Here’s a hot take: should there ever have been a concept of an “entry level product manager”?

What person straight out of undergraduate or even business school has enough acumen to lead the strategy & execution of an entire product or even one of its features?

Upon reflection, I realize that my earliest roles in “product” were actually more akin to a bunch of other things that are not unique to the product function:

• admin/internal ops (much of which can be automated or unnecessary with good cultural values & norms)
• customer support / success
• manual QA (made redundant by automated/unit testing, support engineering & the like)
• mediocre project management (made redundant by good engineering management)
• mediocre user research (often because the designers were too busy, which is less of a thing now thanks to design systems, Figma, AI prototyping, etc.)
• bad strategy articulation & direction setting (which I only got better at by trying, failing & learning in different contexts)

And sure, you could argue that “product is unique because it does all those things well when the need arises.” Sure. Yep. But what person straight out of college does all those things well enough, outside of getting lucky?

I raise this not to criticize any individual or business with low-level PMs - but rather to remind ourselves that you can do a lot of “product”-y work even if you’re not a Product Manager by title.

In fact, before PM became a hot job in the mid-2010s, that’s often how you got into product. Some of the best customer support people I know have a great product sense, because they’re talking to folks every day and helping them with problems. And they would likely make great PMs at some point.

So if you see very few PM jobs on the market – maybe consider looking at other roles (customer success roles specifically come to mind) where you can use many of those same skills you want to be exercising.

Or start your own thing, since that’s also a great way to throw yourself into a fire and learn/grow a ton 🤪

Am I totally off base here? Discuss!