Getting into product management from another function

Five members of the Product Careers work group on the routes that work for career switchers.

Updated October 13, 2026

The most reliable route is internal: do PM-shaped work alongside a product team until you are the obvious pick. Without that path, bring evidence a standard candidate can't.

Start next to the product team. Sachin Rekhi calls the move from an adjacent role the most common internal path, and Ben Erez ranks it above every other. Ben points to a product marketer who became a PM at Asana by taking on PM-shaped problems for months, without asking for the role up front.
Use the domain you know. Jiaona Zhang suggests that people with a decade in one industry join a startup disrupting it. Nikhyl Singhal suggests building tools that fix your own function's processes, with that function's leader as your first sponsor.
Domain knowledge is one competency of many. Ravi Mehta, who hired more than 40 PMs at TripAdvisor, scored every candidate on the same competencies. He suggests switchers name the two or three gaps an interviewer will probe, usually strategy and metrics, and close them.
Make a side project show judgment. Sachin says a generic AI prototype only shows you can use a tool. He suggests a side project that shows a problem from your own domain, the design options you rejected and one decision you changed after watching real users.

Group chat with Nikhyl, Sachin, Ravi, Jiaona, Ben — the Product Careers work group

Question:

How do you move into product management from another role?

Jiaona Zhang (jz)Chief Product Officer at Laurel. Former SVP of Product at Webflow and CPO at Linktree

The first decision is which kind of move you're making, because there are two very different paths.

Path one is restarting as an IC PM. I did this. I studied econ, went into consulting, and realized I didn't want to sit on the side of the table that advises and hopes the client implements. I left and took my first product role as a mobile gaming PM at Pocket Gems

YouTube. If you're early, a structured APM or RPM program is the best option, because it means the company has committed to investing in you. A new PM takes a while to add value, much longer than a new engineer who is fixing bugs within a couple of weeks

YouTube.

Path two is for people with a decade of expertise who don't want to start over. Use what you already know. If you've spent ten years in oil and gas, ask what's disrupting that industry, find the startups doing it, and join one where you can take on more PM responsibilities and fewer operational ones. Your domain knowledge is the reason they hire you, and the title can follow

YouTube.

Whichever path you take, the mindset shift matters more than a skills checklist. I see this most with project managers. You're very good at owning the task list, and in product you own the outcome. Practice having a point of view on what the user problem is, whether it's worth solving, and what success looks like

YouTube.

Also expect very little formal authority. One of the first things I teach is that you're not the CEO, so nearly everything you get done happens through influence

Apple Podcasts. A CS degree isn't required. What matters is understanding your users and the business

YouTube.

Sachin RekhiFounder and CEO of Notejoy. Former Head of Product for Sales Solutions at LinkedIn

Pick one of the common paths and build your case around it. Sending out generic applications rarely works. I've seen five recurring paths into a first PM role: the CS grad going into an APM program, the engineer who adds an MBA, the adjacent role, the entrepreneur, and the domain expert

sachinrekhi. If you're switching from another role, three of those apply.

1️⃣ Adjacent role. This is the most common internal move. If you're in business ops, marketing, design, or engineering, work closely with your product partner and become the person they rely on. Once the team has seen you deliver and seen your interest in product, ask to move into a PM role at the same company

sachinrekhi. You're far more likely to be hired by people who already know your work than by a recruiter reading a résumé with no PM title on it.

2️⃣ Domain expert. Target companies that build for the market you already know. I know a sales ops manager who became a PM at a sales tech startup, an MD who became a PM at a healthcare startup, and someone with a Master's in Education who became a PM at an edtech company. Each of them got hired without functional PM experience

YouTube. Being an expert isn't enough, though. People need to know you're an expert, so write, speak at industry events, and get to know the other leaders in your field.

3️⃣ Entrepreneur. Founders often move into PM roles because they've owned acquisition, engagement, and monetization all at once. The usual weakness is that startups improvise, while employers want proof you can use real product practices. You have to show you wore the product hat with rigor, and you need a clear story about what you learned, especially if the startup failed

sachinrekhi.

