Switching From Software program Engineering to Product Administration

Engineers are nice at fixing issues that come up when creating new merchandise. However deciding what new merchandise to construct is usually simply as huge 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 monetary know-how firm Finest 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 training software program. And over time, he’s gravitated towards roles the place he will get to assume extra deeply about how the know-how he’s constructing matches in with customers’ wants.

He’s regularly transitioned from pure engineering roles to ones which are extra centered on product administration. The method of growing new merchandise and bringing them to market sometimes includes figuring out what merchandise and options the client needs after which coordinating between engineering and enterprise groups to make them a actuality.

“You type 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 Finest 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 vital to lots of product administration roles,” he says.

Rising up in Saginaw, Mich., within the Nineteen 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 area impressed him to enroll in an aerospace engineering course at Tuskegee College, in Alabama, in 2002. But it surely turned out to be much less thrilling than he anticipated, and by the tip of freshman 12 months, he was contemplating different choices. An opportunity dialog along with his roommate’s pal, who was taking pc science, satisfied him to provide the topic a attempt.

“The next semester, I took my first pc 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 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 data know-how from the College of Maryland International Campus.

Though the purposes Austin labored on at Lockheed have been fascinating, he says, the authorities is threat averse, and so the know-how he was working with was properly behind the innovative.

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

Jason Spear

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 monitor scholar progress. This was adopted by stints doing Internet growth for the advertising and marketing startup ISL and serving to prepare workers on software program growth and cybersecurity on the monetary providers firm Capital One.

In 2018, he joined Mapbox, an organization that creates navigation know-how. As head of navigation knowledge, he was liable 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 liable for making certain that Mapbox discovered prospects 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 folks and whether or not they really need them,” he says. The function gave him his first style of product administration.

Fintech to assist folks get by way of the month

In 2019, Austin joined Until, a monetary tech startup in Alexandria, Va., as vice president of engineering. His job was to assist construct the corporate’s versatile rent-payment service, which permits folks 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 lots of impression on folks’s lives.”

Austin says he rapidly found why the service didn’t exist already. The enterprise mannequin required Until to pay landlords up entrance on the primary of the month, primarily loaning the tenant lease cash 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 Nineteen Nineties. Making an attempt 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 development

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 growth practically as a lot as engineering, one thing he discovered he relished. In December 2022, when Until was acquired by Finest Egg, he jumped on the probability to maneuver right into a extra product-focused function throughout the transition.

The acquisition of Until was a part of a brand new technique for Finest Egg, Austin says, which on the time primarily supplied private loans. The corporate needed to supply its prospects an array of economic merchandise, together with Until’s versatile rent-payment service, however this is able to require a shift in Finest Egg’s plan to turn into a “product-led” enterprise, Austin says.

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

Generally, companies that aren’t product-led could give attention to maximizing metrics similar to income, revenue, and month-to-month customers. In its new enterprise mannequin, Finest 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 prospects 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 finest, proper?” he says.

A profession for the curious

Product administration will not be a superb match for each engineer, says Austin, significantly if you happen to want to work straight with know-how each day. However for individuals who are inquisitive about all elements of the enterprise, it may be very fulfilling as a result of “you contact every little thing,” he says.

The creativity, drawback 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 abilities, as a result of product managers want to carry their very own in technical discussions and likewise clearly talk to different components of the enterprise what the engineering groups are constructing. It’s additionally vital 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.