Why and How Engineers Can Become Minimum Viable Product Managers (MVPMs)

The world of product management often feels like an exclusive club. But what if your engineering background can actually be a launching pad into this exciting field. By understanding the core aspects of product management and leveraging your existing skills, you can become a Minimum Viable Product Manager (MVPM).

Understanding of the Intersection:

First of all, it’s interesting to understand the intersection of Product Management skill set. An effective product manager operates at the intersection of three key areas: technology, business, and user experience (UX). They don't need to be experts in each, but possessing a foundational understanding in all three allows them to tackle a wide range of challenges. This core knowledge base is what defines an MVPM.

Engineers as MVPMs:

Let's say your background lies in L2/L3 support, DevOps, and system maintenance. You might not consider yourself a product person. However, your experience has likely equipped you with the essentials of product management principles, even if unknowingly.

Let’s understand it in detail.

Technology:

• Tech Stack: The layers of technologies used to build a product.

• System Architecture: How these technologies work together.

• Data model and API’s: How information is organized within the product.

While working in an engineering role, understanding the layers of technologies that provide functionality to your product is crucial. As the L2 support team, you are the first line of defense against any issue (critical or non-critical) reported in the system. To conduct proper investigations, you need awareness and knowledge of technology layers, system architecture, and data models.

For example, when a user log in to an application through the UI, a combination of technologies like HTML, PHP/Python/Java, and a database work together behind the scenes within a specific architecture to achieve the task using lines of code. Therefor to understand and fix any challenge present in the system it’s important to understand technology.

Business:

• Project Management: Knowledge about project management fundamentals.

• Modeling Impact: How to measure a product's success.

• Data Gathering & Analysis: How to collect and interpret data to inform decisions.

While L2/L3 engineers may not directly work in areas like market research, defining product vision metrics and measurements, customer acquisition etc, but they play a vital role by helping a PM by keep running system continue seamlessly and smoothly. And during outages or critical situations which impact a large number of users, these engineers need to connect with business, stakeholders like product owners, project managers, and business partners. They gather data to analyze issues, find the root cause for issues, fix the issues, identify the impact, and this all ultimately helps business to calculate the potential revenue loss, steps need to prevent issues etc. To effectively collaborate with these stakeholders, engineers possess knowledge of the project or product, including its vision etc.

UX:

• Design Patterns: Consistent use of visual and interactive components in a product.

• User Research: Understanding users through user experience research.

• Prototyping: How to create visual mockups to communicate your ideas.

While engineers aren't directly involved in the user experience (UX) design, they play a crucial role in identifying UX issues. As the first line of defense when customers encounter problems, engineers can understand user concerns and communicate them to the product owner. For critical issues, they can also log the problem directly in the system or suggest improvements.

Therefor we can say by recognizing the transferable skills which engineers possess, they can bridge the gap between engineering and product management. By developing a basic understanding of core product management principles, engineers can become valuable assets as Minimum Viable Product Managers, driving product success from a unique and valuable perspective.

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