This is probably more an exercise for me to get better at writing through telling my story than anything else. Thanks for reading anyway.

How I became one

You’ve probably read a 1000 posts about folks changing their roles. Marketers becoming programmers, programmers becoming product managers and product managers becoming twitter thread bois.

Let me assure you, this post is going to be very similar and probably worse than all the ones you’ve read before this.

Nonetheless, here’s my story.

I’ve always wanted to know how the code I write is useful. Either in how users are using the products I’ve built or how other systems and services and consuming APIs I’ve created. Ultimately programming is a means to an end. The end is helping users.

A side effect of this is I absolutely love talking to users. I feel their pain when they face a bug, I empathize when something didn’t work as expected, I enjoy that a fellow human has painstakingly taken time to give me useful feedback or appreciate stuff I’ve built.

So at my current company, getting bored of the work I was doing working on the infra side of a B2B SaaS product when the rest of the folks were primarily focussed on doing enterprise sales, I decided to speak to my manager with the specific question, “How do I increase my impact here?”

I later learnt that the best way to frame that question is to ask your manager, “What is your biggest problem right now and how can I help?”

Never the less, after this 1 on 1 I became something known as a “Product Engineer”. Here’s how I’d define it -

Speak to users, understand their problems and then do everything possible to get them to use your product. Everything could mean building product features, writing help docs, getting on calls and teaching them how to use your product.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. It was fun speaking to users from more countries than I’ll probably ever travel to in my life. However post doing the above mentioned things, the number of customers or revenue wasn’t increasing as expected. It was directly proportional to the number of users I could speak to. I was obviously the bottleneck here and that’s not how product based companies typically prefer to scale.

But the good part is I was speaking to users. I was speaking to potential customers. I understood what they were trying to do and build. What this meant is that I could propose launchnig a new product that perhaps could answer this scaling question. I distinctly remember that day and the words I said to get the green light here.

If you’ve come so far, I don’t want to bore you further, the new product launch went great, it was successful and over the next year or so I eventually transitioned from a Product Engineer to someone who did growth to eventually becoming a Product Manager.

Why I became a PM?

I love programming. I still code on the side and during the week. Even at my current job, I still debug why our analytics system crashed, write scripts to glue our ETL pipelines, write backend APIs and give small PRs to stuff that annoys me on the Product

On the side, I’m currently learning blockchain development via Rust and Solana.

I will never stop coding. I think it’s a fundamental skill that everyone should know, like Math or History or knowing how to pay your taxes.

However, there’s certain things that annoyed me about Software Development

Deadlines

Deadlines suck. In the 60 or 70 years since Progamming became a profession, we’ve never managed to solve this problem. Human estimation is bad, Software development is complex and Management is not as smart as they think. These 3 things combine to make deadlines and sprints and agile an entirely unpleasant experience.
Management assuming they are the second coming of Steve Jobs

There’s a great quote from A Soul of a New Machine about the Mushroom Theory of Management. It goes

The mushroom theory of management is simple. Keep them in the dark, Feed them shit, Watch them grow.
Comfort zones Working in the same job as a programmer sort of lulls you in a comfort zone. You stop learning, you can put in less hours and produce the same output.

Not to mention, I’ve seen what a force multiplier the right people could be in an organization. They can seemingly work with the shunned or below average teams and get them to produce work no one thought was capable. I want to be that person in an org to other folks.

What next?

idk man you tell me