Comment on Which career to pursue?

Reyali@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Usually I’ll answer product management because that’s what I do and I enjoy it (and I had no idea this career existed while I was in school), but reading this I actually think it could be a good fit for you, depending on how you feel about socializing with people.

I have an English degree but I also worked at an IT company every summer from high school through college, doing many different jobs with an increasingly technical focus. I taught myself HTML and CSS when I was like 10, but except for one high school class of Java I never got deeper into coding than that.

My interest in language and words combines with my technical aptitude in product management. I usually describe it as a job of translation, because I have to work with customers, internal users, business leaders, designers, and developers, and I need to be able to talk to and listen to all of them and understand their context well enough to translate to the other groups. I might need to tell the exact same story half a dozen completely different ways depending on my audience.

There are lots of different approaches to product management and every company does it differently, but some of the critical skills are being able to identify and deeply understand problems (of the business, of customers, etc.) and propose solutions to those problems.

It sounds like you have some technical aptitude but also interest in language and story telling (and a big part of product management is writing what are literally “user stories”), so if you don’t mind the people interactions, it might work for you too.

I’ve on or involved with Product teams for about 10 years now and an actual Product Manager for over 6, managing a team of PMs for the last 3. I feel like I found it by accident, and I totally lucked into a career I actually love, so I’m happy to talk to people about it any time!

source
Sort:hotnewtop