Ask HN: Possible to Become a Part-Time Manager? (Project or Product)
Your question didn&#x27;t talk about your career aspirations, as those items would influence the type of PM position that you are seeking and the level of commitment that you would make to it. I&#x27;m also assuming that this is software PM.<p>Let me provide some of my background and our philosophy on PM, maybe some of these perspectives will alter your point of view.<p>I am currently CEO of WSO2, #1 integration OSS company and #7 OSS software company. We will do around $50M in sales this year, most of that being subscriptions which are growing roughly 60%. We are profitable and cash flow positive. We have 400 people in technology roles, and at any point in time we have 4 full time PMs and another 15 people acting in PM roles.<p>Prior to my job at WSO2, I was CEO &#x2F; Founder of Codenvy, which was bought by Red Hat last year, and we grew to just under 50 people. And prior to that, I had spent roughly 10 years working in various PM roles on software products related to Java, .NET, systems management, virtualization and containers - essentially, devops and middleware are concentrations.<p>Software is a creative industry - much like the moving industry. Every release of a software product is an opportunity to redefine your company&#x27;s position within a marketplace. Engineers are like actors, and PMs are like directors. And the PMs work with a wide range of supporting individuals to make each release of the software as successful as possible. The movie process is similar.<p>Since software is a creative activity, it can be argued that the success of software products are tied to the passion and commitment that their leaders attribute to their fashioning. Many software products are the result of a passion, commitment, vision, and love that are born from the inner values and beliefs of the product&#x27;s leaders, which usually the PM is a strong voice.<p>In this regard, if the company you work for is a for profit software company, or the software project you would inherit has ambitious objectives around market share or penetration, success of the product is measured by results that require abnormal commitments from their leaders. Those commitments are increasingly hard to measure in time allocation or time slicing.<p>At WSO2, when one of our leaders takes on a PM role assigned to a product, it is a position of prestige. It comes usually with higher pay, more recognition, and more responsibilities. We ask our leaders to take a competitive position and to pursue victory, and then allow them to have access to broad resources and budget that they can deploy to facilitate their goals. When they take on this role, we allow them to allocate their time as they see fit, but quarterly they must stand up in front of the company during quarterly reviews to elaborate upon their results, the results of the competition, and what&#x27;s next.<p>This type of PM is not for everyone - but the benefits can be tremendous. It was doing this sort of work that got me introduced to doing investments and acquisitions, because while at Quest, it was PMs that were the strategic drivers of potential partner &#x2F; build &#x2F; buy scenarios (and we did a lot of acquisitions). It also opened up opportunities for me to angle invest and join Toba Capital as a partner, for which I was able to lead investments in Codenvy, Sauce Labs, and WSO2 (for which now I am its CEO). And my CEO positions were never pushed or encouraged by the investors - in both cases, the companies looked at my PM background and asked me to get steadily more involved in the company execution.<p>I got serious about PM just about the age that you are now. I hope your journey proves worthwhile...