To become a product person is simple. Just take a hammer, and hit yourself in the head until you loose all cognitive capacity. In my humble opinion, “product people” are dumb-asses. No really… They love buzzwords, and they love simple schemas that show with a big arrow where the “product” is supposed to be placed in infrastructure, in case they forget what the product was for.

I was totally in agree with you a few months back in time. But it all depends on the organization you are working. In a not very well organized company, any technical job is more tragical than the product manager’s story above. To make proper product management, your organization should give the whole responsible and freedom to you to make choices — these choices may vary from software development practices to the daily hours interval your team should be on site. Otherwise, the BOSS becomes who makes the product management and no other is needed. So you end up being a time sheet filler, an Excel master and some dummy person that repeats the goal of the holly BOSS.

I also really love stuff like changing the outlook settings of product persons and watch them get all confused.

Anyhow, you should not pay attention to any of those. If you want to learn things like budget, market visibility, commerce, etc, just sit down with excel and plan the stuff.

I also recommend all the developers to listen to Scott Adams audiotape `MBA in 30 minutes` – once this material is digested and understood by the developer, next day she/he can go to work with a ceo’ish attitude.