AMA: ATG Group Product Manager, James Heimbuck on Technical Product Management

The easiest path into TPM probably isn't updating your resume and applying externally but rather making the move inside your current company. I know that's not the answer people want to hear when they're excited about a career change, but I've seen it work. I had an intern at GitLab try out a PM role while they were there to see if they liked it, and I work with a former DevOps engineer who made the full transition and is thriving in a platform PM role. Both had something external candidates don ...Read More

I don't think EMs are more respected than TPMs by default. Respect isn't a function of your title, it's a function of how you show up. TPMs, like almost all other PMs, have to influence without the authority of an EM since you are not managing the team directly. It can be similar to orgs where there's a separate Tech Lead working with the team from the people manager. Here's what has worked for me: Be confident in what you're presenting, and use data to back it up, not opinion. If you get questi ...Read More

Today EVERY PM is becoming a technical PM, or at least the lines are blurring in the new AI enabled world we're living in. The good news is that access to information about how your product works has never been easier. Research, asking smart questions, and building together will ease the transition, even if some of the conventional wisdom (do we need requirements docs at all?) is worth questioning. Do your research first The internet and AI tooling have made it easier than ever to build a base u ...Read More

AI gives you more signal faster. If you didn't know how to prioritize before, more signal just means more noise. I've been saying this a lot lately and I think it's the most important thing to get right as a PM right now. The PMs I see struggling with AI in discovery aren't struggling because the tools are bad. They're struggling because they're using AI to go faster at things they were already doing wrong. Where I've actually found value The real unlock for me has been iterative synthesis of us ...Read More

The job isn't translation. It's framing. Most PMs think bridging the gap between engineering and business stakeholders means translating technical concepts into plain English. I think that's the wrong mental model. Framing means anchoring everything on the same impact for both sides. My favorite is user impact, but orders, dollars, or support volume can ground it too. Anything that moves you beyond the abstract of response times and error rates. The place I've seen this matter most: performance ...Read More

The requirements and docs were never the going to be the only value PMs brought to the table. AI didn't create that problem, it just made it harder to hide when other value was not being delivered. What the job actually is, AI or not The real work of a PM is synthesizing and prioritizing a constant flood of competing inputs like customer interviews, support tickets, internal bugs, performance issues, security needs, sales requests and deciding which of those connect to what the business actually ...Read More