Engineers are great at solving problems that arise when creating new products. But deciding what new products to build is often just as big a challenge. That decision-making process is a task software engineer Johnny Ray Austin has found himself increasingly drawn to as his career has progressed.
Austin is the senior director of product management at the financial technology company Best Egg, based in Wilmington, Del. During his career, he’s worked on a wide array of assignments, including classified defense projects, mapping technology, and education software. And over the years, he’s gravitated toward roles where he gets to think more deeply about how the technology he’s building fits in with users’ needs.
Johnny Ray Austin
Employer:
Best Egg
Occupation:
Senior director of product management and customer platforms
Education:
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Tuskegee University; master’s degree in information technology, University of Maryland Global Campus
He’s gradually transitioned from pure engineering roles to ones that are more focused on product management. The process of developing new products and bringing them to market typically involves identifying what products and features the customer wants and then coordinating between engineering and business teams to make them a reality.
“You kind of sit in between the business side of the house and the more technical side of the house, and you need to be able to speak both languages,” Austin says.
At Best Egg, he’s helping lead an effort to transform the business into a “product-led” organization. And while product management typically attracts people who have a business background, he thinks the core skills of an engineer are well-suited to the job.
“Engineers tend to be very creative in their thinking processes, and that’s really important to a lot of product management roles,” he says.
The cutting edge of software engineering
Growing up in Saginaw, Mich., in the 1990s, Austin had little exposure to digital technology. His family didn’t get a computer until he was in high school, and he only used it for writing the occasional class report.
An interest in space inspired him to enroll in an aerospace engineering course at Tuskegee University, in Alabama, in 2002. But it turned out to be less exciting than he expected, and by the end of freshman year, he was considering other options. A chance conversation with his roommate’s friend, who was taking computer science, convinced him to give the subject a try.
“The following semester, I took my first computer science class, which was C++ intro to programming, and I just fell in love with it,” Austin says. “It was like a world had unlocked for me.”
In his final year, Austin attended a campus hiring event run by Lockheed Martin and was offered a job as a software engineer. He started work immediately after graduating in 2006 and continued his studies in his spare time. In 2010, he received a master’s degree in information technology from the University of Maryland Global Campus.
Although the applications Austin worked on at Lockheed were fascinating, he says, the government is risk averse, and so the technology he was working with was well behind the cutting edge.
“Being a young engineer, I wanted to use the latest technology,” he says. “I felt kind of trapped about 10, 15 years behind where all the action was happening.”
Jason Spear
Jumping into startups
After six years at Lockheed Martin, Austin took the leap to the startup world. In 2012, he joined Everfi, where he helped build software to track student progress. This was followed by stints doing Web development for the marketing startup ISL and helping train employees on software development and cybersecurity at the financial services company Capital One.
In 2018, he joined Mapbox, a company that creates navigation technology. As head of navigation data, he was responsible for building the tools and infrastructure to collate and organize the company’s geospatial data. After six months, Austin was promoted to director of engineering.
In addition to managing engineering efforts, he was also responsible for ensuring that Mapbox found customers for its products. “That required me to pick my head up out of the technical world and think about what products we were actually delivering to people and whether they actually want them,” he says. The role gave him his first taste of product management.
Fintech to help people get through the month
In 2019, Austin joined Till, a financial tech startup in Alexandria, Va., as vice president of engineering. His job was to help build the company’s flexible rent-payment service, which allows people to pay their rent in installments throughout the month.
“The first thing that popped into my mind was, ‘Why hasn’t anyone already built this?’” Austin says. “It felt like we could have a lot of impact on people’s lives.”
Austin says he quickly discovered why the service didn’t exist already. The business model required Till to pay landlords up front on the first of the month, essentially loaning the tenant rent money and allowing them to pay it back over the course of the month.
This in turn meant that Till’s software needed to interface with legacy property management and loan-management systems, some dating back to the 1990s. Trying to connect these systems was a major engineering challenge, Austin says. “It can be fun, but it can be surprisingly frustrating.”
Shifting focus for product growth
In 2020, Austin became Till’s chief technology officer. As the leader of both the product-management and engineering teams, he had to think about product development nearly as much as engineering, something he found he relished. In December 2022, when Till was acquired by Best Egg, he jumped at the chance to move into a more product-focused role during the transition.
The purchase of Till was part of a new strategy for Best Egg, Austin says, which at the time primarily provided personal loans. The company wanted to offer its customers an array of financial products, including Till’s flexible rent-payment service, but this would require a shift in Best Egg’s plan to become a “product-led” business, Austin says.
He volunteered to lead this change, and in September 2023 he was made senior director of product management and customer platforms. Part of the role involves hiring and training product managers for each of the company’s key offerings, but the biggest challenge has been changing the company’s culture, Austin says.
In general, businesses that are not product-led may focus on maximizing metrics such as revenue, profit, and monthly users. In its new business model, Best Egg is instead working to boost these metrics indirectly through improved customer experiences.
That has meant focusing more on identifying what problems customers needed to solve and trusting the engineering teams to find solutions. “Let the engineers figure it out, because that’s what they do best, right?” he says.
A career for the curious
Product management is not a good fit for every engineer, says Austin, particularly if you prefer to work directly with technology day to day. But for those who are curious about all aspects of the business, it can be very fulfilling because “you touch everything,” he says.
The creativity, problem solving, and systematic thinking required of engineers can be a great foundation for a career in product management, Austin says. But it’s crucial to work on your communication skills, because product managers need to hold their own in technical discussions and also clearly communicate to other parts of the business what the engineering teams are building. It’s also important that product managers make good judgment calls about things like new features. They should nurture what Austin calls “product intuition”—that is, knowing their product and knowing their customer.
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