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 activity software program 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 categorized 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 steadily transitioned from pure engineering roles to ones which can be extra targeted on product administration. The method of developing new products and bringing them to market sometimes includes figuring out what merchandise and options the shopper desires after which coordinating between engineering and enterprise groups to make them a actuality.

“You sort of sit in between the enterprise aspect of the home and the extra technical aspect 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 sometimes attracts individuals who have a enterprise background, he thinks the core abilities of an engineer are well-suited to the job.

“Engineers are typically very inventive of their considering 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 highschool, 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 tip of freshman yr, he was contemplating different choices. An opportunity dialog together with his roommate’s buddy, who was taking computer science, satisfied him to provide the topic a attempt.

“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 remaining yr, 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 obtained a grasp’s diploma in information expertise from the University of Maryland World Campus.

Though the functions Austin labored on at Lockheed have been fascinating, he says, the government is threat averse, and so the expertise he was working with was properly behind the innovative.

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

Jason Spear

Leaping into startups

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 Internet development for the advertising startup ISL and serving to practice workers on software development and cybersecurity on the financial companies firm Capital One.

In 2018, he joined Mapbox, a company that creates navigation expertise. 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 select my head up out of the technical world and take into consideration what merchandise we have been truly delivering to folks and whether or not they truly need them,” he says. The position 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 vice chairman of engineering. His job was to assist construct the corporate’s flexible 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 plenty of influence on folks’s lives.”

Austin says he rapidly found why the service didn’t exist already. The enterprise model required Until to pay landlords up entrance on the primary of the month, primarily 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 programs, some courting again to the Nineteen Nineties. Attempting to attach these programs 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 grew to become Until’s chief expertise officer. Because the chief of each the product-management and engineering groups, he had to consider product development almost 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 probability to maneuver right into a extra product-focused position 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 offered private loans. The corporate wished 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 change into a “product-led” enterprise, Austin says.

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

On the whole, companies that aren’t product-led might concentrate on maximizing metrics similar 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 shouldn’t be a very good match for each engineer, says Austin, notably in the event you favor to work immediately with expertise each day. However for individuals who are interested in all points of the enterprise, it may be very fulfilling as a result of “you contact the whole lot,” he says.

The creativity, downside fixing, and systematic considering required of engineers could be a nice basis for a profession in product administration, Austin says. However it’s essential to work in your communication abilities, as a result of product managers want to carry their very own in technical discussions and likewise 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, figuring out their product and figuring out their buyer.