Ask HN: Product Managers, how did you get there and what's your background?
Junior positions I think not, especially as a Product Manager (well depending the size of your structure) is supposed to have lots of contacts, all the time, even when he&#x27;s overloaded with tasks.<p>I know I wasn&#x27;t in the same role, just mentionning what I witnessed regarding Product Managers where I worked in the past..
Having been a Product Owner for a couple of years in a 10k+ employees international company, just to name a few guys you need to meet regularly for the sake of your product, from makers to users :<p>Developpers teams, QA teams,  Product Support Teams, Marketing teams, Finance teams, Sales teams (Global, Regional), Delivery teams (Global, Regional), Training teams (See a trend here?), Customers (from time to time, not counting support escalations).<p>Out of these exchanges you get your product needs and issues which you need to rationalise, plan and translate into features and fixes, plan a macro and micro roadmap including slightly-expected hotfixes, service packs, long term roadmap (to give your customers a sense of what&#x27;s coming - up to 5y forecast sometimes), adding also various compliance rules on top of this (depending the market) and a frosting made of turn over rates plus international culture complexity.<p>Of course what I&#x27;m mentionning is not the whole world, but as far as I can tell it&#x27;s a good picture of what you can expect from someone doing decent international product management.<p>Therefore, a junior Product Manager would be pretty much difficult to pull, unless you&#x27;re hiring people who had the opportunity to cross the intellectual and business bridges (consumer&#x2F;producer&#x2F;user&#x2F;support) a couple of times in their carreer (imagine yourself drafting your new product roadmap while travelling a plane to show up on site on a Friday in a customer&#x27;s office to defend your product against a missing&#x2F;crippling feature and try to propose a mitigation plan with the help of the local delivery team).<p>A Product Manager is in a sense a one man band, half Project Manager, half Architect, Salesman, Support Manager, Training manager, end user, customer, etc.<p>So, Junior without someone to back you up, I don&#x27;t think so. 
Junior without having some experience of the Trenches, hardly, as you can easily be reckless toward the teams mentionned above and also miss some red flags (&quot;ivory tower&quot; syndrome).<p>If you find such an opportunity, be wary on the context and the expected work. This role can be more stressing and alienating than being a Project Manager because you are supposed to represent a Product in any aspect of it.