Whichever path you take, the hiring manager is asking one question: does this person bring evidence I can't get from a standard PM candidate? Your answer to that question is what gets you in.

Nikhyl SinghalFounder of Skip. Former VP of Product at Meta and Chief Product Officer at Credit Karma

jz's second path has gotten much stronger in the last two years, and it doesn't always require switching companies. Your first sponsor may be your own functional leader instead of a product org.

I keep hearing the same story in coaching. One person spent ten years in sales, learned the AI tools, and started rebuilding his sales team's workflows: cutting redundant steps and replacing obsolete processes with software. For the first time in his career he was getting promoted and given more scope. The push came from the sales head, whose own team couldn't do this work, and the engineering leaders weren't the ones noticing him. Two shifts make this possible. PM roles are getting wider, so work that used to be three jobs is now one. AI also handles much of the technical depth that used to keep non-engineers out.

YouTube+1

So the concrete path has three steps:

Find the function you know better than any PM in the building (sales, ops, support, finance) and build tools that fix its processes. Your first sponsor is usually that function's leader. The product org comes later.
Pick one or two world-class skills and own them. Nearly every great PM I've worked with has one or two, and PM is defined so broadly that a single elite skill can get you in.LinkedIn
Choose the company stage on purpose. Early-stage PM means running lots of fast experiments to find what works, and late-stage PM is mostly coordination inside the company. If you're coming from a function, a growth-stage company where that function is straining usually fits best.YouTube

My own path was engineer, then managing dev teams, then founder, then EVP of Products. Each move came from owning more of the problem before I had the title.

Ben ErezCo-founder of Insider Loops. Former PM at Facebook and Lead PM at Attentive

I agree with Sachin that the adjacent-role move is the best bet, and in this market I'd rank it far above every other path. Applying cold is the lowest-probability option.

Hiring is a risk-management game. When I hire an internal candidate, I already know they fit the culture, so the only open question is whether they have the raw ingredients. If you're trying to switch, audit yourself on six traits:

↳ Curiosity: how fast you get smart on a topic

↳ Builder mindset: building things nobody assigned to you

↳ Product taste: picking a frustrating experience and working out the tradeoff the team probably made to cause it

↳ Communication: whether people can follow your logic without effort

↳ Customer understanding, including the segments and GTM motions

↳ Analytical fluency: making sense of a raw CSV and picking the right behaviors to track

Michael Chen's story from our Supra Insider episode is the best playbook I've seen. He moved from product marketing to PM inside Asana, then went on to PM at DoorDash. He never asked for the role upfront. He ran it like an experiment. For months he worked closely with product, design and eng, and he took on PM-shaped problems inside his PMM job. When a real PM need showed up, he was already doing the work and was the obvious pick.

My own path was messier. Investment banking, then a failed startup at 22, then a Project Manager role at Life360 where I supported the PMs and built the support-to-QA process. That job was my internal on-ramp into product, and jz is right about the shift it required: I had to stop owning the task list and start having opinions about what to build.

If your company has no internal path, ship something. Build a small product with AI, launch it and put it on your resume. I built Breathe, a deep-breathing reminder app, as a side project while at Life360, and it got 65k downloads. Shipping your own thing is proof of the builder mindset that no interview answer can match.

One caveat: a lateral move can mean a pay cut or a reset in level. If you don't have much financial runway, the slower internal route is the responsible choice, even if it takes a year.

Jiaona Zhang (jz)Chief Product Officer at Laurel. Former SVP of Product at Webflow and CPO at Linktree

Sachin's question about evidence a standard candidate can't offer is right, and the most direct way to answer it is to walk into the interview with a diagnosis of their problem. When I moved into WeWork's developer platform, I had no infrastructure background. My read was that the team wasn't talking to its customers. For a fast-growing company, infrastructure work comes down to understanding where the organization is going and deciding where to put scarce people. Kubernetes versus CI/CD came second. So I went into the hiring conversation and said, "this is what I think your problem actually is." If they hadn't agreed with me, I wouldn't have gotten the role

YouTube. Career switchers can use the same move: pitch your point of view on their outcome and don't apologize for the gaps on your résumé.

