Breaking into product management: A practical guide for aspiring product professionals

The process of breaking into product management is a journey filled with curiosity, challenges, and countless "aha" moments. I started my career as a machine learning and software engineer, spending my days building ML models and debugging code. I loved solving technical problems, but over time, I found myself asking a different set of questions:

"Why are we building this?"
"Who is this for?"
"What problem are we really solving?"

That curiosity led me to explore the world of product management. This journey wasn’t just about picking up new skills; it was about shifting my mindset from thinking like an engineer to thinking like a strategic problem solver. It took patience, persistence, and a lot of networking, but eventually, I made the leap.

In this article, I’ll share the exact steps I took, the mistakes I made, and the lessons that helped me transition into product management. If you're an engineer, analyst, or someone eager to break into this field, I hope my experience provides both guidance and inspiration for your own journey.

I began my academic journey with a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from India, where I developed a deep interest in AI. This curiosity led me to dive into machine learning and deep learning, taking online courses to hone my skills. Over the course of two years, I worked as a Machine Learning Engineer and Software Engineer, primarily focusing on coding, QA, and front-end development. This experience gave me a solid understanding of how projects are built from the ground up.

Despite the technical satisfaction of my work, I began to wonder, "Why are we building this?" rather than just "How are we building this?" I started growing more curious about the role of the product manager in my team. I noticed that they always asked bigger-picture questions like who is the customer? What problem are we solving? What value does this bring? How does this fit into the business strategy?

These were the kinds of questions I was curious about too. I took the initiative to spend more time with the product manager, shadowing her meetings and learning about her work. In those meetings, I kept hearing jargons I didn’t understand, like customer value propositions, KPIs, strategic decision-making, and market analysis. I found myself intrigued. I would write down every new term I heard and, after the meetings, I googled everything—one keyword at a time.

What is a product manager? (Source: Martin Eriksson, MindTheProduct)

My search for knowledge led me to devour blogs, articles, and books on product management. The more I learned, the more I realized that this was the field I wanted to transition into. I began participating in hackathons, product teardown sessions, and attending online product management talks. This is where joining online Product communities like “The Product Folks”, “Product School”, and “Mind the Product” helped me immensely in growing my skills and connections. These communities allowed me to connect with like-minded individuals, and I started collaborating on building side-projects and case studies. 

Around the same time, I was also applying for my Master's degree abroad and received an admit to Duke University's Master of Engineering Management program. I had about 6 months to move to the US and at this point I started actively networking with current Duke students, Duke alums and product managers in the industry in the US to prepare myself in advance. However, after talking to many industry experts, I felt my knowledge in product management was still fragmented, so before heading to Duke, I took a 10-week boot camp on product management. This boot camp offered me hands-on experience on doing user interviews, identifying pain points, finding solutions and prioritizing, building product mockups and landing pages and getting feedback from customers. This helped me put my learning into practice and made me confident to share my experiences.

At Duke, I found that the curriculum was the perfect blend of technical and management skills. My professors often emphasized the difference between the mindset of an engineer and that of a manager, and how crucial it is to understand and reconcile these differences to succeed in product management. Courses like Design Thinking and Innovation, Competitive Strategies and Marketing taught me how to understand customer requirements, conduct user interviews, how to market a product, analyze competitive markets and work with clients to build a customer centric value-driven product. This was indeed the most valuable learning experience that added depth to my understanding of product development.

Despite my theoretical knowledge, I knew that I lacked practical industry experience, which made it difficult to land product management internships and jobs.

So, the next step was to double down on interview preparations. I spent hours in the library reading product books like “Cracking the PM Interview”, “Decode and Conquer” and “The Lean Product Playbook”. I made it a point to practice product design questions and guesstimations everyday, joining online slack communities to do mock interviews, doing mock interviews with my friends and watching interview videos (Exponent, YouTube) to refine my answers. I cannot stress enough how helpful my mock interviews were in helping me get confident for interviews and to get feedback and continuously improve.

The Ultimate List of 72 Product Manager Interview Questions (Source: Carlos González De Villaumbrosia, Product School)

One of the most game-changing things I did was creating an online sheet for behavioral interview questions, where I answered each question using the STARL format (Situation, Task, Action, Result, Learning). This helped me identify gaps in my experience, improve my storytelling skills, and be fully prepared for real interviews.

Slowly but surely, my efforts paid off. I started getting internship interviews, and eventually, I landed a Digital Product Manager internship at Carrier for the summer.

During my internship, I gained hands-on experience in product management and networked with PMs across the company to learn from them. I conducted an in-depth API landscape assessment by interviewing 15+ product managers and coordinating teams across 40+ services, enabling a strategic API implementation for seamless rapid integration to drive platform adoption. Additionally, I transformed the API service inventory into a comprehensive Product Roadmap, prioritized product epics, managed development timelines, and established robust data governance while also leading the development of an edge device Proof of Concept (PoC) through market research, vendor analysis, and competitive benchmarking. This hands-on experience was incredibly insightful, and the relationships I built during this time continue to be valuable.

Time passed, and I was closer to graduation. That meant it was time for full-time job applications! However, this time I felt more prepared and confident. 

Armed with solid interview prep, a robust network, and hands-on experience, I began applying for full-time product management roles. In less than two months of applying, I received over 13+ interview calls and had 3+ job offers from big tech companies.

I ultimately chose Motorola Solutions, where I now work as a Sr. Product Management Analyst.

Starting at Motorola Solutions, here's what I focused on to stay at the top of my game:

Transitioning from engineering to product management has been an incredibly rewarding experience. The key to making this transition successfully lies in leveraging your technical background while continuously learning and developing management skills. Understanding the business side of product development, building relationships, and consistently seeking feedback are all essential components of growth in product management. Stay curious, proactive, and open to learning. Product management is an evolving field, and the ability to adapt and innovate will set you on the path to success.