Your mentee has spent two years building features, and lately they find the conversations around the work more interesting than the work itself. They like talking to customers, and they have opinions about what to build next. The product manager on their team is leaving, and they want to know whether they should put themselves forward.

It is a real move, and plenty of good product managers started as developers. Knowing how software actually gets built is a genuine advantage in that role. But the job is more different than it looks from the next desk, and your mentee deserves to see it clearly before they jump.

Start by asking what they imagine a normal week looks like. Many developers picture the interesting part, deciding what to build. Ask them to find out how much of the week goes on everything around that decision. Meetings with sales, support and leadership. Writing and rewriting priorities. Telling a customer, kindly, that the thing they asked for is not coming this year. Product managers often carry a lot of responsibility and very little authority. Nobody reports to them. They get things done by persuading people.

Then ask how they will feel when they stop making things. Some developers who move find they miss the finished, working piece of code at the end of a day. Product results arrive months later, mixed up with everyone else's.

Encourage them to test it before they decide. They could ask the outgoing product manager to let them sit in on a week of meetings. They could offer to write the brief for one small feature, talk to the users, and present it. Each of these costs little and tells them more than any article.

Suggest they talk to two people. A product manager who used to be a developer, and one who tried it and went back. The second conversation is often the more useful.

Help them think about the way back. In many companies a move like this can be reversed within a year or two, and a developer who understands product thinking is valuable either way. Make sure they ask how the company would treat a return before they need one.

And if they go, keep meeting. Their questions will change, and your view from the engineering side will be more useful to them than ever.

– Asael Shinder