RichmondSQL

Anyone have any experience doing technical product management?    We are starting the concept at work and I am being ask to play the product manager role for all of our BI products in terms of aligning technology with the business.

 I think its a good opportunity but have been the primary architect for our BI products and am concerned about my tech skills atrophying.  

 I'm curious at other places how involved the product managers are with technical details.

I have found that the architect can safely play the role of Technical Project Manager without becoming stale or being detrimental to the success of the project. However, the Technical Product Manager role is something very different. Are you talking about guiding the project to completion or defining the product to the point where it can be built? I suppose it would be good to know what the new position entails.

A Product Manager isn't usually a highly trained, technical person. They have to be good at listening to business requirements and synthesizing them into something that would best be classified as a Product Requirements Document (PRD). Some places call this a General Specification Document (GSD). If you're using Agile/XP, the Product Manager may go as far as writing story cards and detailed stories that flow from them. They might write data flow diagrams but never technical details like schema or service and operation contracts.

I've worked with highly technical Product Managers in the past and it's rarely a good time for anyone involved. Getting a specification to just the right level of detail often requires that the Product Manager doesn't know how to "make the sausage" if you know what I mean.

Thanks for the response Kevin and sorry for the delayed response.   

Basically what the position will entail is completely up in the air now but I think it is more towards defining the product to the point where it can be built.   Also it will involve creating some structure around the way work flows into our technology division.

I'm going to wait and see how things shake out in the engineering dept as well as prod mgmt and make my judgement there.    Based on my tenure, I have a decent amount of flexibility.  

I might hit you up to chat about it at the user group meeting this week.

Thanks again,
Gray

You might want to look at this.  From what I can see from this, more skills less pay than a real PM

 http://tynerblain.com/blog/2007/12/13/2007-product-manager-survey-technical-product-managers/