How Do You Move From Engineering to Product Management?

(~6–8 min read)

Here is what helped me transition from an engineering to a product management role

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” Steve Jobs

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

I thought I was born to be an engineer — I really enjoyed solving complex problems, and building beautiful products. I worked as an engineer researching, and building wireless communication technologies, and products for the first couple of years of my career.

The Aha Moment

This avatar of my life continued until my first customer visit; that visit changed everything! I visited a customer to help them with a critical issue. Seeing a customer use something I had built, and accomplish something critical to them was just so rewarding, exhilarating, and at the cost of being dramatic, life changing. I had found my true calling — I wanted to be in a customer-facing role where I would work with customers helping them solve their problems, and building awesome products in parallel. Given my technical background, and continued desire to build products, a product manager role seemed like the perfect fit! In case you were curious this is how I see a product manager’s role.

The Reality

This was when the fun started. Moving into a product management role turned out to be a lot more challenging than I anticipated. This is something a lot of people struggle with which is what inspired me to write this blog.

How many of you have heard this when you tried to move into a product manager role? “You are critical for this product, so lets talk about a transition once things settle down”, or, “You are such a good engineer, why do you want to go into something else?”, or “We need someone with prior experience, so though you know the product, use cases well we don’t think this would work out”

My experience was along those lines as well. While frustrating at times, I decided to try, and do everything I could to get as much experience, and the skillsets to become a product manager so that I would be ready when an opportunity came along.

Here are the 3 things that helped me the most

1. Maximize your exposure to customers:

Most product managers (especially in the enterprise world) spend a lot of time working with customers, be it helping close deals, defining roadmaps, driving upside, partnerships etc., so its important to build this customer facing experience. And remember that as an engineer people might be more accommodating even if you are a little green when it comes to the nuances of working with customers.

Maximizing face time with customers can be hard to do as an engineer especially if it isn’t a part of your job, but there are still ways to make this happen:

a. Subject Matter Expertise: Become the (technical) subject matter expert for the space you operate in. This will open up a slew of opportunities for you — customer seminars (good sales managers always look to add value to the customer through seminars like this), customer events like workshops

In addition to your customer facing skills this will help you hone your presentation, and communication skills — both key skills for a product manager.

b. Product Expertise: Become an expert at your product — this should be easy especially if you are one of the ones building the product. This will let you add value to sales, and product managers when they are pitching to customers, filling out RFPs, or trying to expand within an existing customer

c. Customer Support: Regardless of how your customer support organization is setup, there are bound to be instances where some engineering help is needed. Volunteer to be the engineering point of contact for these. Help customers, and customer support with issues with your product — be it with the initial triaging, or the detailed under the hood work.

This was probably one of the things that helped me the most; this also opens up more opportunities for you:

a. You learn a lot from those who are in customer facing roles day in, day out

b. You learn how to collaborate and engage customers who aren’t happy — I know this doesn’t sound like fun, but as a product manager there will be times when you have to work with a customer who isn’t fully satisfied, or has issues, so any prior experience in similar situations will come in very handy

2. Get an intimate understanding of the market:

Any good product manager knows the market like the back of his/her hand, and by market I mean the market trends, customers, competitors, partners, ecosystem. As Jeff Bezos put it very nicely “Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition”, so should you! A good understanding of your customers, and the overall market will help you immensely in landing a product manager role, and more importantly in crushing it once you land this role

Here are a few things that will help you get a good understanding of the market:

a. Customer 411: You need to understand more about your customers –segments, personas, problems, how they use your product, and how you fit with the other products they use. Fortunately, many of things you would have done as a part of maximizing your customer exposure (see above) will help you on this front

b. Competitive Analysis: Be it product management, marketing, sales, or even the customer, everyone wants to know how your product stacks up against the competition. As someone who builds the product you have the opportunity to uncover differences beyond what’s obvious from the data sheets, so, do the competitive analysis proactively, starting on the technical side, but expanding to include other aspects such as pricing, positioning etc. and share it with folks internally

c. Participation in Industry bodies: Most industries have associations, or technical standards (ex. IEEE). Try to participate in these associations. This will give you a lot of face time with people in your industry — your customers, competitors, partners. This will also give you a feel for the emerging trends since some of these standards are typically a couple of years ahead of the mainstream market.

3. Take on as many technical marketing assignments as you can:

As a product manager, good communication, writing, and presenting skills always help! So, take on every opportunity you get to build these skills. This could be through:

a. Webinars: Most educational webinars start with a technology/industry piece, and finish up with a product/company pitch. The first piece is a great fit for a technical person, and given the amount of work it takes to put together a good webinar, people will always take you up on any offer to help.

Given their virtual nature, webinars have the added advantage of getting you comfortable presenting to a large audience even if you haven’t yet mastered the art of (physically) presenting in front of a large audience

b. Product/Technology videos: Whether its videos explaining how your product works, or videos explaining the underlying technology there is always a demand for technical videos. Jump on this! This will get you comfortable presenting in front of a camera, and is a great way to ease into doing public presentations.

c. Technical collateral: Just like product videos, the same goes with white papers, and application notes as well. Customers always want more, and being a product/technology expert puts you in a great position to help with this collateral. You might not be an excellent writer, but that’s ok. You can start off, and someone can make it customer facing.

There are always opportunities to do this; it could be something as simple as owning the product’s user guide. As an engineer I remember this was one of the not so exciting parts of the job, so chances are if you volunteer to own the user guide, you are probably going to get it J

Incidentally this is where some of the things we discussed earlier such as the customer support, market research would help since you would have a good handle on what people are looking for, and hence can create material that would resonate

Last but not least, work on your public speaking, and presentation skills. Take every opportunity you get to present, be it at a brownbag lunch, or a release review. Developing public speaking is a topic for a separate blog.

“To succeed in your mission you must have single-minded devotion to your goal” Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam

Did you do a similar transition? What did you do differently?

Vivek Vadakkuppattu

Written by

I am a first time #Entrepreneur, passionate about #technology, love working with customers. #outdoors fan, #animallover

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