Product Management Career Path Growth Potentials
I have a question regarding career path that I would LOVE your thoughts on
*TLDR; coming from a technical background I feel ready to move to a product career path and become less technical however my friends think otherwise due to less growth potential.*
I come from a technical background and after years of feeling misplaced and having to force motivate myself to be engaged at various technical and coding roles where building product was my first responsibility, I decided that my strength is not in teeny tiny technical work and rather in more strategic human centric and leadership enabling roles. It makes me laugh to now put this in one paragraph! In reality this insight has been the result of a decade of soul searching, head scratching and feeling lost in my career and losing opportunities at my door step.
This doesn't mean I'm bad at or not liking technical work at all. I love to use my technical knowledge for advancing business goals and communicating ideas but to do that almost entirely and have to be lost in technicalities seems to not be my forte (I did try lots of adjustments, including working for better teams and more meaningful companies and doing other tasks on the side but no adjustment seemed to give me that sweet satisfaction of having a bigger picture)
I'm now immigrating (again) and unfortunately at the mercy of work visa which limits my options and was talking to my friends who have established themselves in Canada ( I've been mostly in Europe work culture and am a newbie this side of the pond )
I told them about the fact that Ive finally decided to fully make the jump towards product management (I have done various bits of it in all my roles but never fully under that title).
They strongly advised me AGAINST making that career change. They believed that specially in North America product managers have much less room to progress and generally less valuable and versatile than technical people. I argued that I would keep myself aware of technology and that the ability to be able to influence the direction of product and business is more valuable to me than pure career opportunities but once again they said prospects are much better for someone to have decision making powers and influence product coming from a technical background. They also said that a technical person would earn much much more during the lifetime of his / her career.
All in all, they strongly believed that I should go and pickup python or whatever and learn the tools in a domain and use that to secure my next job and then strategize from there. Honestly picking up the next programming language was at the most bottom of my list and I generally shiver in misery having to think about it aimlessly but I could consider it if that is a wiser and smarter way to plan my overall future career in long term...
For context I have been for 10+ years in workforce and have been mostly technical. Although never the nerd technical guy who sits behind computer for hours to improve the last digits on a performance scale or investigate that tricky annoying bug no one else could solve. I have experience with team management, product ownership, coding and writing apps and support etc. but am known to be a social person who thinks outside of the box and can communicate well.
What do you think? How much should I consider my friends' suggestion? Should I re-frame my thinking about this? Specially in North American market. Is product management going to limit my earnings potential and options in future? --
Any thoughts appreciated
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