[pretzel]

In my experience there are a couple kinds of product management. There is very user focused product management, and technical product management.

User-focused PMing is making tools that work for people - working with marketing, UX and client teams, to make sure you have a good Product/Market fit.

Technical PMing is more about making sure that you are building things the right way - making sure that the underlying models that your tools utilise are close to reality and understanding the roadmap that you will need to hit so that your releases will always be useful. It different from an architects role who is fed the information about the domain, the technical PM needs to synthesise this for the tech team to build, but there is a lot of overlap.

For engineers, it makes a lot of sense to become a technical PM, via being a team lead/architect, managing your devs more and coding less, and understanding more about why you are building what you are building that how what you are building it, and working with other PMs. From there, you do become more and more part of the design process, going up the food chain as it were, closer to the source of your user stories.

It's not the quick way of doing it, but PMs who understand the entire ecosystem are obviously more well rounded and may well be more effective than ones who have fallen into it from client management or marketing!