Agreed. People who are "technical-enough to understand software but don't have quite the right mindset to write it well, but everybody likes working with them" are often excellent in developer-adjacent roles like business analyst. They grok the system well-enough to be able to talk requirements and work with both developers and stakeholders, and can go to bat for their team and win the stakeholders over when it's a case of "okay the developers think they have a neat way to meet your needs but it's not exactly what you asked for what do you think of this???"
I hate to admit that that’s who I am. I made a pretty OK career as Product Manager / Head of Product.
And I can tell that beeing nice is super important here as I deal daily with anything from customer, CEO, difficult stakeholders, sales and co.
So no I don’t think beeing incompetent but I had not the patience and grit for software development although I loved it.
Nothing to "hate to admit" there. A good product manager is worth their weight in gold, especially one with enough knowledge of what's going on under the hood to understand the technical tradeoffs the developers are making in order to meet requirements.
I don’t know who I’m quoting. But being able to stare at a screen for hours is the key. Relentlessly technical? Stubborn hacker?
It’s definitely not an intelligence thing. Being smart helps, but the amount of time you can passionately power through figuring out technical minutiae is often the limiting factor.
