Product Manager

Between what users actually need, what the business can afford to build, and what engineering can ship in a quarter, the product manager makes the call. The role is less about authority and more about earning trust across functions — building the case for what to build next, running discovery interviews, and writing specs clear enough that designers and engineers can execute without re-asking the same questions.

Students grow into product management by shipping something, anything, end-to-end, and learning to instrument it in tools like Amplitude. The best product managers stay close to the customer, stay humble about their own assumptions, and care more about the outcome than about who gets credit for the idea.