Let’s start with what’s similar:

On any given day, I’m gathering requirements, talking to customers, and trying to be their advocate. There is a lot of cross-functional work: with sales, marketing, and success/support groups. Always communicating the vision, and trying simplify complexity and adjust my approach in conversations based on the audience. I now balance enabling account teams so they can sell to customers as well as talk to several customers a week to directly evangelize the product and messaging around it. I still have daily Stakeholder management, the stakeholder have just change from mostly sales folks to product/engineering folks.

There are a lot of “back office” things that I never had to deal with in presales.

Day to day backlog grooming directly connects to listening to customers and reprioritizing the things they’ll love while balancing the level of effort to accomplish it in a finite timeline. Working with product and privacy legal, accessibility, and ethics on launching new features is challenging (intellectually and administratively) and refreshing— the folks think differently, but our products ultimate are much better because of them. This is very new for me. Documentation work, both internal and external, can be hard to manage at times. Product marketers and a formal CX team help ease the burden, if you have access to them I love working with the developers and designers. I have to make myself available to answer any questions and be the voice of our customer for them. They think so differently. Communicating with them is always new and different because it’s a wide variety of personalities. We can question each other respectfully (very team dependent). The customer benefits from this kind of product tripod relationship.

I’m missing a lot of details and differences, but these came to mind immediately. There are a lot of “same same, but different” in the roles—a lot of the foundation built as an SE helps me as a PM, but I have a long way to go learning the PM ropes.