❓Here's an open question - are you a product manager who has explored re-tooling as a creative technologist? 🧙♂️ 👀 I've met many PMs who, after being a senior product manager for a while, will question their career progression. I talked with several very senior PMs about this at a recent conference. If you go into group product manager or director roles to mentor and lead others, you quickly lose visibility on the things that were your skills, passions, and motivations in the first place. 🐬 On the flip side, I've seen many senior engineers shift from tech leads or development managers in favour of staff or principal engineer roles to free them up for the most creative, high-impact work. 🤖 I didn't know many creative technologists before I was at Shopify. They would say those two words together, creative technologist, and I would think, that's a description but not a role, right? Like, I work creatively with technology to discover potential solutions through prototyping ... 💌 Would love your thoughts. I appreciate this is a niche, reflective, PM post 😂 . The new thoughts are still spinning from ProductCamp Vancouver. Also, the power to create now is limitless. I had an opinion that PMs were being squeezed out (post-Brian Chesky's comments, and other market changes), but I'm now starting to see that with better Python skills, I can 10x myself to build out tools without an engineering team (pre-production). There's a market/skills/role opportunity unlock here for PMs given the airspace to do so. 🚀 #productmanager #productleader #creativetechnologist #AI
In my world a creative technologist is someone who uses technology for creative output. That can range from an engineer who builds tools for creatives to a creative who chains pipelines of tools and code together to produce creative output - images, video, immersive, 3d etc.
It's fascinating to ponder the evolution from a PM to a creative technologist. Your insightful reflection on career progression resonates deeply with the constant quest for growth and impact.
Have faced this quandary daily. I entered the product role T shaped, then I feel the T is wider as every day I take on more responsibilities to fill gaps. Technical skills in particular are diluted, but have gained a much bigger force multiplier being the voice of the customer.
Get to PMF efficiently | AI Product & Design | Fmr. Silicon Valley AI founder & product manager
2moI'm a former freelance PM and teamed up with a designer to help teams/founders iterate and prototype faster I wanted to deliver more value. Instead of only discovering what we should build (PM work), instead actually mock it up (design work) and test it before investing in development what types/stages of companies do you see looking for creative technologists?