Absolutely! In fact, this used to be the norm before fhe MBBs and ex-IBs who did an MBA flooded the PM market in the 2012-15 period thanks to Google's PM org.
PMs who started before 2012 or after 2022 tend to have a product mindset ("I'm building a product to solve a problem").
This requires domain experience - you can't learn this from an MBA. You need to have started of working in that field in order to become a truly strong product manager. Before the 2010s, most MBA PMs tended to be staff or principal engineers, sales engineers, or support engineers sponsored by their employer to attend part-time MBA programs like Berkeley Haas [0] or Stanford HCP MS&E [1]as a finishing school and return as a business minded engineer.
Google and Twitter (back under Dorsey in 2010-11) changed the whole PM hiring process industry wide by prioritizing MBB personas and MBB-style interviews as one of their heads of PM at the time was a former Partner at McKinsey and brought the McK process into the tech industry, despite more product minded people like Salar, Marissa, and Sundar helping build core fundamentals of what became the Google behemoth (Xooglers, please correct me if the history is wrong - it's been 15 years and I do think I messed up some of the chronology).
PMs who started before 2012 or after 2022 tend to have a product mindset ("I'm building a product to solve a problem").
This requires domain experience - you can't learn this from an MBA. You need to have started of working in that field in order to become a truly strong product manager. Before the 2010s, most MBA PMs tended to be staff or principal engineers, sales engineers, or support engineers sponsored by their employer to attend part-time MBA programs like Berkeley Haas [0] or Stanford HCP MS&E [1]as a finishing school and return as a business minded engineer.
Google and Twitter (back under Dorsey in 2010-11) changed the whole PM hiring process industry wide by prioritizing MBB personas and MBB-style interviews as one of their heads of PM at the time was a former Partner at McKinsey and brought the McK process into the tech industry, despite more product minded people like Salar, Marissa, and Sundar helping build core fundamentals of what became the Google behemoth (Xooglers, please correct me if the history is wrong - it's been 15 years and I do think I messed up some of the chronology).
[0] - https://ewmba.haas.berkeley.edu/
[1] - https://msande.stanford.edu/academics-admissions/graduate/ms...