Question
If you're successful at hackathons, and you're not the programmer, can you get a job as a product manager?
Answer
A "career in PM" sounds like you want the big company jobs. If you succeeded in selling your ideas to hackers at hackathons, that's not entirely relevant because most big company work is incremental visions while startup work is clean-sheet vision.
It will probably help a little. But if you could find some way to get experience on incremental stuff that would round you out. Could you answer a question like "how would you improve Google's search results page to increase ad revenue without making the page more spammy"? (that's of course the very top job at Google in a way). To answer that you'd need deep understanding of search, high volume traffic, experience working with very subtle usability issues etc.
Clean sheet work in big companies is far harder to get. You have to pay your dues by working on small incremental stuff first, grow stuff via 20% time type mechanisms and work your way to the big opportunities.
On the other hand, if you don't want a product management career in that sense and are willing to learn additional marketing and hustling talents, you can do startup stuff. Product management is a subset of hustling in the hacker-hustler paradigm.
Biz-dev is kinda unrelated, an orthogonal vector of skills to product management and product marketing. There is not much correlation there to product visioning skill. Yes, you need that to structure a deal concept for a partnership or something, but it is not the primary skill and others can support you there. The main biz-dev skill is relationship/trust building and people stuff.
It will probably help a little. But if you could find some way to get experience on incremental stuff that would round you out. Could you answer a question like "how would you improve Google's search results page to increase ad revenue without making the page more spammy"? (that's of course the very top job at Google in a way). To answer that you'd need deep understanding of search, high volume traffic, experience working with very subtle usability issues etc.
Clean sheet work in big companies is far harder to get. You have to pay your dues by working on small incremental stuff first, grow stuff via 20% time type mechanisms and work your way to the big opportunities.
On the other hand, if you don't want a product management career in that sense and are willing to learn additional marketing and hustling talents, you can do startup stuff. Product management is a subset of hustling in the hacker-hustler paradigm.
Biz-dev is kinda unrelated, an orthogonal vector of skills to product management and product marketing. There is not much correlation there to product visioning skill. Yes, you need that to structure a deal concept for a partnership or something, but it is not the primary skill and others can support you there. The main biz-dev skill is relationship/trust building and people stuff.