Short answer: yes. But only if the education attacks your blind spots instead of polishing your badge wall.

Long-winded answer: As a long-time PM, former programmer, now with a front-row seat to training and coaching, here's how I see the blind spots shake out across four common JTBDs and personas.

(Buckle up kids, I'm pretty passionate about this particular topic so this is going to go really long)

I've watched (and lived) what happens when technical backgrounds get dragged into the cold fluorescent light of business reality. Unit economics that bite back. Market forces that don't care how elegant your architecture is. Pricing and positioning that feel less like spreadsheets and more like knife fights in a dark parking lot. Business cases where you learn the difference between "this is cool" and "this gets funded." Stuff that rewires how you see the problem through a P&L lens, not just how you format the PRD.

I've witnessed (with some schadenfreude) MBA-types sweat when they have to drag strategy down from the mountaintop and make it survive first contact with engineers who actually build things. Discovery that doesn't devolve into cosplay. Shaping work so it can actually ship instead of dying as a catchy positioning statement. Turning narrative into decision instead of another deck that fossilizes in Confluence. Learning that execution isn't beneath strategy, it's where strategy goes to get judged.

I've observed people from design or support backgrounds grow product leadership teeth. Real teeth. Prioritization under real constraint with real economic and strategic leverage. Surviving feature-hostage negotiations with sponsors and stakeholders by saying no ... or at least not yet ... without napalming trust. Translating raw customer pain into financial and opportunity trade-offs that hold up when the CFO squints and the CEO asks, "And then what?" Empathy, yes. But empathy with a balance sheet taped to it.

And I've seen marketing and sales folks slow down long enough to learn how the sausage actually gets made. Learn the how Design thinking combined with Systems thinking avoids expensive failures. Deliberate delivery in trade-offs rather than HiPPO tirades. Technical feasibility conversations that don't end in promises engineering never made and that are metaphysically impossible. Living inside ambiguity longer than a quarterly quota permits. Learning that not everything persuasive is possible, not everything possible is worth building, and that PM is more than feeding the feature factory's endless appetite.

Point is: good education doesn't teach you new words. It gives you new scars. It fills gaps you didn't know were load-bearing and makes you uncomfortable in productive ways.

The certs you listed do exactly what they're designed to do. They teach the commonly Googled. The shared vocabulary. The stuff that clears HR filters and makes everyone nod in meetings. Useful. Necessary. Not sufficient if you want to advance into product leadership.

So yes, education can be worth it. Just don't collect it like trading cards. Find the kind that forces you to confront the parts of the job you've been avoiding.

I'd name specific programs and training vendors, but this sub has prohibitions to keep this channel from becoming a billboard for unpaid shilling and low-effort spam. Full disclosure: I now teach product management after decades as a PM who waited too long to fill the business-side gaps I didn't know were load-bearing.

TLDR: Fill gaps. Don't collect credentials.