AMA: HashiCorp Director of Product Management, Mark Meredith on Product Management Career Path

In tech companies, having a background as an architect can be extremely valuable. The ability to speak confidently to the technical aspects of your products goes a long way in building trust with your customers and with your teams. The primary shift in mindset is from a focus on solving primarily technical problems to one that focuses on the business - product/market fit, customer needs, market trends and opportunities, channels etc... If you make the change from architect to PM but don't shift ...Read More

My background was in mechanical engineering, and I worked briefly as an engineer before making the switch over to PM. There are a few different types of skills that transfer well across disciplines - leadership, communication, technical acumen, and persuasion. No matter where you're working now, you can take steps toward a career in PM by focusing on sharpening those four key skill areas. As you make the change, be humble. Recognize that as you start out you may be in a role that is slightly les ...Read More

I've worked in IBM for a decade now, so naturally I've been focused on b2b products almost exclusively. The most pervasive misconception I've seen is that b2b products are ... bad. There's this idea that the interfaces and UX patterns are difficult to use and do not inspire joy, but that's simply not true. Granted, there is a lot of b2b software out in the world that drains the life out of its users, but that isn't an artifact of it being designed for the business. Often, it suggests that the so ...Read More

Building and proving new skills is often most obvious and effective through passion (side) projects. Of course you can read and take myriad classes and watch videos, but until you start trying to put these new skills into practice, the "marketability" of that knowledge on its own is not very high. As a PM, the impact you make speaks much louder than the skills you list on your resumé. So be creative. Find ways to learn those new skills practically. Find a mentor or two in the field you'd like to ...Read More

Find a way to get hands on with the product or domain of the product that you'd like to enter. In software PM, of course that's AI right now, but you could also lean into data analytics. Don't be satisfied to learn the buzzwords to fill up a resumé, but take courses that walk you through getting your hands on the product. Of course, that is going to be specific to the domain that you'd like to enter. So for software, I suggest learning (among other things) AI skills - build agentic workflows, us ...Read More