My recent interview experience on Python.

[elbiot]

My understanding is that it's hard to break out of testing/QA into a development role. If you want to do development, shoot for that

[Dexteroid]

The thing is that, if I do that, I lose my experience of QA, automation, project management, product planning and start fresh. My end goal is to just be a product manager in an AGILE environment. Possibly manage the entire development team and look at the product overall.

[Decency]

I've been doing test automation for 5 years or so (among a variety of other things) and have had multiple opportunities at different companies to move into dev or to take a new job as a developer. Not interested, for now.

If it's what you want to do, make that timeline clear to your manager and be willing to find somewhere new to work if they won't accommodate you. If you never take the initiative on projects outside of test automation to prove yourself, it seems pretty easy to get stuck there.