A Forked Path in the IT Career

In a previous Geek Speak blog post, I talked about the viability of practice leader being a career path for IT professionals. A large part of practice leadership is being fluent in vendor technologies, i.e. products. This opens up an interesting set of paths for IT professionals: product management and product marketing.

Are you passionate about discovering IT pain points and finding solutions for them? Product management focuses on customers and their problems. A product manager (PM) is the voice of the entire customer spectrum; the PM delivers market metrics that guide product decisions.

Do you like to tell stories? If you like sharing your problem-solving knowledge by using a product in a one-to-many fashion, you'd probably enjoy working as a product marketing manager (PMM). As Peter Drucker said, product marketing focuses on the product selling itself; creating a product that people want to buy; and creating an environment that encourages people to buy.

Ideally, PMs work to understand real customer problems and using that knowledge to turn solutions into products, while PMMs work to smooth the friction between products and consumers in the marketplace.

Would you consider transitioning into a new role as PM or PMM? Let me know in the section below.

P.S. We are hiring for both PM and PMM positions.