Careers in Product Development
This post is intended for students and recent graduates or professionals looking into transitioning into product development. We discuss and explain roles in technology (hardware and software) product development, how they evolve in a company, and how an individual can naturally start as an engineer to build a successful career.
Building products is a cross-functional pursuit and how we divide the work might vary slightly depending on company type, size or industry, but at a high-level these are the four major functional areas in product development.
- Engineering – Function responsible for building the technical components of the product or service, this is where most careers in product development start. Engineering roles are typically filled by professionals with formal technical training (Electrical Engineering, Computer Science – we will generally refer to those as “engineers” in this article). Engineering roles include software development, hardware design, testing, quality assurance, user experience design, mechanical design, compliance engineering, web design, etc. Engineering roles typically focus on software and hardware development.
- Product Management – Function responsible for managing product strategy, sometimes described as the “CEO of the product”. Product management roles are typically filled by engineering professionals who grow beyond their technical core and develop business and process expertise over time. The product manager is responsible from translating business requirements coming from customers into technical requirements to be met and delivered by engineering, and managing the product development process towards executing on a product roadmap. Product Management roles typically focus on use cases, product requirements, thought leadership, and engineering process and deliverables.
- Product Marketing – Function responsible for representing the product capabilities and translating them into business benefits to customers. Product Marketing professionals typically come from either Engineering or Marketing functions. The Product Marketing Manager describes product capabilities outwards and positions the product in the market by communicating its capabilities, competitive differentiators, and business value it delivers. Product Marketing roles typically focus on product positioning, competitive analysis and delivering sales and marketing collateral.
- Project Management – Function responsible for coordinating cross-functionally to ensure timely execution and efficient management of time and resources. Project Management professionals are analytical, proficient communicators, and understand processes. They can come from a variety of functional or academic backgrounds. The Project Manager tracks, coordinates and communicates project execution and manage the project schedule, influencing both the prioritization and expectations for the project. In large companies, a collection of projects can be grouped in a larger program under the coordination of a Program Manager, with similar but higher level functional role.
Product Development: Organizational Perspective
While the functional taxonomy above is well standardized, not all companies will have those exact functional departments. The exact roles in product development in a company can vary, depending on their culture, size and level of organizational maturity.
It is not uncommon in startups for one person to hold multiple functions. For example, initially the engineering manager might also be doing product management and project management. A software engineer might be writing code, testing the software, and prioritizing development tasks.
As the number of engineers grows beyond a handful of people, there is a need to implement more process to coordinate the work. Engineering roles branch and specialize across software and hardware development, user experience (UX) design, software and system testing, etc.
Next in the organizational maturing process, Product Management and Product Marketing specializes into separate functional areas (in some companies under Engineering, in others under Marketing). In a large organization, the Engineering Manager becomes mostly a technical and people manager for the Engineering team and leave the other functions in product development to others.
Once the company grows to have cross-functional teams, the need for coordination increases exponentially with the number of teams involved. That is when companies set a separate project/program management office (PMO) that focus on cross-functional communication and coordination. Companies that organize mostly along functional lines can live without a separate office of program management. Companies that have a matrix organization with unclear functional lines typically have a large number of program managers.
Product Development: Personal and Career Perspective
If you know you want to work in product development at a Technology company, then the academic door for jobs in that area are in Engineering and Computer Science related areas. While in larger companies there are opportunities for people in other functions to join product development, most careers in product development start in Engineering.
Once an engineer working on developing code or designing a system accumulates a few years of experience, there is a natural pressure for that person to take some other responsibilities. The rational for that pressure is that new college graduates might have less experience, but they can code as fast, are more familiar with new technologies, and cost less.
- Stay an Engineer – Engineers who love the technical work and can remain as technical experts in their area can continue to do pure technical work at higher and higher level. That is not easy to realize, but it is possible in large technology-centric organizations.
- Becoming a Functional Manager – Engineers who develop leadership and project management skills naturally transition to being engineering technical leaders and people managers. They can still do some technical work, but mostly spend their time coaching and managing the team.
- Transitioning into Product/Marketing/Project Management – Engineers who evolve from building to understanding a product, can learn about engineering process and become the bridge between customers and markets with product development. They can take Product, Marketing, Project Management roles.
- Taking Company Leadership Roles – As organizations grow and mature, the functional roles specialize and there are opportunities for senior engineers who continue to grow and learn to migrate to other adjacent functional areas in the company and eventually take major leadership roles.
Conclusion and Call to Action
In conclusion, the most significant source of career options for college students graduating in technical areas such a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering is to work in product development in the Technology industry. Academic research and software development in other industries are some of the other options.
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About the author
Marcio has had a 35 year career, mostly in product development., starting as an Electrical Engineer working on hardware and firmware development, transitioning to Engineering and Product Management, to CTO roles both in small and established companies. His latest corporate role was leading the team responsible for development of Systems and Technologies for consumer operations and support at Google. Marcio provides career coaching, with focus on early career choices and senior leadership roles in Technology.
Marcio Saito 