Let me start with the rewards first:Understanding the big picture: Coming from a technical background into a PM world is like a little bird learning to fly. Suddenly you begin to understand that there are many other things close to my home, that I never felt the need to notice before. But once you get used to the surroundings, they become a part of you. Similarly when you transition into a PM role, you will find many things different - the Marketing, Customer support, sales, GTM etc. You never would have looked into how all of these work together to make a product successful. But now you have to deal with them every single day. And once you begin to look at the big picture, you begin to look at your home just as that, not the entire world. Your entire perspective changes.Unique point of view: Technology products are becoming complex than ever. With your technical background, you are always at an edge when it comes to understanding customer requirements, performing competitive analysis, writing battlecards and several other routine tasks. You can bring to the table a unique point of view that many others that you will deal with on a day-to-day basis, cannot.Now onto the challenges:The PM role does not come without challenges, more so if you are coming from a technical background.Moving from one thing to the next: Most engineers/technical people struggle with this. A technical role needs you to dig deeper and allows you the time and resources to do so. But you cannot afford to do that in a PM role. There is a constant barrage of things you need to deliver and it is hard to focus on a single aspect alone for a longer time. In my experience, this is the biggest challenge a technical background person goes through.Understanding business/value proposition: As a technical person, you will tend to highlight features/functionalities. This will come out in everything you do including customer collateral :-) Very soon, you will recognize that you cannot fight battles on that alone. But it will take you years before you get good at highlighting the value proposition from the feature/functionalities that you put in. It is a constant learning for any PM to be able to articulate the business benefit.Change of focus: You will have to think more holistically than ever. If you are in an engineering role, and as you grew into that role, you would have experienced this. But the change of focus that happens in a PM role is on a much larger scale with many more stakeholders.If you fail in handling any one piece of your PM job (be it Marketing, or support etc.), it will impact the product very badly. The stakes are not that high in an engineering/technical role. Of course, all of this can be learnt and eventually planned.The extent of all of this varies with the type of PM role. It is better to start as a technical PM and eventually move towards a business PM role (more of that on my blog), if you are coming from a technical role.