learn all you can about as much as you can. If you can't code a bit... you'll have a hard time communicating what you really want to the developers (there's just no way to write down every possible requirement in every ticket). Same goes for every other discipline... QA, UX research, DevOps, marketing, business development, etc... you want to know as much as you can about all of these things so you can build the right process and pick the right focus for your team and your audience. * Product Managers: Who Are These 'Mini-CEOs' And What Do They Do? || http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/10/12/product-managers-mini-ceos/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/10/12/product-managers-mi... * How to Hire a Product Manager - The classic essay on the role of product management - Ken Norton || https://www.kennorton.com/essays/productmanager.html https://www.kennorton.com/essays/productmanager.html * Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE