Transitioning from Engineering to PM

So she gave me a shot, put me through the interview loop, I passed and that was the first team that I joined. I started out as an engineer straight out of college. And that was when I was a mobile engineer for a few years. I joined a research team for a while because I thought maybe that was the kind of engineering that I would like a little bit better. Um, and I was just constantly trying to learn new things as an engineer. But I knew I think pretty early on in the engineering journey that I cared a lot more about problems like what we were building, who we were building it for, why, what are some like data insights that we're trying to synthesize, and how are we prioritizing the things that we're building. Those things were a lot more interesting to me from the get-go. And I just remember like sitting in meetings when we would talk about those things versus architecture and implementation details. and the latter would not hold my attention as much as the former. And so I knew just pretty early on that okay, I want to get good as an engineer and I want to learn how the sausage is made, as they say, and then eventually transition over to something that is slightly different. And that happened about four fourish years into my career as an engineer. I was like, I think I'm good. Like I've tried a smattering of different types of engineering, different types of teams, more userfacing teams, more back-end teams, more like API and research heavy team. So that was a very different experience. And I figured that was a good enough survey of experience that could serve me in a role as a product manager. And so that's when I decided to try and make the transition. Okay, let me tell you what it was like when I was making this transition. It was I felt like I needed to enumerate all the possible paths that were my exit out of engineering and just pursue all of them at the same time and see what stuck. Very like play by numbers kind of person, right? And then each of them had a different strategy. So I was very busy for about a year as I was making this transition. But here are some of the options that I had in mind was uh apply to be a product manager outside of the company that I was already at which was Meta Facebook at that time. And that required a different strategy which was like looking at startups potentially cuz maybe they'd be a little bit more amendable to hiring someone who didn't have PM experience but had engineering experience coming into it and then applying internally which was a process. That was the one that I eventually took and I can talk a little bit more about that going deeper into it. The other paths that I was considering were starting my own company which was it's like if you go from zero to a thousand uh instead of taking that middle step of becoming a PM. I was like what if I just have my own thing that I run. Um that was an option I considered. And when I say seriously considered like I join a founders accelerator not an accelerator it was like a founders group. I forget what we called them, but essentially like a networking group for founders where they could start building in public. Um, so I was seriously considering that. And then the other option was dropping everything, quitting my job, and moving to Antarctica. I actually looked for jobs in Antarctica on Indiegogo and found a few options and submitted a resume for them cuz I figured like if I'm going to quit and do something different, might as well make it wild. Oh, and then also applying for business school. I was at the same time applying for MBAs and applying for PhDs because I thought maybe I want to try that. And those were kind of that's a little bit of an overview of the different paths that I was considering because I just wanted a change. After pursuing all of these simultaneously, the one that seemed to make the most sense was looking internally. It didn't it wasn't super straightforward, but I knew that there was a path. So even after I got into my top MBA programs that I was targeting, I decided to make the I made the call of just turning that down and focusing all my efforts on looking for a role internally as a PM. It just felt like it felt like a little bit of a gamble at the time, but there was something about the process that I thought like I don't think this is impossible and I think I need to give it a real shot and there's a way to make this work and I think I'm going to find it. I wish I could say that I saw this AI revolution coming. I didn't. If you would ask me back then, do you think engineers are going to be replaced? I did have a thought. I remember my second year or something working at Facebook. I was walking through the offices and we have these like big beautiful offices, open concept, everyone's always on their computers, and I had this weird feeling as I was watching everyone. This feels very factory-like. I don't know where that thought came from, but it was just noticing how we were all pumping out code 247, basically 247 because it's an international company. It felt very factory-like. And I had a thought back then that, you know, I can see this eventually

when AI gets good enough all of this going away, but that's not going to happen in my lifetime. I truly didn't think it would still don't think we're there yet. We're kind of getting there. I don't see we're seeing like layoffs and things like that, but I don't know how much of that is impacted by economics versus how good AI is. So, I'm not sure how impactful AI is just yet for engineers. But yeah, I wish I could say that I was a savant and I knew it was more honestly it was more me recognizing that in order for me to be truly engaged in my career and happy with what I was doing and not feel this constant sense of malaise throughout my life and not have that feeling of like I'm working 5 days a week in order to have fun 2 days a week. In order to not have that feeling, I really needed to enjoy and be interested in what I was doing. And I knew that engineering was not that for me. I liked the ability to code. I liked knowing how everything worked. And every once in a while, I would have fun on the job building something, but that wasn't where my interest was. And I had to be very honest with myself about that pretty early on. But just kind of pay my dues in learning the things that in learning the right things that made me feel competent enough and then deciding, okay, I think it's the right time for me to move into something that I'm actually that's actually going to hold my attention for a longer time. I think as an engineer, you build a very strong intuition for what it actually takes to get something out the door. You are in the trenches with people who are building things from scratch. you understand the work it takes to get something from zero to one or zero to or one to infinity. Having that knowledge as a product manager is invaluable because not only does it make you a more effective planner, I think it makes you a much better collaborator with your engineering counterparts. You can empathize with what they're talking about and also you can kind of ask ask the right questions if you really want to get to the core of why a project is going to take three months. For example, there's no There's just like there's less opportunity for miscommunication and less opportunity for hiding behind estimates that don't make any sense. So that's one of them. That's one of the things that I think makes an engineer a very effective PM. The other thing is like engineers think very methodically. We're taught to think very logically. You're literally educated in the art of logic. Whether we know it or not, whether it's called logic or not, we are educated in the art of logic through our ability to code, our ability to be archite, our ability to architect large complex systems. And if an engineer can harness that, that ability to think logically and translate it into words, I think that's a very powerful skill. And I noticed that coming through as a product manager in the kinds of PRDs that I would write, posts that I would write. They got better and better in my time as a PM and I think I'm still becoming a better writer. But I remember there was a time when I would write kind of like word soup posts and the details would get lost in them. And it was in my desire to get all the details out because I thought that was what people needed and that is what I owed everyone that I would write like that. But it became very clear to me very quickly that no just like an engineer re needs to write clean readable code so too does a product manager need to write clear understandable legible and very to the point briefs and PRDs what have you. Communication is, I think, one of the core skills that a PM needs to know because your job is communicating. Whether it's trying to convince someone of the priorities of what your team is going to be doing, whether it's doing damage control, if something didn't go according to plan, and you need to find the narrative and be able to communicate why something happened, what did we do to mitigate it, all of those things, all of that is storytelling. So the ability to tell a story is rooted in the ability to form a logical narrative out of the facts you're given. The biggest learning for me was that a PM has a huge responsibility to foresee issues that have not yet come up. As an engineer, I think there's some element of that, but your the arena in which you're looking for possible issues that could pop up as an engineer is limited to the

technical things that could go wrong. Obviously, I think for higher and higher level engineers, that scope increases. I think as a PM, your scope is not just your product. It's also looking at how your product is going to affect other people's products and a lot of your job is being on top of coming up with those issues before they even show up. I was still learning how to do that. Um because it was so easy for me to get locked into one road map, one product launch, one thing that we needed to get done because that's pretty much how I thought as an engineer. So as a PM it required a little bit of a shift to think okay no I need to actually distribute my attention and my time among a bunch of different trains of thought even if that is the inefficient thing to do because that's what the job calls for. When I was first moving from engineering into PM, my main goal was I need to find a team where my skills as an engineer are going to be valuable. Valuable enough for that team to want to hire me despite the fact that I'm not a PM. Um, and then secondly, I had a secondary goal which was just as important. I needed to find a team that I was very interested in joining. like the work was exciting to me cuz one of the things that I was bumping into in my time as an engineer, I think I was hitting that point where I thought this isn't interesting to me anymore. I don't particularly care about learning more about different types of architectures and how to build a system and how to yeah how to like build algorithms because I was on research at that time. And so those two conditions were very important for me. something that would take advantage of my engineering experience and something that would be interesting to me. My process of finding a team that would be willing to interview me for the PM role was a pretty long one. It took I think from December when I decided to switch to PM. It was a December of that year to July of the next year before I found the team that I thought this is it. There was actually a team maybe a couple of months into my search um so around January that was quite responsive to my reach out and was willing to give me a shot and put me through the interview loop. But I had turned it down because I thought there's just this work isn't interesting enough for me to be valuable to them in the long run. And I wanted to make sure that there wasn't any regret on their part for hiring me because I don't want to make it harder for other people who are switching from engineering to PM. So I might as well do an excellent job where I'm going and I knew I needed to be interested in the product for me to do an excellent job. So I waited until I found the right team and it h it happened to be a team that was in Meta Reality Labs or Facebook Reality Labs at that time and they were working on building an uh how much can I talk about? They were working on building an operating system for VR headsets. And this is all public knowledge because it was announced back then. And the manager who I had reached out, the hiring manager I had reached out to at that time was very intrigued by the fact that I was an engineer, that I had actually done a little bit of research on augmented reality when I was in college, and that I was excited about the space. So she gave me a shot, put me through the interview loop, I passed and that was the first team that I joined. It was a very good fit at that time because it was a very technical team. They like being a PM on a team that's building an operating system is extremely engineering. The PM's responsibility primarily at that point was just synthesizing all the collaborative information that we needed to be able to build the right modules. I was working specifically on audio and uh camera technology at that time. So my job was very XFN heavy and those were both things that I excelled at talking to people, collaborating with people, having the technical knowhow to answer questions when the engineers weren't in the room. So that was the first thing I did as a PM. I did that for about 6 months before the team was dissolved. I defaulted to working then on an audio team again because that's where we were absorbed. And I figured I'm just going to stick around. I feel like I've just started learning this technology. the lingo of building into an operating system. I've just started learning the specifics of audio technology and audio algorithms. So, let me stick around here and learn as much as I can. So, I did that for at least I think a year and a half. And then I decided after that I wanted to try something that was a little bit closer to the user because that was I think for me the northstar. I wanted to work on something where I had to think deeply about what the end user would want. Like that was

my customer. That was my direct customer that I was building for. And so I switched then into the team that was working on messaging for VR and AR platforms. That was a lot more kind of what I expected to do as a PM, which is like you're working with UXR, you're working with data science to get insights on how users are behaving, what they want, what they like about your product, what they don't like, and working with other teams to understand what the overall strategy of the company was and of your product area was and then understanding what needed to be built to serve that and what your users wanted. I think there were pros and cons of being at a large company. So, let's go through the pros first. The pros were at a large company, you have resources, resources galore. Um, and if you wanted to do UX research, you let's say it this way, like if I wanted to do UX research, I had one of the best UX research teams to work with. And that was extremely heartening and very encouraging working in a big company because you have some of the best in the world working on these problems with you. The other good thing about working on at a big company was you have a massive user base. There is already a user base that you have access to. Your challenge is how to convince that user base to adopt your product. So it's a very different problem to solve. And there are yeah it's a different but interesting problem to solve. And the other advantage not even on the work side just on the personal side is like at a big company you have a lot of security and stability. So as an immigrant that was very front of mind for me. Like I needed to know that my job would be safe. I was in a company where I'd be learning things constantly. and the perks were great. So, the cons I think of working at a big company or rather I'll frame it as like potential pros of working at a smaller company. I've only had limited experience working at startups. I did this for a while when I was in college. The incredible thing about working at startups is that you have to do all the same stuff that you're doing at a big company with way fewer resources. And so, you have to get very creative. And I felt that working at a startup when I was in college that I had to do a lot of handiwork to be able to like get data or approximate data. I remember when I was working on AR algorithms at a startup in college and so much of the calibration that I was doing was by hand and that's not really something you're going to be doing at a large company like Meta. So if you really want to get your hands dirty, it's an excellent opportunity to learn those skills from the ground up at a small company. There's just trade-offs in that everything's going to be harder. the team is going to be a lot more hit or miss. That's at least what I hear from a lot of my friends who work at startups that sometimes you have an incredible team, sometimes you don't lock out and you just have to really work at fostering those relationships in a startup. But there's invaluable lessons to be learned working in an environment with limited resources. People don't realize how much creativity STEM careers require. The ability to think outside the box to solve problems is a pretty underrated one. And not just computer scientists and people who work in tech, but like mathematicians, biologists, physicists, anybody who has to think about problems and how to solve them and come up with hypotheses that could explain certain phenomena that they're seeing. These are all creative thought processes. And I think that's why I also see a huge cohort of people that have technical careers but have very creative pursuits on the side. When I was working in audio, some of the best engineers I knew were also sound designers on the side. I know people who are data scientists and actors on the side, musical theater actors and singers. I know people who are painters. And it's just there is there's a huge overlap there. And I think it'll make you a much stronger person in either of these fields if you feed into like your technical skills and your purely artistic creative skills. And I think they're very synergistic. One of the main things that I did in my transition as an engineer to a product manager was talk to a large number of people. I wish I had tracked how many people, but I had a notebook where I would write meeting notes. I talked to as many PMs as possible, especially PMS who had made similar transitions into their careers. I just wanted

