Becoming a Product Manager

Transitioning from engineering to PM

For the last year, I’ve been transitioning from being a Software Engineer to becoming a Product Manager.

I have read a lot about career transitions like mine, and from every book and every blog entry I’ve read I have learned something interesting…but at the end, I guess every person has a different story.

One of the things that were highly useful to me at the beginning of this journey were the personal experiences from other Product Managers in the industry. The goal of this new blog is precisely to give back what I’ve received from the PM community and start sharing my experiences, with the hope that they can be useful to someone.

Why become a Product Manager?

Lately I get this question quite a lot. I’ve been in engineering for several years, first as a consultant and then as a product engineer. I’ve been building products, creating tools, crafting features for real people… but one day, around a year and a half ago, I felt the need to help engineers, my colleagues, my coworkers, go a step further. When I was at engineering I felt that when I was building features, I couldn’t reach final users as much as I needed to get their feedback, to listen to them and put their improvement suggestions into the product. I didn’t have time to do market research, to use the competitors products, to spend time seeing how our users where actually using our product. I felt like there was a gap between me and the users. I felt that much more can be achieved if I had someone helping me in that sense… It was then that I discovered the role and need of the Product Manager.

I was happy to discover that my company was creating a PM team, so I enrolled, and here I am! Now my work is to listen to customers, do market research, competence analysis, strategy and vision definition, road map prioritization, writing user stories, usability testing, feedback gathering… and then, after all that work is done, provide that valuable feedback to engineering and design so that we build products that solve real problems, that help our users on their daily lives, that are usable and useful!

Transitioning to PM was one of the scariest career decisions I’ve ever made, but I don’t regret it at all. I think that when you make decisions based on the will to help others and not on self-interest, only good things come out as a result.

Thanks for reading so far and please, don’t hesitate in sharing your feedback with me!
Best,
Juan