RISKING IT ALL By Switching From Engineering To Product?

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all right it is Tuesday December 17th just leaving CrossFit um today is not an office day it's apparently very loud beeping sound day um let me back out of this spot um it's probably going to sound like my cold is getting worse but I actually think what's happening is like my body's finally getting stuff out sorry that sounds disgusting but like I'm coughing more aggressively but it's actually like feeling good to like to be able to cough um but the side effect is my voice is getting pretty pretty mangled so just got to watch for that um but I could finally like sleep again last night which is so nice I like slept totally fine and then like woke up and my body was like now it's time to cough cuz you didn't do it all night um so yeah anyway it I feel like

it's uh it's progressing but I know like while recording this I'm probably going to cough pretty hard at some point and you're going to be like Whoa man like sounds like it's getting worse and I hear you but um I'm feel like I just finished CrossFit and I had the whole week off from the gym last week so like uh I'm legitimately feeling better but so here I'm going to cough it's like my I I also think that like my my body is getting tired from coughing like it's taken a lot to do it but anyway enough of that I had a topic that was submitted I really like this question um this came in from someone commenting um and they were asking about uh a roll switch which I have seen be very successful and the question is along the lines of like they

have a a team so they're a junior engineer um software engineer right and they have a team that is kind of looking to bring on a product owner and they use the word like the phrase product owner which is kind of interesting because um I don't know I feel like there's there's a lot of product roles like with the name right or like you'll see project manager product manager um in this case product owner and um these I feel like these things can mean um the same phrases and words can mean completely different things to different people so I want to make sure that when we're talking about this we're um we're just we're just being transparent about that so um first of all I think that based on what this person was briefly saying on the comment um it sounds like it might be

uh of Interest to them oh man oh don't do a U-turn right here this is not the spot very bad spot at the on the other side of a hill and there was like cars coming the other way too like someone was uh they joined my Dev leader live stream last night and they said it was really funny that like I'm they like when I'm yelling at traffic and stuff so I hope you enjoy that uh it sucks cuz you can't see it I wish that when people were doing stupid stuff when I was driving I like I don't know have like a mode where you could see like exactly what I'm seeing maybe um maybe in the future if this channel does really well I'll have more cameras and stuff and I'll have I'll actually have like a vlog editor and then when people

are doing stupid stuff we can just turn the camera around and you can say yep Nick's not wrong like that person is being a big dummy um but back to this question so I do think that there's a really interesting opportunity here because I think some people get into like a Technology field like a being a software developer and it's kind of interesting that they when they're in the industry they and it doesn't have to take long right but they start to realize like some of these other things that are going on in software teams are actually stuff that they gravitate towards more so and like I talk about this kind of thing from a different angle where I'll say hey by the way you know like your soft skills are important stuff outside of just Cod is important but that's because you're interfacing with

other developers and you're interfacing with these other roles and some people might find that not only do their like I don't know personality traits interests like skill sets kind of align with that um like naturally but they're also more interested in those types of responsibilities so with a product owner um and this might change too like at a maybe at in this person's situation I don't know maybe because it's a small company or a small team or something maybe they're like hey look we know you're a software developer you want the product owner role we still need you to code right like don't pretend like you can't we've seen you do it and we need the help so like you got to still do it that might happen for this person right I don't know um but the idea is regardless of whether not or

not that's happening they would be moving away from having their hands in code okay so that's not like for some people I think the the scary part is like some people go well is that like a death sentence for my career like you know I been training for software development um you know I throwing everything up the window um it seems kind of scary to take a you know to do a change like that and I could understand that um I wanted to share like as part of talking through this I wanted to share a story about one of my best friends um he's from the company that I used to work at and um you know he's a kind of person like we'll be lifelong friends um we he actually is the person that hired me there he was their first employee and um

and yeah like you know we kind of kind of lived through the startup growth we when you think about like how startups have to do like go through some crazy stuff or like all nighters and stuff like that like we we did that for the for the eight years that I was there so um yeah I actually like I lived at his house briefly like when I was kind of transitioning between uh you know moving back into the into kitchen or waterl area for work so um yeah I think like you know I only good things to say about him so his story is kind of interesting he went to school for I think it's called management engineering I actually didn't even know it was a thing and they look at like uh like analysis around processes um so they he talked about how they

had like school projects designing like queuing systems and not I don't mean like message queuing I mean like like queuing people in lines and stuff right and doing an analysis around like single line versus multi-line versus like you know like just different strategies for how to get effective queuing systems and so kind of super like super interesting from like a schooling perspective but he was a software developer right so when I was starting there he was their first software engineer and um very early on like when I was transitioning to do management he was already transitioning to being a product manager so this is super early on in his career as well so if you were to talk to him his story is probably very much like mine except I talk about hey I went from being a software engineer over to an engineering manager

