Journey — Sofware Engineer to Consultant to Product Manager
If you asked me 5 years ago, I didn’t even know what Product Management was. I received a lot of questions recently on how to transition into a Product Manager role. As you might have already come across stories of how people got into product roles, let me highlight that there is no single RIGHT path.
This is my journey into Product Management:
- I graduated with a technical degree (B.Sc in Computer Science) in 2008. I started off my journey as a Software Engineer at PayPal Engineering Singapore. It was a great experience working in an MNC that functions with the startup mindset. But towards the end of 2 years, I felt like I needed to do more than just code so I decided to pursue a Masters in Software Engineering National University of Singapore.
- After learning a whole lot about how to do software requirements management, project management, enterprise architecture, architecting software solutions, information security policies. Between 2013–2015, I ventured to become a Consultant with a couple of Enterprise Digital Transformation companies(Mega and Erwin) where I worked with major banks, insurance, and government organizations in the Asia Pacific region. It was my stepping stone into product-related work, luckily as part of the digital innovation team I had the opportunity to work with business/technical requirements, how to address enterprise-level business problems, interacting with users, getting my hands dirty, delivering real value by customizing the transformation platform for each organization getting their data, systems, and processes in order.
- I moved to Toronto, Canada in 2016 and had a couple of stints as Senior Business Analyst / Product Owner with Aviva, Hydro One where I focused on working with the clients to derive business requirements and translating them into user stories, worked closely with the development teams and also played a Scrum master role for some projects. These roles gave me opportunities helped me gain exposure on how to develop web applications for users. This is where I realized that a lot of the work I did does align with the Product Manager role description. I switched to RBC mobile team, where I got the opportunity to manage feature implementations for the RBC mobile app (iOS and Android). The mobile team was functioning very much as a product organization where they had a roadmap and delivered features that lined up with the vision of the company. I spent a year understanding how to build products in a B2C environment, how to measure product success, and how to understand what consumers need.
- After many years in the big corporate organizations, I longed for a chance to be in a smaller organization where I can have more ownership and a chance to build a product that makes a great impact. In 2018, I landed a Product Manager role with GroupBy which is a true startup environment and where engineers are passionate to build new things, experiment, and work on the challenges faced by business in the e-commerce industry.
Before landing a Product Manager role, I spent numerous hours reading medium articles, best practices articles, design thinking, writing blogs about products and new features, UX, how to understand what user wants, managing a product team, how to influence people, books, making connections at networking events like (ProductTank, ProductTO and others)
Even though I came from a technical background my journey was definitely not a cake walk, no one handed out the PM job out to me. It took persistence and over a year of preparations, multiple failed interviews, failures at last stages of the interview. I documented the mistakes I made at each stage and learning from them and trying to improve.
Advice to all the aspiring PM’s:
Ask yourself a few questions:
- Why do you want to become a product manager?
- What qualities do you think you have to be a successful product manager?
- Which of your current job duties overlap with the PM role?
- What are your weaknesses?
Steps to take to get closer a PM job:
- Start learning the Product Management concepts, the Agile/Kanban model.
- Build your connections with other product managers in your city.
- Find out if your organization has PM roles and try to shadow a colleague and understand more about the role.
- Move to an organization in a different role or current role and switch to PM roles internally.
- Attend product meetups like ProductTank and others in your city.
- Read product management related books.
- Work on your weakness, work on mastering the UX, design process, understand how to work with developers and the business team.
- Shortlist a few industries in which you are interested, look at some of the product companies in your city and understand what they do and what do they look for in a product manager. Try to identify the gaps that you need to work on.
- Prepare and practice well, there are many Slack communities where you can connect with some peers or seniors who are willing to do a mock interview or spend some time to help you out.
I hope this article was helpful. If you’re still discovering what the world of product management is all about or want to learn more, connect with me.
