Switching the career from the current path indicates leaving the comfort zone, it requires new learning and new way of thinking. How to switch from software testing to product management? Testing is verifying the functionality per expectation. It indicates that the testing professionals are testing the functionality per other’s expectation, they could be from product manager or customer.

Being a team member

Being a team member testing professional knows the process of execution. Eventually, he/she is familiar with Agile methodology, participating in scrum, software development life cycle, test life cycle, product grooming, product planning, coordination between teams, following the quality process, bug life cycle, the process of CI/CD integration, using the product specific tools. So, the person who would like to switch the career from testing to product management is a process ready person.

Being a testing professional

Knows the end to end functionality of a product. He/she knows how to break the system with testing, knows leveraging the user stories to convert into test cases, knows the importance of features and their impact on the existing functionality, knows the product manager and customer’s expectation. A testing professional gets into the shoes of business user to validate the functionally, he/she knows the types of testing to make sure the product works per expectation. So, testing professional knows the functionality of the product.

Being a team member you know the process and being a testing professional you know the functionality and customer’s expectation. The other skills to be learnt are:

Designing a product requires sense of business, domain knowledge, commercial thinking, understanding customer, and product life cycle.

Sense of business

To determine why to develop a product? What to develop? one should have the sense of business. A product manager role is business facing role which should know the demand and market need, so he can produce a product which can be sellable. Business is a profession for making money by selling or producing services or products. To sell products one should know the customer/market need, which products are sellable? Which has demand? How to sell the products? Price to sell and profit making.

Domain knowledge

Gaining domain knowledge is very important to be a successful product manager. For instance, the product is related to banking. Testing professional usually has the product knowledge, but it should be extended to learn other products in the same sector, learn the processes, learn the core business of banking. What is the core business? Borrowing the money from individuals for lesser interest and lending it for businesses and big companies for higher interest. This business is involved with lot of manual tasks. A part from the core business trends, risks, and typical business problems are imperative to understand. Eventually, functional knowledge helps designing the product confidently.

Commercial thinking

Every business needs commercial and ethical thinking. Let me put it in one statement. Commercial thinking is for a business man, what am I getting out of this business? Ethical thinking is for the customer from businessman stand point, how useful and valuable the product is for the customer? Commercial thinking teaches to do self analysis on 1. Why am I building this product? 2. What is the profit am I making? 3. How useful for the customers? 4. How long can I sustain in the market? 5. How to gain bigger market share? 6. How to gain more loyal customers. This kind of self analysis ensure to build a right product. So, commercial thinking is one more skill to develop.

Understanding customer

Understanding customer behavior and need is the first thing to learn for any product manager. Being a testing professional you know specific customer expectation. However, to understand the market you need to know the customer expectation in general. Learn to analyze who is target customers and their expectation so that the product will be shaped up per demand.

Here is the article which helps to market research.

How to do market research

Product life cycle

Being a testing professional your role will be started from the stage of ‘development’ and limited to know the new features that are getting integrated, but product manager should know the 360 degrees view of the product life cycle because he is the owner of the product. So, get into the shoes of owner of the product.

These are the additional skills to be developed to switch from testing to product management.

Another good read

Who can become a product manager