After working as a software engineer for more than ten years, I found myself in a place where I just didn’t feel comfortable anymore. As I’ve built up a lot of experience throughout my engineering career, people within the companies I worked for, but also recruiters from other companies, started to approach me by offering all kinds of lead engineering roles. Although this would have been the logical next step in my career it just didn’t feel right. For me, coding often was like a means to an end. I liked building stuff, but unlike a lot of my colleagues, I was never ‘proud’ of the code that I wrote. Not because it was bad, I think it was quite good most of the time. I was proud of the thing that I’d just built and shipped. A feature that users would hopefully enjoy.
So, I always loved to focus on the product and the user experience. How would this new feature that I’m working on fit into the rest of the software? Where is the best place to add it? Does this really make the product better and things easier for the users? I never thought – oh, maybe there is a new cool programming language I could try out on this, or wasn’t there this awesome new framework everyone is using now? What is the most performant way to implement this and maybe if I do this and that, would the whole thing be 5 milliseconds faster?
Don’t get me wrong, these are all important questions and I love it when people are passionate about it. The thing is, I’m not. That is why it didn’t feel right to lead a bunch of young engineers just to make the next step in my career. The more I thought about it the clearer it became for me. I wanted to follow a different career path. A path away from engineering and into product management. But how should I do it?
Looking for Jobs
Since I wasn’t really interested to make this career transition in the company I was working for at the time and there wouldn’t have been the opportunity to do it anyway, I started to look for jobs.
In the beginning, this job hunt wasn’t going so well. I didn’t tick a lot of boxes on the profiles that companies were looking for. A lot of them listed a technical background as a ‘nice to have’ but not really a requirement. Most of them were looking for a skillset that included things like this:
- 3+ years of hands-on product management experience
- Ability to manage internal and external stakeholders
- Excellent communication skills
- Experience in leading product delivery from start to launch
- Experience in driving the vision and strategy for the product
- Experience in conducting market research to identify opportunities for new features
- Experience in translating product strategy into roadmaps, epics, and user stories
- Experience in defining and driving the OKR/KPI of your team
I mean, in theory, I knew about a lot of those things, but years of experience? That would be a big no.
In the course of research, I became aware of something though. Some jobs won’t make me a product manager right away but would bring me closer to a product manager role. Some of them had ‘Business Analyst’ or ‘Technical Analyst’ as a job title and others were simply named ‘Requirements Engineer’. Especially the requirements engineering jobs looked very promising. Almost all of the required skills were part of my daily business as an engineer. Maybe on another level and with less complexity, but I definitely had experience in that area:
- Act as the interface between customers and developers
- Analysis, documentation and management of requirements
- Strong analytical thinking skills and a technical background (programming, databases, specific frameworks, etc.)
- Experience working with browser dev tools
- Prioritization and delivery of requirements in close coordination with the product team
This looked a lot more promising. I could still use a lot of my gained skills but apply them in a completely new setting.
Starting the transition
After sending out the first few applications to companies offering positions in requirements engineering it became clear pretty fast that this job search won’t take very long. I’ve sent out five applications and got three interviews. Within a month I had two offers on the table and accepted one.
Apparently, there are really not a lot of engineers that are transitioning into a more product-focused role. At first, I thought that maybe I just got lucky and had good timing (hello imposter syndrome) but now I can say this wasn’t the case. The company I currently work for is constantly trying to fill open positions in this area and a lot of other companies too. So if you think it would be hard to start this transition, it is definitely not.
Conclusion
If you are thinking about transitioning from an engineering to a management role there might be a lot more options than you think. Just have a look at the favorite job platform near you. If you don’t feel comfortable or ready to apply for a product management role right away, make smaller steps.
Look for job titles like:
- Requirements Engineer
- (IT) Business Analyst
- Technical Analyst
- Technical Product Manager
These are usually jobs that will bring you on track to a career in product management but still have a very technical focus, which allows you to build on your existing skillset.