and he went from being a software engineer to a product manager very early um and he was working in a domain that like he didn't know to start with right like digital forensics none of us went to school for digital forensics so as a product owner something that's incredibly important is that like you play this role of being a user proxy like having to understand the pain points of the users and then being able to figure out how that translates into priorities especially for the business because you have to keep in mind that like the business has to make money otherwise you'd say well what's in the best interest of the user let's just make stuff and give it to them for free right um things like that it doesn't work that way so you need to be able to balance like business needs uh

you have to balance how what the customer like what's going to solve the customer's problem which also means not just blindly listening to what customers say but the other interesting thing that comes up here is that it's the same thing I was saying or have been saying about software developers and communication but now it's the other way around you need to be able to have conversations with other software developers as a product owner now or or a product manager whatever the the title happens to be that's focused on product ownership you now have to be able to articulate back to software developers why things are priority why they're important when Engineers push back and they say hey but we have this Tech de or hey we have these challenges you also need to be able to operate at a level that you can understand them

in order for things to go really smoothly right otherwise friction will develop so just to give you an example and this I've seen this go many different ways say you have an engineering team and you know you're you're kind of putting out the priorities people are working things are going pretty good and then say you're doing sprints or something and you're planning the next set of work sit down with the team to talk about it and then one of the engineers goes well we that's not going to be like it's not going to work that well we're going to have to I think we need to spend time like refactoring this area of code rewriting parts of it like it's not it's not safe for us to go try and build on top of that and you're sitting there going well well what the heck

do you mean like we have to go go deliver this feature and they're like look I get it but like that stuff is really brittle there so it's probably going to take us a whole Sprint just to like clean it up so that we can build effectively there if we think about this scenario I've seen product owners that are complete pushovers and basically I've I've literally watched I don't think maliciously but I've watched Engineers basically just walk all over their product owners and anything they say hey we want to rewrite this hey we want to spend time on this the product owner is just like okay okay because they're unable to ask questions back and understand things and they just get walked all over so none of the work that they want to prioritize can ever get done this is really bad from a business

perspective but the programmers seem to love it right because they're going hey we get to kind of do whatever we want as long as we just bring it up they'll schedule it the complete opposite direction which is still a communication problem is when product owners say no to everything and this one's pretty common right you'll hear people tell stories about like oh we never get time to address Tech debt the product owner never lets us do whatever um now I should be careful cuz I don't think that All Tech that should be done sorry if that's loud I have to clear the windshield um I don't think that Altech that should be done but uh I do think that there needs to be a conversation around how it's prioritized so some product owners will just say no and it's because they don't even take the

time to understand what's being asked and then I would say that in my opinion what makes a good product owner is that they are able to have good clear communication uh uh having technical understanding is very valuable I don't think it's an absolute requirement because if you have Engineers that are very good at spending time communicating things or taking time to understand them the communication goes both ways right if you have both sides that are excellent communicators great this works really well if you have one side that's a little bit worse but another side's compensating for it this still works really well but when you have both sides that are like okay or one of them subpar it really starts to have a a negative effect so I think that you know having a software development background could be extremely valuable for a product owner

um and I would recomend and this is just my personal opinion obviously this person's welcome to do whatever they'd like but I highly recommend if you still maintain an interest in programming and developing things like don't necessarily give that up and I want to go back to my story from my you know my my good friend um he is still like he still programs to this day there were times what so he he did a lot of the prototyping with us uh if you've heard my other stories um I talked about how we rapidly prototyped a digital mobile digital forensic product I got to move over people not letting me in we make room um yeah we we prototyped a mobile uh digital forensics acquisition product and uh the the story that I told is like we had the first version of the Prototype like

as we were taking off in an airplane sounds super cool um but we were able to like acquire phone data and I we were T literally taking off in an airplane uh on a business trip and we got it working and we were like holy crap like this is so cool um but like he he had already been a product manager for a couple of years at that point right and so he was still developing software um and I think personally not only is he like a great product manager just from having like um a good business understanding uh empathizing with customers like understanding their domain but I think what what really helps him Excel is that um it's not it's no with the engineers right one sec I'm trying to turn right here and I can't see how many lanes there are come on

this a stupid turn um anyway yeah he um like if we needed to talk about tech for example we couldn't just say hey we want to go program whatever we don't want to deliver features he would say like like what do you mean right like you need to be able to explain things and conversely if we made a good point and we were like hey like this is why he would be able to rationalize that and have conversations about like what needs to happen right what compromises like do we have to do all of it can we do some of it like because he can understand what we're trying to uh to discuss so I think personally if you're if you still M if you're interested in this kind of role transition if you are able to maintain some amount of technical understanding in the

