Career paths of Product Managers are interesting. If like me you started as an engineer you may find yourself feeling the pull of writing code again so a Technical Product Manager (TPM) role is a nice fit, but this role seems to be very ill-defined and is going through an evolution at the moment.
TPM generally work across backend, data, infra to bring a product mindset to platform concepts - be it plumbing, internal tooling or external products that are consumed by technical users (analysts, devs, data sci).
This is a really nice mix for engineering minded people as you are “close to the metal” as it were and get to be the voice of the technology in the broader product strategy.
The role is going through an evolution now into a Head of Data or Head of Platform role which is sitting more in the technology line management track and even managing engineers directly.
I hypothesize that this trend will keep going as more businesses realise the importance of having a product mindset in the data and infra org especially those businesses where the data/platform IS the product.