AMA: Product Management Leader, Liron Deutsch on Product Management Career Path

Honestly, for me it has always come down to three things: what do I want to learn right now, where is the work most interesting, and where can I make the most impact? Over time, you also start to learn where you are happiest. Where is your mojo? Some people find that answer shifts. Some have a clear instinct early on. My own path has zigzagged, and each move taught me something. My first shift from IC to manager was not really a choice. The startup was growing, I was a founding member, and I kne ...Read More

TLDR: Probably not. The gap most non-technical PMs need to close is not about writing code. It is about understanding how systems work, and that is a different thing entirely. I came from a computer science background with a few years in software engineering, and honestly, I could not code from scratch today at a high quality (unless I use AI ;)). But that has never once held me back as a PM. In my experience, workplaces do not expect PMs to code. What they do expect is that you can have a credi ...Read More

First and foremost: no ego. The PMs who struggle are almost never the ones who lack a specific skill. They are the ones who are not coachable. I want people who are genuinely curious, open to feedback, and can demonstrate they have pushed themselves outside their comfort zone before. Customer obsession is non-negotiable. I want to see evidence you have gone out of your way to get close to users, not just reviewed research someone else did. On experience: for junior hires, I am not always looking ...Read More

From personal experience, the Senior to Principal or Group PM transition is one of the hardest in this career. Not only because the craft gets harder, but because the rules change. You are no longer being handed a problem and expected to nail it. You are expected to find the problems worth solving, often before anyone else has named them. Here is how I think about what separates someone who is ready: Scope. Principal PMs operate at a different order of magnitude. We are not talking about one ext ...Read More

That's very true, AI is getting very good at the things we used to call hard PM skills. PRDs, data analysis, competitive research, synthesis from user interviews. If your value as a PM is squarely in those outputs, that is a real problem worth taking seriously. But here is what I keep coming back to: the skills that matter most have always been the ones hardest to systematise. AI is just making that more obvious, and removing the excuse to hide behind the documents. What I believe cannot be comm ...Read More

TLDR: There is no single right path. Depth has value, but so does range. What matters most is staying energised, continuing to learn, and understanding where you do your best work. A lot of PMs do stay in the same industry for most of their career. Often because they have built real expertise there, feel confident, and naturally keep getting hired for it. That is a legitimate and valuable path. Deep domain knowledge in something like fintech or cybersecurity is genuinely hard to replicate and ca ...Read More

Honestly, UX researchers can make some of the best PMs. The single most important thing a product manager does is stay deeply connected to customers and users, understanding their pain, their context, and what they actually need. Researchers do that for a living. That is not a small head start. What tends to be missing is the other side of the pie. Quantitative fluency. Researchers are typically strong on qualitative insight, but PM work requires you to pair that with data. Understanding the rig ...Read More

TLDR: Yes, absolutely. Project management is actually one of the better springboards into product. The craft is transferable. The mindset shift is the hard part. Product management is not something you study at university. It is a combination of skills and mindset built over time, from different roles, different industries, different problems. A lot of the best PMs I know came from somewhere else entirely, and project management is one of the more natural starting points. That said, there is one ...Read More