Before you pitch anyone, run the same discovery on yourself. I teach people to understand themselves the way they'd understand a user. Figure out what gives you energy and what a fulfilling day looks like before you go after the title. When people chase PM because it's the hot role and then find it's a bad fit, they've done a lot of work just to learn that

YouTube. A lot of PMs burn out ten years in because they followed what they saw other people doing

YouTube.

For engineers in particular, I'd usually pick a fast-growing company over business school, unless the school's network is the specific thing you need. Getting a PM title somewhere is the first goal, and a fast-growing company can give you a better network than the school would

YouTube.

Question:

Jiaona described two paths into PM. Early-career people restart as an IC PM, ideally through an APM program. People with ten years in another industry join a startup disrupting that industry and let the PM title follow their domain knowledge. When you hired PMs at TripAdvisor and Tinder, did people with deep domain knowledge but no PM experience actually get hired into product roles? What did they have to show to convince you?

Ravi MehtaProduct advisor. Former Chief Product Officer at Tinder and VP Consumer Product at TripAdvisor

When I scaled the TripAdvisor team to over 70 people, I hired more than 40 PMs, and every candidate was scored against one standard set of competencies. That's how I'd answer for domain experts too. Deep domain knowledge is one competency. It can earn you the interview, but it can't stand in for product strategy, prioritization, or measuring success. The domain experts who convince a hiring manager can show they've done those other jobs, even without the PM title.

I've also been on the other side of jz's second path, and it taught me that domain is the easier gap to close. When Facebook interviewed me for a Director role, I had spent years at TripAdvisor and knew travel cold, but I had almost no background in social. They asked which companies I'd buy with an unlimited M&A budget. I drew a 2x2 on the whiteboard with device on one axis and media format on the other. Then I plotted Instagram and Snapchat on it, and we spent 30 minutes talking about the empty boxes as acquisition targets.

LinkedIn I got the job without the domain, because I showed product judgment in the room.

For a switcher, that suggests a concrete plan:

Score yourself on all 12 product competencies. Count domain as one strength, then name the two or three gaps an interviewer will probe. For most switchers, those gaps are strategy and metrics.
Close each gap enough to give AI good instructions, spot bad decisions, and know when you need someone whose judgment is better than yours.LinkedIn
In the interview, use your domain knowledge as the raw material for a strategic point of view, the way jz did at WeWork. If you only recite what you know about the industry, an interviewer hiring against competencies has nothing to score you on.

Question:

Ben's advice for switchers with no internal path is to build a small product with AI, launch it, and put it on the résumé. He points to Breathe, which got 65k downloads. Sachin, you've criticized PMs for putting out low-quality AI prototypes. When an external career switcher shows a hiring manager an AI-built side project, what separates one that earns an interview from one that gets discounted? Say what the candidate should show: real users, metrics, the product decisions they made, or something else.

Sachin RekhiFounder and CEO of Notejoy. Former Head of Product for Sales Solutions at LinkedIn

A hiring manager can spot slop in about ten seconds. If you type "create a CRM," you get generic styling, vanilla features, and the most basic scenarios. The result looks impressive to the person who built it, and nobody would ever ship it. The prototypes I see from PMs usually fail the same way: they solve the customer problem generically, they have no branding or real differentiation, and they lack depth

sachinrekhi. If a hiring manager sees that kind of side project, it tells them you can use a tool. It says nothing about whether you can do the PM job.

A side project that earns an interview shows three things:

1️⃣ A problem chosen from your own domain. Taste comes from pairing domain insight with AI, and that pairing produces work a generic prompt can't

sachinrekhi. An ops person who builds a tool for a workflow they suffered through for five years has the domain-expert path and the builder path in one artifact.

