What I want to do in next phase of my career?

"Better to be late than never" is one of the finest proverbs. After 13 years, I realized what I enjoy doing the most and how to make a career out of it.

June 2020 marks my 13 years in the tech industry. However, the memory goes back to the days I started my journey as QA.

"We humans want everything to be best and of the highest quality".While the world was talking about best, I was fascinated with the term “quality” and started to understand the depth of it.

During my initial days, I focused more on understanding the importance of testing and how it impacts the product and the customers. As a QA, rather finding defects, I focused on building the right product of the highest quality. It gave me a sense of pride and was enjoying what I was doing. While enjoying life as QA, the tech world was talking about automation and how it is going to change the industry.

Automation is not my game. Right from college days I was not interested in coding and based on my friend’s suggestion I did basic testing courses to land in a job assuming is the one place where coding is not involved but I was wrong. Though I did not enjoy it, I realized the need and forced myself to learn the automation just to sustain in the industry. 

My life as a blended tester continued until a few months back, my younger brother Karthik was promoted as a product manager at Microsoft. He is a kind of inspiration to me. The way he started his career and where he is right now it's amazing and happy about it. He always encourages me to find what I want to do next in my career, how I want to shape it. For a couple of years, I tried to find but could not succeed.

Then one day while having a casual talk, we discussed product management and the importance of it. I was able to connect the dots between testing & product management and how I enjoyed being the functional tester. When I figured out the connection between the two, I asked myself a question.

Can a tester become a product manager?

As a tester, I look at the product or an application from the end-user perspective and try to find answers to these questions –

1. What is this product?
2. What are the features?
3. Who are the users?
4. What do they need?
5. Does the product serve their purpose?
6. What are the pain points?
7. How to address those points? (problem-solving)
8. How the product help in organization growth etc.

These questions help me in improving the overall quality of the product. As mentioned earlier, the job of the tester is not only to find the defects. Their job is to drive themselves through product journey and build the right product of highest quality.

A product manager would want to know –

1. What problems the users are facing?
2. How to identify the problem that is worth solving?
3. Who are the potential users and their persons?
4. What are the solutions?
5. Does the solution solve the user problem?
6. How to turn the solution into a product?
7. How to market the product?
8. How the user feedback is taken?
9. Who the competitors are?
10. What are their strengths?
11. What makes a product unique compared to those in the market?
12. What metrics to follow, from where to collect and analyze the data, what to derive out of the analysis?
13. How the feedback, metrics, data are used to build an innovative solution?

While I found the things in common, I decided what I want to do in the next phase of my career. I asked my brother to guide me to part of the product management family.

Under his mentorship, my journey to becoming a product manager continues. I hope to succeed and add value to people's lives through the product journey.