Will I still be employable after this role in tech?
October 2, 2018 7:20 AM Subscribe
I moved from academia to industry at the beginning of this year and seem to be moving from a hard technical role into bizdev/product management/architecture. I'm worried about what comes after this. I seek advice from people who might have gone through similar situations.
I asked a couple of questions about my current role previously. I've come from core technical to a lot of strategy, business development and high-level architecture. To provide specific examples:
Whereas previously I might have got hold of a problem, designed a solution, written the code and supported people maintaining it (or my students further developing it), now I'm in a situation where I seem to think about things in "blocks", follow engineers progress to get ideas of where they are and what's coming next and think about solutions in terms of high level concepts and architectures needed to solve the problem with other people doing the actual work of getting concept to implementation.
On a personal, mental level, this is really messing with my head. I've gone to caring about 2-3 things at any given point to (as worked out from the stats last week) to contributing to 8 projects on a weekly basis. Details are foreign to me, and I often need to ask about the internals in order to make decisions or provide input.
Professionally I'm kind of worried. I am able to do this because it's a small company and I seem to have a lot of latitude and trust from senior management. However at some point I'll have to leave this place and I'm worried I will lock myself out of other technical or project management roles in the future as I've been working at too high a level of abstraction. My technical input seems to be limited to reviews and brainstorming, while my bizdev/project management input seems to be limited to working with the engineering teams to make sure goals are highlighted, aligned and schedules are met.
From people who have been in similar roles before, is there anything I should be doing in order to continue to make myself attractive to future employers? In particular my goals are to (1) make sure I have explicit projects in the company I can point to in the future to prove I contributed/made them happen (2) have specific revenue numbers for projects I initiated and (3) keep up to date with the rest of the industry. However, this still seems nebulous and I'd love for some help to avoid becoming unemployable in the future!
I asked a couple of questions about my current role previously. I've come from core technical to a lot of strategy, business development and high-level architecture. To provide specific examples:
Whereas previously I might have got hold of a problem, designed a solution, written the code and supported people maintaining it (or my students further developing it), now I'm in a situation where I seem to think about things in "blocks", follow engineers progress to get ideas of where they are and what's coming next and think about solutions in terms of high level concepts and architectures needed to solve the problem with other people doing the actual work of getting concept to implementation.
On a personal, mental level, this is really messing with my head. I've gone to caring about 2-3 things at any given point to (as worked out from the stats last week) to contributing to 8 projects on a weekly basis. Details are foreign to me, and I often need to ask about the internals in order to make decisions or provide input.
Professionally I'm kind of worried. I am able to do this because it's a small company and I seem to have a lot of latitude and trust from senior management. However at some point I'll have to leave this place and I'm worried I will lock myself out of other technical or project management roles in the future as I've been working at too high a level of abstraction. My technical input seems to be limited to reviews and brainstorming, while my bizdev/project management input seems to be limited to working with the engineering teams to make sure goals are highlighted, aligned and schedules are met.
From people who have been in similar roles before, is there anything I should be doing in order to continue to make myself attractive to future employers? In particular my goals are to (1) make sure I have explicit projects in the company I can point to in the future to prove I contributed/made them happen (2) have specific revenue numbers for projects I initiated and (3) keep up to date with the rest of the industry. However, this still seems nebulous and I'd love for some help to avoid becoming unemployable in the future!
Jeffrey Snover (now very senior at Microsoft) has a good story about realizing that in order to increase his "impact radius" -- the scope and scale of how much he could help the company and number of people within the company -- he had to move on from a strictly technical role writing code, or even mentoring other coders, to a non-coding role.
So congrats on doing just that! Your goals sound fine and product managers are universally needed. Product managers (and Enterprise Architects and even "BizDev" folks) range in technical experience, so you can drive your career any way you want.
Recommend doing some googling on product management - PMs love to talk about themselves! A search on Medium gives you a particular software/silicon-valley-flavored view. Here's a big list of books about product management from that search. Because the role can be ambiguous, often companies have their own "version" of what a PM is - Microsoft (where the role you have might be called "program manager") and Google perhaps most famously.
You might also want to do some reading on moving on from being a programmer/hands-on technical person to other kinds of contribution and leadership, even if you're not going to manage a team right now. Not sure I know what kinds of keywords to look for, but there's a lot out there because many technical people hit this question - how do I stay relevant and technical while moving on/up to other roles?
posted by troyer at 1:05 PM on October 2, 2018 [3 favorites]
So congrats on doing just that! Your goals sound fine and product managers are universally needed. Product managers (and Enterprise Architects and even "BizDev" folks) range in technical experience, so you can drive your career any way you want.
Recommend doing some googling on product management - PMs love to talk about themselves! A search on Medium gives you a particular software/silicon-valley-flavored view. Here's a big list of books about product management from that search. Because the role can be ambiguous, often companies have their own "version" of what a PM is - Microsoft (where the role you have might be called "program manager") and Google perhaps most famously.
You might also want to do some reading on moving on from being a programmer/hands-on technical person to other kinds of contribution and leadership, even if you're not going to manage a team right now. Not sure I know what kinds of keywords to look for, but there's a lot out there because many technical people hit this question - how do I stay relevant and technical while moving on/up to other roles?
posted by troyer at 1:05 PM on October 2, 2018 [3 favorites]
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posted by heigh-hothederryo at 7:26 AM on October 2, 2018