2️⃣ The options you rejected. Generate four design variants, pick one, and be able to say why you threw out the other three

sachinrekhi. That walkthrough is the interview. It shows the prioritization and judgment Ravi says interviewers score.

3️⃣ Instrumentation and what it taught you. Make it functional: add PostHog analytics, watch session recordings, and run a short survey. Then show one decision you changed because of what users actually did. Ben's 65k downloads are great, but a switcher with 200 users and a clear story like "retention dropped at step three, so I cut it" shows more product thinking than a big number with no explanation.

This matters more now because the bar has moved into the interview itself. Meta expects PM candidates to prototype a feature live in tools like Figma Make, Lovable, or Claude Code

sachinrekhi. A side project you've iterated on with real users is how you practice for that loop before you're in it.

Ask a follow-up

Product Careers

207

Product Careers

3M+ insights

Product leaders & coaches from Meta, Google, Airbnb & 1 more

by SuperMe

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you decide what role to take next?
Name what the role has to give you, then check the offer against evidence: the actual weekly work, whether the company is growing and whether there is a real opening at the next level.
Is a bigger title at a smaller company worth it?
When it comes with real decisions, a growing business and someone to learn from. Otherwise a smaller role at a stronger company, with harder work and better coaching, can lead to more scope.
When should you switch career tracks?
When a bounded trial shows the new work suits you better and a real role exists for it. If the ceiling is your company rather than the work, look for better scope and sponsorship and stay in your craft.
How do you know when to leave a job?
Make one specific request first, with a date to revisit it. Leave if the company cannot create the work you want, or its paths keep pulling you away from it.
How do you prepare to leave a job and start a company?
Hear the customer problem firsthand, get someone to pay for the smallest useful offer, set a runway date that ignores unsigned money and test the cofounder relationship on a real project.
How do PM, designer and engineer roles differ now?
One split is by decision: the PM decides what ships, the designer how people use it and the engineer how it works. Before product-market fit the founder may make the PM's call.
Which tech jobs will hold up as AI spreads?
Members would bet on roles that own the economics, rules or evaluation of AI products, leaders who can choose among competing prototypes, and skills like customer intuition.
How do you build product analytics skills?
Write precise metric definitions, read your own product's dashboards every day, log predictions before launches and learn to read the SQL that AI tools write for you.
How should you prepare for a performance review?
Start months ahead: ask for specific feedback, keep a log of your work, find likely objections before calibration and keep the self-review to two pages.
How do you get promoted to the next level?
Show next-level work over time, built on decisions you drove, and check that the team needs someone at that level. If it has no room, a growing team may offer a clearer case.
What should you do in your first 90 days in a new role?
Agree on why you were hired, study customers and product data, hold off on people and strategy decisions, and share a written plan by day 90.
What should early employees know about startup equity?
Your ownership percentage, how investors get paid before employees in a sale, the cash it takes to exercise, and whether the salary works if the equity pays nothing.

All career growth questions →

Frequently Asked Questions

Getting into product management from another function

Product Careers

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you decide what role to take next?

Is a bigger title at a smaller company worth it?

When should you switch career tracks?

How do you know when to leave a job?

How do you prepare to leave a job and start a company?

How do PM, designer and engineer roles differ now?

Which tech jobs will hold up as AI spreads?

How do you build product analytics skills?

How should you prepare for a performance review?

How do you get promoted to the next level?

What should you do in your first 90 days in a new role?

What should early employees know about startup equity?

Your ideas, super powered.

Getting into product management from another function

Product Careers

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you decide what role to take next?

Is a bigger title at a smaller company worth it?

When should you switch career tracks?

How do you know when to leave a job?

How do you prepare to leave a job and start a company?

How do PM, designer and engineer roles differ now?

Which tech jobs will hold up as AI spreads?

How do you build product analytics skills?

How should you prepare for a performance review?

How do you get promoted to the next level?

What should you do in your first 90 days in a new role?

What should early employees know about startup equity?

Your ideas, super powered.