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 large a problem. That call-making course of is a job 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, primarily based in Wilmington, Del. Throughout his profession, he’s labored on a big selection of assignments, together with categorized protection tasks, mapping know-how, and education software. And through the years, he’s gravitated towards roles the place he will get to suppose extra deeply about how the know-how he’s constructing suits in with customers’ wants.

He’s progressively transitioned from pure engineering roles to ones which can 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 client desires after which coordinating between engineering and enterprise groups to make them a actuality.

“You type 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 communicate each languages,” Austin says.

At Finest 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 essential to a whole lot of product administration roles,” he says.

Rising up in Saginaw, Mich., within the Nineties, Austin had little publicity to digital know-how. 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 area 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 good friend, who was taking pc science, satisfied him to offer the topic a strive.

“The next semester, I took my first pc 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 closing 12 months, Austin attended a campus hiring occasion run by Lockheed Martin and was supplied 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 acquired a grasp’s diploma in information technology from the College of Maryland World Campus.

Though the functions Austin labored on at Lockheed have been fascinating, he says, the federal government is danger averse, and so the know-how he was working with was effectively behind the innovative.

“Being a younger engineer, I needed to make use of the most recent know-how,” he says. “I felt type 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 scholar progress. This was adopted by stints doing Net growth for the advertising and marketing startup ISL and serving to prepare workers on software development and cybersecurity on the monetary companies firm Capital One.

In 2018, he joined Mapbox, a company that creates navigation know-how. As head of navigation knowledge, he was chargeable for constructing the instruments and infrastructure to collate and set up the corporate’s geospatial knowledge. After six months, Austin was promoted to director of engineering.

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

Fintech to assist folks get by way of the month

In 2019, Austin joined Till, a monetary tech startup in Alexandria, Va., as vp of engineering. His job was to assist construct the corporate’s versatile rent-payment service, which permits folks 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 a whole lot of impression on folks’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, primarily loaning the tenant hire cash 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 Nineties. Attempting to attach these techniques was a serious 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 know-how 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 Finest Egg, he jumped on the probability to maneuver right into a extra product-focused function throughout the transition.

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

He volunteered to guide this variation, 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.

Normally, 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, Finest Egg is as an alternative 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 unravel and trusting the engineering groups to search out options. “Let the engineers determine it out, as a result of that’s what they do greatest, proper?” he says.

A profession for the curious

Product administration isn’t a very good match for each engineer, says Austin, notably when you want to work instantly with know-how each day. However for many who are interested in all features of the enterprise, it may be very fulfilling as a result of “you contact every little thing,” he says.

The creativity, drawback fixing, and systematic pondering required of engineers generally is 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 essential that product managers make common sense calls about issues like new options. They need to nurture what Austin calls “product instinct”—that’s, figuring out their product and figuring out their buyer.