Moving to product management

Fundamentally, I'm motivated by solving people's problems; writing code has always been a means to that end. So earlier this year, I changed roles from software engineering into product management. I'm excited about it!

Two things in particular were very helpful in the transition. First, the Human-Computer Interaction curriculum at CMU opened my eyes to the importance of design attention, especially the intro course Designing Human-Centered Software (05-391). And second, I'm thankful for the support of my leadership in Platform Engineering at Twilio for finding an opportunity for me to make the leap ("cross over to the dark side", as some have said).

In my own experience as a software engineer, I've spent time coding a new feature that literally was not used for months after it was shipped, and on the flip side, answering constant support questions and rewriting FAQ pages because we didn't write a feature since we missed a major use case. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to talk with people (like, 15+ hours of week in meetings talking) and figure out how to build better products that serve their needs. I still do write a little code, mostly around tracking metrics to understand usage patterns.

One unexpected bit of this role change: it's even harder to explain what I do. No, even though the title is "product manager", I don't manage people like an engineering manager does. I help design internal tools used by engineers at Twilio to deploy their code, which will be used by engineers at companies like Doordash to write more code, that eventually sends a text to tell you your delivery driver is on their way... pretty straightforward, huh?