My year in review: From Software Engineer to Product Manager

2020 was an unprecedented year.

I planned to make the year a foundational one and try out a couple of things. As we all know, with every year, some plans work out, and some don't. My main goal for this year was to transition into Product Management. Amazingly, this plan worked out, and so in this article, I'm going to be talking about my transition from Engineering to Product Management. Hopefully, it helps someone considering making the transition or currently in the process.

I've spent the past few years of my career as a Software Engineer, and while this was very fulfilling, I wanted more. Whenever I contributed to a product in either design or engineering, I found myself interested in the bigger picture and the little details. I usually had thoughts and questions around how my contribution led to users' happiness, how the business got value by building a product, why leaders made different product decisions, how teams built great products and many more. This feeling increased dramatically in the last year, and I knew that was my cue to try out something different.

Before I got to know about Product Management, I had thought that everything related to building a great product while providing business value was the CEO's responsibility exclusively. My desk research proved me wrong. Product Managers exist to deliver consistent value both to users and the business by rallying together company resources. It sounded like a role that would answer my questions and be interesting, so I decided to pursue it.

I didn't immediately understand how, but I think I figured it out. I will walk you through how I went from Software Engineering to Product Management in the next few paragraphs.

Five practical steps to transition to Product Management

1. Learn more about the role

I started the early part of this journey, finding and connecting with people that were where I wanted to be. The questions I was trying to answer at this point were: What is Product Management? What are the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager? What do I need to succeed in this role? And if this what I wanted to pursue. I spent most of this time learning from afar, consuming every piece of content I could get my hands on, from Youtube videos to blog posts to podcasts. Fortunately, this helped answer some of my questions, but it also led to content overload and caused some confusion around certain things. Luckily for me, as time passed, I learned to structure my learning (I intend to write about this sometime).

2. Join a community

After spending some time learning from afar, it felt necessary to build human connections around what I was learning by meeting people. I also thought that I needed to understand how Product Management works in my local community - The Nigerian Tech Space. So I researched product communities in Lagos; I found a couple: Mind the Product and Product School communities, and I attended a couple of meetups. It was at one of these meetups that I met Tobi Otokiti of Product Dive.

In the journey to getting practical experience, I decided to take Product dive's Product Management course. At that time, the classes were physical, which was beneficial for me since I had been learning alone previously. The classes were also immersive, and we got tasks and things to work on in groups. I particularly loved working in groups cause of the collaboration and the ability to bounce ideas off each other in the group until we got an idea that resonated with everyone. Joining a community helped me combine everything I had learned online with real-world experience. It also helped me meet interesting people.

3. Be vocal about your progress and goals

Through the previous steps, I built a habit of talking to people about what I wanted to do, sharing my ambitions and my progress. I shared with both stakeholders and non-stakeholders. Stakeholders I refer to as those people that had a direct influence on my transition. And sharing with non-stakeholders even if they couldn't influence my transition helped to encourage me through my journey.

4. Do the work! help, and contribute

At this point, I had an idea about the role, had done a course, got some practical experience, but something was still missing. I needed to work on an actual product.

The advice anyone would find at this point is to work on a project -whether personal or work-related. For me, personal projects at the time were far-fetched as I didn't have as much free time to work on them. I had to figure out how to land projects at work. Doing this could be challenging because usually, there's already a designated person responsible for Product Management, and you still have your job to do.

Here's a tip I got from Grace Samuel, an Instructor I met at Product Dive; she advised me to ask, "How can I help?" consistently. Doing this changed the game for me. I started getting Product Management tasks delegated to me. And this was my opportunity Haha! So basically, I started getting more opportunities to help and contribute and just kept providing value from there. At this point, I was still working as a Software Engineer, but I started doing things in Product. I was super happy about that.

5. Ready? Ask to switch!

When I thought I was ready to switch roles, I had a conversation with my manager and asked. At this point, I believe I was reasonably equipped, with not just theoretical and practical experience, but I was also able to demonstrate how I could bring value to the company as a Product Manager. As earlier mentioned, I was already executing product management tasks. Also, I voiced out my intentions and goals early enough and consistently so. When the time came for this crucial conversation, I was ready, and my manager was able to make the transition happen. 🚀

Pausing now to look at everything, it seems everything was perfectly aligned and well planned, but honestly, while going through this, it wasn't. Just like building a product, you'll have to keep iterating till awesome.

While this is based on my personal experience, I believe it will be useful for anyone looking to transition into product management even if you don't have a technical background.