I'm not sure what's going on out there in other companies, but I keep having this same conversation with promising software engineer candidates where they say "I want to move into product management". What? Huh? Here we are, talking about a development position, and they start talking about how they don't want to do that, they want to be in product management.
What is it about product management that is so attractive to these excellent developers? Do they know what product managers spend their time doing? They go to a lot of meetings (developers hate meetings); they talk to a lot of people (developers are usually introverts); they don't "do" anything (developers check-in code and push it live to the servers); ... do these people really want to be product managers?
Eventually I figured out that what they were really saying was "I want to be in control of what I do". They've noticed that at their current company, the product managers are in control and so they want that job: product manager... Ah, now I can explain how at New Relic we don't have a product management group and that those kinds of decisions are made by developers.
The good candidates eyes light up because they realize that we've got the best of all worlds: passionate developers who write code and make decisions without excess layers of management. Maybe someday when we grow to be a big company we'll have to reorganize and add product managers, but not yet: today, our developers are directly talking to our customers and so our developers are our product managers.
(If this sounds great to you, take a look at our jobs page.)