Switching from Engineering to Product Management Without an MBA

I was a software engineer for six years. Mostly frontend. React, TypeScript, that kind of thing. Good at it, comfortable, but I kept finding myself more interested in the why than the how. Why are we building this feature? Who asked for it? Does the data actually support this decision? Last year I made the switch to Product Management. Without an MBA. Without a PM certification. Without knowing anyone in product. It was harder than I expected.

The perception problem

Engineers who want to move to PM face a strange bias. On one hand, people say "technical PMs are valuable because they understand the engineering constraints." On the other hand, when you actually apply, they say "but do you have product experience?" It's a catch-22. You can't get PM experience without being a PM. You can't become a PM without PM experience.

How I got around it

I started doing PM work before I had the title. In my engineering team, I volunteered to run the sprint retros. I started writing product specs for features I was building. I asked to sit in on customer interviews. After about six months of this, I had a portfolio of sorts. Not formal product management. But evidence that I could think about problems from a product perspective.

The interview process

PM interviews in Singapore are tough. There's the product case study — "how would you improve Grab's driver allocation?" — which I found OK because I could think about it technically. There's the behavioural round — "tell me about a time you influenced without authority" — which I found harder because I'm not naturally the best communicator in English. I failed at two companies before I got an offer at a B2B SaaS company in the CBD. They liked that I could talk to engineers in their language. The salary was a slight cut — from SGD 8,500 to 7,800 — but the trajectory is different.

Six months in

I like it. I'm still learning. The hardest part is not jumping to solutions immediately, which is what engineers do. As a PM, you have to sit with the problem for longer. Understand the user. Look at the data. Resist the urge to start coding. My English is getting better too, which helps in a role where communication is basically the whole job.

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