ddelt

I find that as I'm getting older, I am appreciating the work that a product owner or technical project manager does at a large company (think person who writes JIRA stories, understand the technology or development enough to talk to everyone, can get people on a single line of thinking and can lead discussions, likes working with people and business, and is not hands-on engineering all day).

I also constantly hear from people who are in these sorts of roles that they would 'kill' for the technical background that an engineer has (as that would make them more effective).

Now there is me, with SRE and DevOps background, who applies for product owner, technical project manager, or any sort of similar role as described above, and can not for the life of me figure out why I keep getting "upsold" engineering roles instead, when I am very explicit about applying for the less technical ones. Is it true that there is really no world for a technologist to transition into one of these less technical roles? Does anyone know what the secret sauce is here (besides the line item on the job description that asks for "having been a product owner/<INSERT TITLE> for X years at a previous company")?

What can I, as someone who is in engineering, and would like to do one of these sorts of jobs instead, do at application/interview time to demonstrate that I am a good choice/fit?