to know what made them do it, why did they do it, what's their job like? It was like my data collection process and me trying to figure out whether this was the right move for me, which I couldn't figure that out in isolation. I had to talk to people to gather their experiences, synthesize that data, and then put it all together to understand, yeah, okay, this is for me. I want to try it out. I've heard from enough people, and this is a pattern that I'm noticing that I like. And the second reason talking to people is super important is because it's passively building your network. Your network is going to be important regardless of what career transition, you want to build. So whether you're trying to build your career and go to the next step or transition into a different career, talking to people and building your network is an extremely valuable step. For example, here's where the network that I built as I was talking to people in during my transition. Here's how that came in handy. I used to reach out to PMs who were either hiring managers or on teams that I found interesting or had made transitions that were similar to mine. either of these three criteria. If any of those were met, I would want you want a one-on-one with you on my calendar. And I would ask them a bunch of questions, whatever was interesting, whatever I was interested in learning from them. And at the end of every conversation, I would ask them, "Is there anybody you think I should talk to? " And without fail, everyone would say yes. Because after you've had a conversation where you've exchanged ideas, where you've learned about each other's lives and careers, there's bound to be someone that pops into their head where they think, "Yeah, you know, actually, Nema would really enjoy talking to this person. Whether it's because she has a goal and this person can help her reach it, or whether it's because I think they're both very similar people and they'll have things to talk about. " And that was incredible because it showed me sort of like it gave helped me tap into other people's networks as well. And then the other way that this came in handy was when I was finally going through the PM interview loop. I needed all the help I could get with mock interviews. And there was a few different ways I did that. I used Exponent actually. I used um you know Exponent has that log on at 5:00 p. m. every day and you'll get randomly paired up with someone to do a mock interview. I did that every single day for about a month. And that was one way I did it. The other way I did it, I would post in Facebook groups, Slack channels that I was a part of, any network of that had PMs in it. I would post, "Hey, I have this PM interview loop coming up. I would really appreciate help if you could mock interview me. If you're calibrated and you're an interviewer, I would really appreciate an interview. " And so many people reached out and they agreed. I tapped into that network of people I talked to. I wrote all of them messages. Either thanking them because something they said helped me find the role that I was interviewing for, or just giving them an update on the process, which they really appreciated because they had given me their time. And then I would ask them, hey, are you by any chance calibrated? Would you be open to giving me a mock interview? So many people said yes. I interviewed like a mad person about a month leading up to my loop because I had been preparing for, you know, December to July was my job search period. I had been preparing for all those months, but lightly. It was just like self-training, watching a lot of the mock interviews that we had on Exponent, consuming interview prep content, doing my own mocks by myself. And then about two weeks leading up to the interview, I realized like it was crunch time. And so I tapped into all of these resources and asked everyone for help and everyone came through. So talk to people, build your network, and learn the art of cold emailing. That's another like Yeah. All right, let me talk about cold emailing. Cold emailing is a superpower. I've done it at several different points in my career. I did it as an intern in college or I did it when I was in college looking for an internship and that's how I found my first internship when nobody else was giving me a job. I did it as a boot camper at Facebook when I was looking to join teams that weren't looking for introlevel engineers. I did it when I switched from mobile engineering to research because research teams primarily take PhDs and I did not have a PhD. So I used a cold email. I used cold emails to reach out to people and pitch myself and convince them that I was the right person for their team. That's how I got my research job. I used it to get jobs in with like research. I was a research assistant in college and I used cold pitching and cold emailing to get that position as well. And then I used it to become a PM. I had to write a tight paragraph to PMs I was reaching out to and

