r/ProductOwner

Hi everyone,

I’m a Senior Frontend Engineer with 7+ YOE (mostly React/TS) currently looking for my next role, and I’m using this transition period to completely rethink my career trajectory.

I am highly motivated and ready to put in the grind—whether that means aggressive upskilling, diving into new technical domains, or pivoting my career path entirely. But before I start sprinting, I want to make sure I’m running in the right direction.

Here is what I know about what I actually want: My core interests lie in owning and building robust systems, being highly product-minded, and being in a position where I can drive key technical or product decisions. I want to move away from just picking up tickets and move toward shaping the product itself.

For those of you who have made a similar leap (whether into Staff/Principal roles, Engineering Management, Solutions Architecture, or even Product Management):

• What path makes the most sense from where I am right now?
• If you were in my shoes, what specific skills or concepts would you focus on upgrading first?

I would deeply appreciate any guidance, or shared experiences you have. Thanks in advance!

Hi 👋

What tools do you use to research and understand customers' needs and requests? My company uses Zendesk to gather issues but I need something different. I get you probably receive customers' requests and issues via some support ticket systems like us, but how do you extract what matters from it?

From my experience the sheer number of support tickets makes it very hard to filter out what matters. Happened many times that we've been chasing some trivial issues raised by noisy users just to miss the critical problem boiling under the surface.

I'm looking for something that will help me find what matters and use it to craft decent product requirements from it.

What would be your recommendation? Do you do it manually? Are there some good tools to try? How do you tackle this?

Hi everyone,

Last weekend I attended a product management conference and it made me want to explore the role seriously, so I'd love some outside perspective.

I'm a UX/UI and Product Designer with about ten years of experience in design, currently working remotely for a major Italian telecom company on digital products used by millions of people. I don't have a university degree, everything I know comes from work and hands-on learning. Lately I'm drawn more to the product side, and I also build a lot of my own tools with AI.

A few questions:

1. If you moved from design to product management, how did you make the switch? Was it worth it?

2. I'm considering a business bachelor's to strengthen my profile. With ten years of experience, is a degree still worth it, or does experience matter more?

3. With AI changing how products get built, is a designer who can also build a strong profile, or should I specialize?

Tips and personal experiences are very welcome. Thanks!

Hi everyone! I'm a corporate lawyer with 3 YOE, and for the last 1.5 years, I've been deep into Legal Ops & AI Solutioning. This experience has really sparked my interest in product-centric roles, and honestly, I don't want to keep practicing corporate law.

The thing is, I'm completely clueless about how to make this career switch. Can anyone in the product domain shed some light on what these roles actually look for in candidates? And more importantly, how can I upskill to land a solid product role at an MNC? I've been working with startups so far and now I'm looking for that established entity exposure.

Thanks a ton in advance for any help and best wishes!

Going through proposals right now with two agencies quoting time and materials and one quoting fixed. The t&m agencies keep saying their model is more flexible while the fixed one says they protect from overruns. The mvp is defined with clear requirements and there is no experimenting happening here. Genuinely confused about which model makes more sense for a situation like that.

Sales closed a large shipper last month and the contract mentions automated load tendering. Our CEO's position is that discovery is pointless now, the deal is signed, just build it. He's given engineering 6 weeks.
I pushed back a little and got 3 calls with the shipper's dispatch team, framed as kickoff calls so nobody felt slowed down. What came out of it: their dispatchers re-key most tenders by hand from email bc their EDI setup only covers their top carrier, and the long tail of small carriers they use every day just send emails and PDFs.
The feature as written in the contract assumes clean EDI data from everyone. If we build that, it'll technically meet the contract and their dispatchers will keep re-keying anyway.
So now I'm stuck between the contract says X and X won't get used. The CEO hears discovery and thinks about months of research. I think we need maybe 2 more weeks, a rough mockup of the email intake flow and one session with their dispatchers walking through it.
How have you made the case for discovery when the deal is already done? Is there a version of this that doesn't sound like I'm trying to slow down revenue?