in the actual programming part I think that can work really really well so I would advise that if that's a of interest you um what else though I I don't know like I think this is an interesting opportunity if if someone finds that they're interested in this stuff uh I know that I kind of hinted at this earlier but this idea of like well then I'm not going to be programming anymore like is that okay for this person they might not care they might say yeah like programming it's fine whatever but like I'd be totally cool if I never had to do it again um I know a different role right for myself as an engineering manager that took me almost 8 years to figure out that entire time I was at that digital forensic company and up until the very end I was kind

of battling with like a uh like am I could I ever take my hands out of the code like I don't know I don't know um and by the end I realized I was having more impact by not coding but it took me that long to go figure it out and now at Microsoft I don't code at all but I code like every day outside of work so I never had to give up programming and that's something else that I kind of wanted to you know to mention here is like um it might look different in your in your day job now and I think as long as you feel alignment with that like if those are interesting things for you then that's great but if you're kind of nervous like oh but what happens to the programming part you like you can still do

this kind of stuff as a hobby or or a side business or something right but you you might find that you don't have time for that if you're trying to do your job effectively at work so it's a heads up it's not you know it's not the end of the line for your programming Journey um it just is going to look different um trying to think if there's anything else it's like Pro tip or like advice or something but I I think that that transition is it could it could be challenging in the sense like if you've never done some of the things before it might be like a pretty big learning curve and what I mean by that is going from being a programmer to like you know a lot of the time kind of being told what the priorities are to now like

you're saying what they are it's not a matter of like I mean it's hopefully it's not supposed to feel like a Power Trip like I get to tell people what to do um it's not that it's like I have to represent the customer is how I see it and that's that's a challenging role it's a very challenging role so it takes time to like to understand like how to channel and represent the customer effectively so for example if if you never have customer meetings right like you have to think about like What mechanisms do I have to properly channel the customer if you're not doing calls with them if you're not doing customer meetings like how are you getting that feedback how are you learning about what customers actually want without just guessing without just like saying hm this seems like Cool Tech we should

go build it right so these are different skills sets and different sort of activities that you have to lean into and it's I'm not saying it's impossible obviously it's just uh it's one of those things that like you need to spend the time figuring that out if you've never done it um So based on what this person said it's I'm not sure if there are other product owners at the company or if this is sort of the first kind of one uh I might recommend uh trying to do some networking around this uh just to get some advice one of the things I did was like I just started trying to learn in public right this is how Dev leader my main YouTube channel came to be when it was just a Blog 10 years ago it's longer than that now like in 2013 um

I said I have to go learn this stuff cuz I don't know how to be a manager I have to take it seriously you know it's going to take me time but I'm just going to start writing about the stuff that I'm learning and um that's I think another totally viable option it's just like you know being vulnerable trying to learn in public not trying to masquerade as like an expert but like you know posting on social media writing blog articles whatever whatever is comfortable and I don't try to make more work for you but this is a way where you can go read about things watch videos on things and then try to like internalize them and I think something that can really help is when you write about it because now you're taking something some information that you've gathered you're digesting it for

yourself that's one part and the second part is that now you have to communicate what you think you've learned to other people so you're processing it multiple times and trying to have a better understanding at the end of the day you still have to put those things into action so it's not like a a shortcut for for being an expert but for at least exposing yourself to different things to try different methods different processes um that could be a pretty cool approach I think so I might recommend that depending on the person's Comfort level uh I feel like it it worked well for me it's just that like you know I gave up early on because I started focusing on like why is no one reading my blog doesn't matter um it wasn't the point right now I rant in a car about software engineering

Look at me now just kidding this isn't so bad um but yeah I I I think that's probably about it I I I think it's a cool opportunity I encourage this person you know if they're excited about what that role looks like I think this could be a great chance for them to uh to try applying for that and it sounds like they are applying internally I would also just want to remind this person hey look if you don't get it don't sweat it okay they might they might hire someone else in cuz I like kind of lived through this kind of thing um they might hire someone else in because they're like we need we need to bring on someone that we feel more confident in and that's not to say that you'll never get a chance or that you're bad or anything like

that so don't take it personally they might be trying to drisk things and I I I urge you to kind of like acknowledge that and accept that and what that could mean is that now because if this is a small company that's growing now you have another product owner inside guess what you can do you can start talking with them you can start seeing how they work you can learn from them right this if you don't get it this could be a huge can I say a blessing that's it sounds like a weird thing to say an opportunity could be a really cool opportunity for you to learn from someone else and that way when the next one's open guess what you have someone if you've been working closely with them and you could say like hey like could you maybe refer me to like

this internal position given that I've been kind of working alongside you trying to learn from you trying to learn the ropes so to speak um I think it could be really cool so um yeah I'm excited for this person I hope that if they watch this video um if they go for it they can write back and we can see what their journey is like over time it'd be awesome but I think that's it for today I will sign off here I'm going to go back to sleep and rest my throat cuz uh well you can hear me right so um take care tomorrow's an office day that means at least two videos as long as I don't mess them up so take care see you next time