How I Transitioned from a Software Engineer to a Product Manager
Many people asked me how I changed my career path from a software engineer to become a product manager. So I would like to share my story to be an example and an inspiration for many software engineers who wanted to work in the product management world.
While I was working as a full-stack software engineer at Demand Media (currently called “Leaf Group”), I worked with a diverse group of people from Product, Design, Optimization/Growth, Editorial, SEO, AdOps, and Business Operation. While I interacted with them to find a technical solution for their issue or their goal as part of a software engineering role, it triggered me to think not only a technical solution but to think about the user, the product, and the business as well. So I had many opportunities to share my ideas on how to make our product better for both the user and the business, which was the area of product management that I involved without realizing it at first. Admittedly, it was challenging and exciting to solve the problem for the user and the business, apart from solving the coding problem. The problem on the product management side and the problem on the software engineering side were totally different, but the ultimate goal was the same by having the right solution for the product and business. For example, the goal could be about improving the ads’ revenue. On product management, it was about what we needed to do to achieve the goal and why we had to do that. On software engineering, it was how we could implement the solution effectively to allow us to hit the goal. Both sides worked on a subset of the solution to work toward the main goal.
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With those exposures, I felt strongly to move from a software engineering career into a product management career because I wanted the product I worked on and the business I worked with to be successful. Knowing the career goal helped me a lot to prepare myself and to find every opportunity to practice and make it happened. As part of my software engineering role, I grabbed many technical opportunities and worked toward the product goal. For instance, when Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project in 2015 to optimize the mobile web browsing for making the webpages load faster. I took that opportunity and pitched the idea to my software engineering manager, a product manager, and a SEO manager on how we could use this technology for our editorial websites to improve user experience, to grow our product, and to generate more revenue to the business. The executive team was very worried that this technology could negatively impact our revenue at first because AMP was very new at that time and there was no case study on this AMP project yet, but the executive team allowed us to test and learn about this technology on 100 articles. So I worked with both the product and SEO manager to make sure that I had all product and SEO requirements for building the page on the AMP technology along with designing how to integrate the AMP capability to our current tech stack. By the time we launched the AMP technology on our site in early 2016, we were one of the early adopters of this technology after it came out to the public. The initial result wasn’t that good, but we learned, made changes, and re-tested it to the point that we expanded the AMP compatibility to more than 100 articles. Another example was when I turned the Friday engineering project, which the company allowed any software engineer to do anything from our idea that could make an engineering impact every Friday, to be the project focusing on both tech and product. I looked at the business’s goal, identified the opportunity, thought about user’s use case, and designed tech solution. So I came up with an idea to generate more traffic to the website by allowing the users to embed the article tile on their blogs, which the article tile would lead the traffic to its corresponding article on our website. I still remembered my joyful moment when I sent out an email to the team and executives to announce this feature when it was successfully deployed to the production server and I got an email back from an executive recognizing and complimenting my idea, which made me to believe that I was on the right path to the product management world. The last example that I did was to propose an idea of revamping the About Us page of our website to increase authenticity and trust of the site. I tried to solve the problem that our users didn’t recognize our brand and, thus, our About Us page at the time was very bad containing text only without any graphics and any sign of a modern website. So I used my free time to research the site’s statistics and its competitors and create mockups before presenting my idea to both my software engineering manager and the product manager. Both of them loved my idea and they worked with the leadership team to get the approval for this project. Finally, they got the green light to re-design the About Us page; and of couse, they asked me to be the one who built it. So I worked closely with both the product manager and the designer to make it happened. As you could see, I used my role as a software engineer to not only think about the solution but to expand my involvement at the product level as much as possible, which was a huge success since I had stories to tell about the product experiences and how I helped drive the product even I wasn’t a product manager yet.
Moreover, I also enrolled in “The Art and Science of Product Management” online course from Stanford Continuing Studies to learn about the foundation of product management. It was very useful since I had a chance to work with other students in a group project to define product’s conception, strategy, and launch as if we were product managers along with learning tons of product management concepts and practices. Not only the online course, I also applied for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp from MIT to expand my knowledge on entrepreneurship and innovation and to build a new venture for solving global challenges within one week with the team. I got an offer to join the MIT Bootcamp, but I had to let it go because of the schedule conflict with an important project at work.
Apart from the projects at work and the product management course, I strongly believed that the Master degree that I had received before joining Demand Media as a software engineer helped me preparing for the product manager role. I graduated in a Master of Science in Information and Computer Science (AKA M.S. Informatics) from the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine, which the program focused on the relationship between information technology and human to help us design a better technology for the people. This degree allowed me to strengthen my knowledge in three core aspects: human-computer interaction (including UI/UX), social computing, and software engineering. These core areas were the key skills for a product manager who could perform an end-to-end function of a product development from brainstorming an idea with the team to thinking about what the product could be and to working closely with the tech team to build and ship it. That was the reason why I didn’t afraid to work on many aspects outside of my software engineering function at that time to build my product management skills and experiences.
Beachbody Blog (www.beachbodyondemand.com/blog)
At the end, everything that I did worked out successfully and I became a product & optimization manager at Beachbody overseeing the Beachbody Blog and optimizing the conversion rate and revenue, which was my first product management job. I had many stories and accomplishments to tell during an interview for the role because of those projects I did and the knowledge I had. It even turned out better than I expected it could be when I got a job at Beachbody because the Director of Product at Demand Media, where I worked as a software engineer at that time, didn’t want me to leave the company and offered me a product role in her team as well.
While I was working on to become a product manager, the road ahead wasn’t smooth and I wasn’t even sure whether I was on the right path. But, looking back after achieving the goal, everything I did was the right piece that shaped me from a software engineer to become a product manager as I wanted to be.
For anyone who wants to become a product manager, I hope you find your own path leading to your success and I wish you a good luck on your journey!
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