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I worked as a junior PM at Microsoft and eventually moved to Applied Science. My feel is that the junior PM role isn't necessarily needed & most tech organizati
by formalsystem 8y ago
I worked as a junior PM at Microsoft and eventually moved to Applied Science. My feel is that the junior PM role isn't necessarily needed & most tech organizations would benefit from a very small group of senior PMs. The junior PM role mostly involves syncing the dev team with the expectations of leadership which means you have to be good measuring dev progress (via scrums, task management, unblocking the dev team) and measuring product progress (via customer interactions, metric reviews, leadership review meetings).
The good qualities for such a role is to be a clear communicator and someone who gets shit done and doesn't work on pointless things.
However, I'd argue that anyone at any company should have these skills. I get that we're trying to make environments more amenable to introverts who don't necessarily want to be bothered with meetings and focus on code, but I also don't see how any pure non research organization can achieve this realistically. You're always going to be bombarded with requests to do all sorts of stuff, you'll have opinions about what's important and what isn't and you should be able to communicate it or else you'd be seriously mismanaging both your career and your product.
- beerlord 8y agoHow do you become a senior dev if there are no junior devs? A healthy company will maintain this pipeline, to keep fresh talent and fresh ideas coming in. Plus, getting down and dirty at the coalface is essential experience for a product manager.