Career transition to Product

Since Jan 2022, I switched careers from being an SDE to PM. I wanted to share my thoughts here on “Why” did want to switch careers:

What do I want to do in my career?

As of July 11th 2022, I would hit 6+ years in Software Engineering career. I would have learnt a lot in semiconductors (Intel), SaaS (Workday), ML platforms (AWS). I would be at a point in my career where I have been good at how to build a product.

Going forward, I wanted to grow my career in the aspect of “why / which product feature needs to be built next” and hence PM seems like the career path for that.

Why should I learn about the “why / which product needs to be built”?

After spending these years in software engineering, what I learnt is, a lot of great products are great / not great because of decisions taken on how they solve a need / pain point of the user or customer using it.

Solving the need / fixing this pain of user is all it needs to be done for the product to live and get paid for.

I want to learn the experience of knowing why a certain prodct needs to be built while making iterating changes in it to address pains / requests of whoever is using it with the outcome being users loving the product and using it more.

The +ve feedback loop is addictive (and -ve are educational). I wanted to be in a career which helps shape the direction.

Why couldn’t I get these staying as an engineer?

One abosolutely can but I wanted to do this job of thinking on this “Why” as a full time job.

Another reason is I have no idea where I will be in years to come physically. It might be here in the US or in India as the circumstances can get out of my control.

Given there are a lot more talented engineers in India than me, if I go back with only my engineering experience, I might have to justify and compete harder for a more lucrative / satifying career. Given this, I want to gain as much diverse experience here as possible.

And my hope is skill stacking with engineering + PM experience will get me an additional edge for years down the line.

A great article I found about the concept of skill stacking from Tomas Pueyo: How to Become the Best in the World at Something