Transferrable skills

When I resumed my current role as engineering lead, there were three things I was immediately grateful for learning in my previous role as product manager.

One of them was solving problems for users. As a product manager, I was working with the engineers on how to solve user problems. When I started leading the engineering team I could easily remove myself from being only about the engineering problem and take a broader look at the issue at hand.

Another was coordination. Being the PM, I was interfacing with design, business, support, and engineering teams. I was juggling expectations, managing communications and putting all of our work into one ore more coherent plans. I did more of the same thing leading engineering, this time it was amongst frontend, backend, mobile, security, product and business teams.

Then tools. I explored and used a number of tools being a PM. It was a no-brainer using that knowledge as needed with the engineering team.

Disparate perspectives across a broad range of roles and industries do come in handy when you least expect it.