Thank you for asking this. I’m 38 and trying to make a move to product management. I’ve been a front-end developer for years but I’m just not good enough at what’s become front-end to keep up and maintain any kind of work-life balance. It’s not fun anymore.
I have no trouble keeping up with design and technical trends and understanding deep technical details. I'm just not enough of a programmer to keep up with the pace of being hands-on with the code. I've actually been moving in this direction for a few years.
About three years ago, I got lucky enough to be put into a management position. In order to do the job, I had to put hands-on development aside more and more in order to make room for the job of actually running a small team. We were sorely lacking product management—doing pretty much everything at the whims of stakeholders—so I started bringing it into what I do. I definitely enjoy it more than today's front-end development, although I still love being involved in the process.
My dilemma is how I switch to it full time. Even though I'm trying to do a fair amount of it, it seems like it'll be hard to get my foot in the door anywhere without that title on my resume. We've got a whole department full of people at my company with "product" in their titles, yet they don't do any actual product management, making it hard to make the switch internally.
