Switching From Software Engineering to Product Management

Engineers are nice at fixing issues that come up when creating new merchandise. However deciding what new merchandise to construct is commonly simply as massive a problem. That call-making course of is a activity software engineer Johnny Ray Austin has discovered himself more and more drawn to as his profession has progressed.

Austin is the senior director of product administration on the financial technology firm Best Egg, based mostly in Wilmington, Del. Throughout his profession, he’s labored on a big selection of assignments, together with categorised protection tasks, mapping expertise, and education software. And through the years, he’s gravitated towards roles the place he will get to assume extra deeply about how the expertise he’s constructing matches in with customers’ wants.

He’s progressively transitioned from pure engineering roles to ones which might be extra centered on product administration. The method of developing new products and bringing them to market usually entails figuring out what merchandise and options the shopper needs after which coordinating between engineering and enterprise groups to make them a actuality.

“You sort of sit in between the enterprise facet of the home and the extra technical facet of the home, and also you want to have the ability to converse each languages,” Austin says.

At Greatest Egg, he’s serving to lead an effort to rework the enterprise right into a “product-led” group. And whereas product administration usually attracts individuals who have a enterprise background, he thinks the core expertise of an engineer are well-suited to the job.

“Engineers are typically very artistic of their pondering processes, and that’s actually necessary to plenty of product administration roles,” he says.

Rising up in Saginaw, Mich., within the Nineteen Nineties, Austin had little publicity to digital expertise. His household didn’t get a pc till he was in high school, and he solely used it for writing the occasional class report.

An curiosity in house impressed him to enroll in an aerospace engineering course at Tuskegee University, in Alabama, in 2002. However it turned out to be much less thrilling than he anticipated, and by the top of freshman 12 months, he was contemplating different choices. An opportunity dialog along with his roommate’s buddy, who was taking computer science, satisfied him to provide the topic a strive.

“The next semester, I took my first laptop science class, which was C++ intro to programming, and I simply fell in love with it,” Austin says. “It was like a world had unlocked for me.”

In his last 12 months, Austin attended a campus hiring occasion run by Lockheed Martin and was provided a job as a software program engineer. He began work instantly after graduating in 2006 and continued his research in his spare time. In 2010, he obtained a grasp’s diploma in information technology from the College of Maryland International Campus.

Though the purposes Austin labored on at Lockheed had been fascinating, he says, the federal government is danger averse, and so the expertise he was working with was nicely behind the leading edge.

“Being a younger engineer, I needed to make use of the most recent expertise,” he says. “I felt sort of trapped about 10, 15 years behind the place all of the motion was occurring.”

Jason Spear

After six years at Lockheed Martin, Austin took the leap to the startup world. In 2012, he joined Everfi, the place he helped construct software program to trace pupil progress. This was adopted by stints doing Net improvement for the advertising and marketing startup ISL and serving to prepare staff on software development and cybersecurity on the monetary providers firm Capital One.

In 2018, he joined Mapbox, a company that creates navigation expertise. As head of navigation information, he was answerable for constructing the instruments and infrastructure to collate and arrange the corporate’s geospatial information. After six months, Austin was promoted to director of engineering.

Along with managing engineering efforts, he was additionally answerable for making certain that Mapbox discovered clients for its merchandise. “That required me to select my head up out of the technical world and take into consideration what merchandise we had been really delivering to individuals and whether or not they really need them,” he says. The function gave him his first style of product administration.

Fintech to assist individuals get by way of the month

In 2019, Austin joined Till, a monetary tech startup in Alexandria, Va., as vice chairman of engineering. His job was to assist construct the corporate’s versatile rent-payment service, which permits individuals to pay their hire in installments all through the month.

“The very first thing that popped into my thoughts was, ‘Why hasn’t anybody already constructed this?’” Austin says. “It felt like we may have plenty of influence on individuals’s lives.”

Austin says he shortly found why the service didn’t exist already. The enterprise mannequin required Until to pay landlords up entrance on the primary of the month, basically loaning the tenant hire money and permitting them to pay it again over the course of the month.

This in flip meant that Until’s software program wanted to interface with legacy property administration and loan-management techniques, some relationship again to the Nineteen Nineties. Making an attempt to attach these techniques was a significant engineering problem, Austin says. “It may be enjoyable, however it may be surprisingly irritating.”

Shifting focus for product development

In 2020, Austin turned Until’s chief expertise officer. Because the chief of each the product-management and engineering groups, he had to consider product development practically as a lot as engineering, one thing he discovered he relished. In December 2022, when Until was acquired by Greatest Egg, he jumped on the likelihood to maneuver right into a extra product-focused function through the transition.

The acquisition of Until was a part of a brand new technique for Greatest Egg, Austin says, which on the time primarily supplied private loans. The corporate needed to supply its clients an array of monetary merchandise, together with Until’s versatile rent-payment service, however this might require a shift in Greatest Egg’s plan to turn into a “product-led” enterprise, Austin says.

He volunteered to steer this alteration, and in September 2023 he was made senior director of product administration and buyer platforms. A part of the function entails hiring and coaching product managers for every of the corporate’s key choices, however the largest problem has been altering the corporate’s tradition, Austin says.

Usually, companies that aren’t product-led could concentrate on maximizing metrics akin to income, revenue, and month-to-month customers. In its new enterprise mannequin, Greatest Egg is as a substitute working to spice up these metrics not directly by way of improved buyer experiences.

That has meant focusing extra on figuring out what issues clients wanted to resolve and trusting the engineering groups to seek out options. “Let the engineers determine it out, as a result of that’s what they do finest, proper?” he says.

A profession for the curious

Product administration just isn’t an excellent match for each engineer, says Austin, significantly in the event you desire to work instantly with expertise each day. However for many who are inquisitive about all facets of the enterprise, it may be very fulfilling as a result of “you contact every little thing,” he says.

The creativity, downside fixing, and systematic pondering required of engineers is usually a nice basis for a profession in product administration, Austin says. However it’s essential to work in your communication expertise, as a result of product managers want to carry their very own in technical discussions and in addition clearly talk to different elements of the enterprise what the engineering groups are constructing. It’s additionally necessary that product managers make common sense calls about issues like new options. They need to nurture what Austin calls “product instinct”—that’s, understanding their product and understanding their buyer.