El-mom

The thought process went something along the lines of this. For the first question, why product management? At one point last year, I was analysing how the past... 4 years went and I kind of had these whole sessions of trying to understand where I would like to fit in and in the longer term (think 10-40 years ahead), what type of role do I want to play, what type of work would fulfil me, where would I thrive, and all that and something I noticed is, I'm very much someone who loves integrating multiple things and thinking from different perspectives. And I also, for the life of me, can't sit still with one line of specialization or one type of work (so like right now, my days include product work, then I have projects on finance, code, social impact stuff, the stuff in my backlog includes Econ stuff, writing, art...). That led to me thinking "okay, what type of person/brand/role do I want to build? how can I integrate the interests I already have in a meaningful way? what type of leverage am I building?" which got me to, at least for now, product. One of the people I bugged throughout this time was Lu, she really helped me clarify what product is and what she does. And I'd say the major part of the influence comes from her. It's to the point that she'd be like "but this is hard" or "but this is so tiring" and what she's describing, the pain she's describing, seemed like something I wouldn't mind taking on. One of the advices I took I think like 5 years ago was this "when 'picking' the type of work you want to do, ask yourself whether you'd enjoy the painful parts, not the parts you're passionate about". So for example, you could say you want to pick medicine, you're passionate, awesome, but are you willing to take the extra extraaa long years it takes before you make money out of it? are you willing to have your heart shattered in more ways than one every other month? I took that to product, and I found out, the challenges and the "things hated" were the things that I actually would endure, so it made sense. Another lane I took, is, going back to the long-term arc, I feel like I now have a very good idea of the person I want to be and the types of things I want to contribute in the world. I want exposure into multiple industries and workflows, I want both the narrow and the multiple lanes of understanding you have to accommodate to be a good product person and ultimately, an actually good builder, and I want to build. It was a lot of pattern analysis from what I learnt over the past 5 years, and yeah, I figured out product is a good stepping stone for me. As for what you're missing out, I really can't tell you anything about that. For what it's worth, I feel like with the way the industry is going, having the business/marketing/strategy/leadership understanding product gives as much deep technical knowledge helps you a long way, and it's also ultimately about the person you want to be I guess. Are you the type who would love to tinker with technical problems or work on a specific domain for the longer term or are you interested in say, the marketing side of business? How much do you love researching, like actually, spending weeks researching, synthesizing, obsessing over products? And a lot more of those questions you can ask Claude. So it depends, I don't know what to tell you. Hope that answers your question :)