Elon Musk
26 Feb
My Transition from Software Engineer to Product Managere
While studying computer science in college, I was focused on doing the natural next step — getting a job as a software engineer.
How it all started
While studying computer science in college, I was focused on doing the natural next step — getting a job as a software engineer. I had no idea what a product manager did and I was focused on utilizing my newly gained coding skills in a professional setting. After tons of hours of practicing coding questions on Leetcode, I finally landed a software engineering job at a health tech company in the bay area. On my first day, I met my product manager and project manager and my first question was — “What does a project manager do and what does a product manager do and how are they different?” The answer I received was project manager is the “when” and product manager is the “what”. I found the product role fascinating but focused all my attention on becoming a better software engineer and trying to get promoted to senior software engineer.
Why did I decide to switch?
After a couple of years as an engineer and getting promoted to Software Engineer II, I realized I wanted more of a leadership role where I was in a position to decide what the team worked on based on user and business impact. I was getting tired of working on tech debt and spending my time and energy on engineering initiatives that didn’t excite me — I wanted to focus on improving existing product functionality and work on new products from start to finish. This is when I started talking to my product manager about what her day-to-day looked like and what the challenges of being a product manager were. I also decided to set up 1:1s with multiple product managers across different products in my company to learn more about product management and the difference in their day-to-day job. What I found exciting about the role was the responsibility to analyze and decide what the team would work on and prioritize multiple initiatives based on impact. In addition, I wanted the opportunity to talk to users directly about my product and learn about how I could improve the product from their feedback.