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 usually simply as massive a problem. That call-making course of is a process 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, primarily based in Wilmington, Del. Throughout his profession, he’s labored on a big selection of assignments, together with labeled protection initiatives, mapping know-how, and education software. And over time, 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 steadily transitioned from pure engineering roles to ones which are extra centered on product administration. The method of developing new products and bringing them to market sometimes entails figuring out what merchandise and options the shopper desires after which coordinating between engineering and enterprise groups to make them a actuality.

“You form 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 expertise of an engineer are well-suited to the job.

“Engineers are usually very inventive of their considering processes, and that’s actually necessary to a variety 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 highschool, 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. But it surely 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 together with his roommate’s good friend, 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 ultimate 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 acquired a grasp’s diploma in information know-how from the University of Maryland International Campus.

Though the purposes Austin labored on at Lockheed have been fascinating, he says, the government is danger averse, and so the know-how he was working with was properly behind the leading edge.

“Being a younger engineer, I needed to make use of the newest know-how,” he says. “I felt form of trapped about 10, 15 years behind the place all of the motion was occurring.”

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 Net development for the advertising and marketing startup ISL and serving to practice workers on software development and cybersecurity on the financial providers firm Capital One.

In 2018, he joined Mapbox, a company that creates navigation know-how. As head of navigation information, he was answerable for constructing the instruments and infrastructure to collate and set up 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 have been really delivering to individuals and whether or not they really need them,” he says. The position gave him his first style of product administration.

Fintech to assist individuals get by means 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 individuals to pay their lease 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 variety of influence on individuals’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, basically loaning the tenant lease 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 courting 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 progress

In 2020, Austin grew to become Until’s chief know-how 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 likelihood to maneuver right into a extra product-focused position throughout 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 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 develop 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 position entails 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.

Generally, companies that aren’t product-led could give attention to maximizing metrics comparable to income, revenue, and month-to-month customers. In its new enterprise mannequin, Greatest Egg is as an alternative working to spice up these metrics not directly by means of improved buyer experiences.

That has meant focusing extra on figuring out what issues clients wanted to resolve 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 shouldn’t be an excellent match for each engineer, says Austin, notably in case you favor to work straight with know-how each day. However for many who are interested by all elements of the enterprise, it may be very fulfilling as a result of “you contact every thing,” he says.

The creativity, downside fixing, and systematic considering required of engineers is usually a nice basis for a profession in product administration, Austin says. But it surely’s essential to work in your communication expertise, 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, understanding their product and understanding their buyer.