From a Product Manager (back) to a Product Developer

It was not the transition I desired, but then a transition I deserved.

Yea — you did read that right. A transition that doesn’t make much sense. Borrowing from the oft repeated movie line, its not the transition I desired, but then a transition I deserved.

Jokes apart, coming back to the world of coding and development after almost a decade(7 years if any one wants to count), the first realisation that stuck home was that much has changed and yet much has remained the same. Being a full stack guy back in the hey-days of Java, JSPs and plain simple HTMLs and Vanilla Javascript, it meant being awed by the power of Node and the MEAN stack taking over the world, while the likes of Python are making analytics look like Lego-sets. And not to forget the omnipresence of AWS and its oft-berated, but still amazing sibling Azure(Google I feel you).

After almost 5 years of research(yes I could have gotten a Ph.D) to find the right stuff to build and the right way to build, it was not quite a revelation that there is no one right idea and certainly no one way to build. Iterating over an idea and shipping it out for feedback is way more important than to get it perfect: A lesson that took some coaching and lot of time to reach home. Thanks to some great mentors for persisting with this message.

Personally, coming back to development meant picking up from 0: also needed was a caveat — not spending time in ramping up coz the goal was and is not to compete with the technologists, but to use it to drive home MVPs that can spawn ideas into tangibles. And that meant, using what I knew and then drawing upon the collective power of the world wide web to get it working just right. And there is certainly a lot of learn, but a start is a̶l̶m̶o̶s̶t always the most difficult part of a journey.

This journey will continue — and there is so much my first few months have taught me — in terms of approaches, tools and so much more, that it would be crime to not share it, and ease the journey for a lot of folks who have similar aspirations and ideas.

Do check out my apps — M0rx and N0W on the Google Play Store.