I'm a dev with a few years of experience and there may be an opportunity at my company to take on a product management role.
What does it do for your career prospects? Is it similar to moving into people management? Do you like it better? Worse?
First, product manager != people manager. Despite 'manager' in the title, a typical product manager is an 'individual contributor' with no direct reports, just like a typical developer. Every company's title structure is different and titles and reality are often disjoint, but you'll generally won't get to do people management until you're a 'director of product management' or at least a 'senior product manager'.
Being a product manager is similar to being a people manager in that you won't be doing any coding any more. If you want to code, stay a dev.
Early-stage startups generally don't need product managers - one of the founders is almost always the de facto product manager. So by becoming a product manger, you're effectively saying 'I don't ever want to work for extremely small startups', because those guys just aren't going to hire you. Be aware of that before you jump into it.
Salaries are generally the same as developer salaries - in some places a little higher, in some places a little lower, depending on how respected product management is at that organization. In my opinion, if you're just looking to get to an executive role and maximize your salary (and hey, nothing wrong with that), it's usually a bit easier to climb the ranks in product management. Although I can think of a few large companies where the opposite is true, generally competition is lighter and if you're good you'll get to advance more quickly. Note that 'good developer' does not necessarily mean 'good product manager'.
In some places product management has a lot of power and influence and the ability to really make strategic decisions on behalf of the company, and in other places they're overpaid administrative assistants doing meeting scheduling and filling out TPS reports. Whether you like it better or worse depends a whole lot on that.
Any specific questions, feel free to email me.
In early-stage startups, the CEO is most often playing the product manager. 70% of a PM's job should be speaking to users, both new and existing (usability testing of built features).
In small startups, product management will likely be mixed with project management - you will probably have to manage the teams' Pivotal Tracker / Jira tickets. You will naturally work closely with UI/UX designers, filtering through user feedback. You're really the person that needs to know what your team should be building next and PM's generally head roadmap planning and releases.
You also really need to be across the data/SQL and understand exactly what features users are using, when and have a good idea of why. As a dev, this is where it would be to your advantage - being able to setup mixpanel/tracking events or even pull & analyze the raw data yourself is going to be a big advantage compared to other candidates.
So define your target.