From Engineer to Product Manager: What the Shop Floor Taught Me
From Engineer to Product Manager: What the Shop Floor Taught Me
I started my career as an engineer, not a product manager. Three years at Mitsubishi Power, first as a graduate trainee, then in auxiliary equipment engineering, meant working on systems where the parts genuinely have to fit together or nothing runs. That background changed how I approach product, and I'd argue it made me better at it.
Engineering teaches you to respect dependencies
In power systems, you can't wish a constraint away. A component has tolerances, an interface has a spec, and if you ignore either, the whole assembly fails downstream. Product work has the same shape, just less visible. Features depend on other features, teams depend on other teams, and a decision made in isolation usually surfaces as a problem somewhere else later.
So when I plan a project now, I look for the dependencies first. What has to be true before this can ship? Who else is affected? That instinct came straight from engineering, and it's saved me from a lot of avoidable surprises.
Specs only matter if everyone reads them the same way
As an engineer I learned that a drawing is only useful if two people interpret it identically. The same is true for a product requirement. A vague spec doesn't fail at design time, it fails three weeks later when two teams built to two different assumptions.
That's why I write things down plainly and check that everyone is reading them the same way. It's not bureaucracy. It's the cheapest way to avoid building the wrong thing twice.
The pivot was really an accumulation
Moving into product after my PGPM at Great Lakes didn't feel like leaving engineering behind. It felt like adding a layer on top of it. I still think in systems, dependencies, and tolerances, I just apply them to roadmaps and teams now instead of equipment.
The engineering years gave me a way of thinking. Product management gave me a place to use it.
Harish skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Harish Varajith C was part of the April 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 18 other talented participants.