I find myself in a lucky position where I believe my role is malleable. I’m currently a Software Engineer building mostly web applications, but I believe I can pull off a transition to an adjacent role like Product Management if I tried hard enough - a transition that many engineers have done before.

With this malleability comes a bunch of considerations.

One of the bigger considerations is bodily energy consumption.

PM work is people-heavy while engineering work is less so.

On a typical day at a startup, PM plausibly liaises with:

• CEO

• CPO

• CTO

• salesperson

• marketing person

• engineer

• designer

• external customer

• external partner

But for an engineer, they would likely only liaise with:

• PM

• designer

• a couple of engineers

• CTO

PMs are meant to bridge the builders (designers, engineers) to the commercial team (executives, sales, marketing, externals), while engineers are meant to build with designers, engineers, and PMs. Politicking is therefore likely part of a PM’s job and less likely to be part of an engineer’s. That’s just the nature of the jobs.

Even though we contractually agree on time spent at work, energy is a limited daily resource. If you use a lot of it at work, you undoubtedly have less left in tank after work for yourself, your family, and your friends. How much energy are you willing to allocate to work?

Another consideration is the craft and whether it allows for flow, which for some defines job satisfaction. Engineering is a craft that resembles a solo sport, while PM is a craft that resembles more of a team sport.

One experiences flow less readily in PM work and much more in engineering work, as the latter is much more of a craft that’s independent of group input.

An individual contributor engineer at junior, mid, and senior levels will spend plenty of time programming, which has a tight feedback loop and clear, verifiable outcomes. An individual contributor PM at those levels will instead be spending time communicating, aligning, and occasionally doing market/user research, activities which don’t seem to have a tight feedback loop.

When I take these considerations seriously, changing roles from engineer to PM becomes a lot harder than “just do it and enjoy the new learning curve.”