to hiring managers I was reaching out to. And that paragraph had to be enough to grab their attention and to convince them to give me a shot. So those cold emails that I was writing kept getting better and better. I would gather data about, you know, which ones are hitting, which ones are not getting responses, and I would refine and refine, get feedback from people on whether it was grabbing their attention or not, whether it was convincing or not. And I got very, very good at cold emailing, and I still do it today. I actually learned this from a group called the Renaissance Collective. If you Google the Renaissance Collective, they have a blog. They're a networking group based out of San Francisco and they have a blog post about what it takes to write I think it's they call it a blurb. good email blurb and I've taken learnings from that and added my own razledazzle to it. You need to be able to grab someone's attention in the first couple of sentences. And that means no, hi, I was just reaching out to I really love your I've been a fan forever. No, just cut the fluff out. Everyone wants to hear what they're going to get out of something. So, me telling you why you should be reading this should be in the first two sentences. I hear you're looking for a product manager. someone who has XYZ skills. That'll grab their attention and then go into, "Hi, my name is XYZ. I have and then like a quick bulleted summary. It doesn't need to be literal bullet points, but a very easily readable two, three points about why you might have the skills that they're looking for. And then a closer with a clear ask. I would love to meet with you to discuss. Don't say pick your brain. I really dislike that phrase. Um cuz pick your brain is like what are you going to pick my brain about? A very clear ask about, hey, I'd like to talk to you to see if there is potential to collaborate. I'm the right match for your team or if we're each other. So, it's a very clear request for this is the end result if we talk. I would think about it from the perspective of someone who's hiring. If you think about like put yourself in the hiring manager's shoes, assume you're trying to hire an assistant for yourself for your life right now. It's not a business or anything, just like an assistant for your life. and a bunch of people apply and the applications aren't really tailored to what you are looking for. It's difficult. I understand like each person has to go through the process of like tailoring an application to what this business what this role is looking for. It's not easy. But as soon as you do that, the person on the other side who's reading it, if they are told in the first five seconds of reading your application or reading your profile why you would solve the problem that they have, they are so much more likely to give you a shot. The issue is that when you hit apply for a job, I don't think there is room for that creativity. communication to be able to tailor, to be able to answer specifically why you would be right for something cuz you're just sending them a resume. And a resume is difficult to parse. It has a lot of stuff on it. So, I think it's so much more useful if you're able to reach out to someone directly and answer their question for them quickly and then get to the like here's my resume, here's my LinkedIn, my work experience. They don't have to do the mental work of parsing through all that information and deciding whether it's a yay or a nay. You're giving them that information in a couple of sentences. Absolutely. because it makes you stand out and it gives you just a whole other dimension to what you could bring to a problem, project or a team. An example of this is when I was in college, I was looking for a thesis adviser. I didn't really know what I wanted to write a thesis on, but there was this one adviser who I was pretty interested in just because I liked his body of work. I liked his style of advising as well, and I thought the space that he operated in was interesting to me. I didn't know what I wanted to do with any of that information, which is a terrible pitch if you're trying to get anybody on your team. But that is exactly the pitch I gave him. And the answer was no. I was in his office. I remember this. And he was like, "Yeah, I'm so sorry. " Actually, he emailed me this after I wrote to him. He said, "I'm so sorry we're full, but come in for a chat if you want. I'm these are my office hours if you want to come and just like brainstorm who else you can ask. " So, he had already rejected me. What I did then was I decided, all right, two things.

Let's get specific. I went and read through some of his research papers just to see what is what's something that stands out to me? What is something I actually like? And there was one research paper that he had. He and his posttock had written about word embeddings and how to extract gender bias from word embeddings. That piqued my interest because I'm really into languages. I speak a lot of languages. I am into linguistics. And so I went into his office for office hours to brainstorm who else I should ask because he rejected me. And I happened to just mention I said by the way I really liked your paper XYZ. And he was like huh tell me what you liked about that. And so I told him I said well first of all I love linguistics. This particular concept in linguistics is super interesting to me. And I was fascinated to see the technique that you use for extracting a very social concept from language. That's such an interesting marriage of concept. It's social science, linguistics, and computer science. How cool. And he was like, well, since I wrote that with a posttock, I could consider having you as a thesis adise if the posttock is your main point of contact and I'll come in the final stages of your thesis. And I was like, and it all happened because I was very clear about an interest that I had that was outside of computer science, outside of mathematics, but that fed into what I found interesting about his work. I think there's two lessons there. There's be very bold and vocal about your interests outside of your main area of work because that's what makes you interesting to people in your area of work. And two, if you're ever going to ask anyone for something, look up their work and read it and really understand. Like, pick two or three things you love about it, specific and bring those things up because immediately people want to talk about themselves and about their work. So, I have a channel. I'm making videos on there about my career transition, about the opinions that I have about product management and working in product and tech and also some of the work that I'm doing on the artistic side. I'm an actor right now, actor and a writer and I do I kind of mix both of those interests of mine into that channel. So, if you're looking for that kind of content, come over to come and check it out. That's I think the best way to connect with me.