How to make my technical strategy job transferable across companies?
June 27, 2018 5:56 AM Subscribe
About 6 months ago I wrote about wanting to get out of the nitty gritty of technology and doing something different. I seem to have moved into 'technical strategy'. What should I be doing to keep myself employable longer term?
About six months ago I posted a question on what to do beyond writing code and got a lot of really useful answers which I rolled up into a proposal for my boss. I have moved from being an architect/coder into "technical strategy", a loose description that encompasses looking at our products and product lines and working out where to go and where we fit in with the rest of the world, what could add value to us longer term and how we should be dealing with issues such as competition, change of technology etc. Some examples of the kinds of things I've done over the last 6 months:
* (ongoing) Setup and execution of a long-term research agreement with a government body which will bring in $500K over the next year and which will stretch one of our products into a new use-case.
* Have been scouring a lot of industry verticals and have identified about 6 non-obvious (to the rest of the industry) value-added services we could add to our current platform to increase revenue. These are being evaluated at the business level right now.
* Engineering support for one of our products -- talking to customers, translating their requirements, integration with our software (including helping write some code etc). 1:1 relationship with them. Ideas on how we change our product to beat the competition, steering marketing to the lucrative market segments (including going fishing for initial marketing segments).
* Working on a long-term (3 year) strategy that would make us "more valuable" by realigning some of our technology to hyped trends in the industry. Setting this off in terms of execution.
* Working on how we can transition from adding value in hardware to adding value in software, decoupling some of our value-added software from the hardware we produce so there's a bigger market.
I am really enjoying the work and how different it all is, and I seem to be good at it, but the thing that I'm struggling with -- is this transferable across companies? Unlike engineering in which I can point to actual tangible outputs and say "I built that" this is less tangible and I'm worried that this may not be transferrable to other companies or it may be hard to show where I added value, especially given that I've effectively given up on day-to-day engineering . In that respect, I'm looking for ideas/previous experience on how I can continue to make myself marketable to other companies should I have to leave my current position.
About six months ago I posted a question on what to do beyond writing code and got a lot of really useful answers which I rolled up into a proposal for my boss. I have moved from being an architect/coder into "technical strategy", a loose description that encompasses looking at our products and product lines and working out where to go and where we fit in with the rest of the world, what could add value to us longer term and how we should be dealing with issues such as competition, change of technology etc. Some examples of the kinds of things I've done over the last 6 months:
* (ongoing) Setup and execution of a long-term research agreement with a government body which will bring in $500K over the next year and which will stretch one of our products into a new use-case.
* Have been scouring a lot of industry verticals and have identified about 6 non-obvious (to the rest of the industry) value-added services we could add to our current platform to increase revenue. These are being evaluated at the business level right now.
* Engineering support for one of our products -- talking to customers, translating their requirements, integration with our software (including helping write some code etc). 1:1 relationship with them. Ideas on how we change our product to beat the competition, steering marketing to the lucrative market segments (including going fishing for initial marketing segments).
* Working on a long-term (3 year) strategy that would make us "more valuable" by realigning some of our technology to hyped trends in the industry. Setting this off in terms of execution.
* Working on how we can transition from adding value in hardware to adding value in software, decoupling some of our value-added software from the hardware we produce so there's a bigger market.
I am really enjoying the work and how different it all is, and I seem to be good at it, but the thing that I'm struggling with -- is this transferable across companies? Unlike engineering in which I can point to actual tangible outputs and say "I built that" this is less tangible and I'm worried that this may not be transferrable to other companies or it may be hard to show where I added value, especially given that I've effectively given up on day-to-day engineering . In that respect, I'm looking for ideas/previous experience on how I can continue to make myself marketable to other companies should I have to leave my current position.
Welcome to the highly employable world of Product Management as your new job looks very much like that of a PM (or Product Strategist, or maybe even Chief of Product given how much you're able to execute). This is a massively transferable set of skills, partly because product is such an amorphous role with very different responsibilities depending on the knowledge/resource profile of the company you work for, but the general aim is to add value. So my advice is to read up on Product functions. If you like the work and you're getting results you should be good for the forseeable future.
posted by freya_lamb at 10:14 AM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by freya_lamb at 10:14 AM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
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Being good at bringing in revenue is the hard switch to flip when coming from technical disciplines, and architectural skills can only add to that, so I think you're on a good track. You are indeed moving further away from programming-engineering, so if that causes you unease it's better to figure out how you feel about that sooner than later. It sounds like you're good at all this new stuff, so maybe the change isn't such a bad thing.
posted by rhizome at 7:24 AM on June 27, 2018