From Programmer to Engineering Leader: An Accumulation, Not a Pivot
From Programmer to Engineering Leader: An Accumulation, Not a Pivot
I started as a programmer in 1993. Three decades later I lead engineering as an Associate Director. People sometimes ask how I made the jump from coding to product to leadership, as if there was a single moment I switched tracks. There wasn't. Every role added a lens, and the job today is keeping all of them in focus at once.
Start at the keyboard, and never quite leave it
My first years were spent writing code, handling user acceptance testing on-site in Taiwan, doing QA for localization, running fit-gap analysis. It was hands-on, detailed, and occasionally tedious, and I'm grateful for all of it.
The technical foundation never stopped paying off. When I was drafted into the Baan practice, I went deep enough to invent a technique for customization without source code. When I later managed SAP programs, I could read past the status report to what was actually happening in the build. You lead engineers better when you remember what the work actually feels like.
Project and program management is where I learned scale
Moving into project and then program management taught me the part code can't: people, timelines, customers, and risk. I managed engagements across continents, an EMEA SAP program for a US CPG major, an MDM implementation for a shipping company in Singapore, a roll-out for a Switzerland-based customer.
Managing across time zones and cultures forces a kind of clarity. You can't hover over a global team; you have to set things up so the work is unambiguous and the right decisions get made without you in the room. That lesson carried straight into product and engineering leadership.
Product management tied it together
Earning my product management certification and stepping into the role gave the technical and program experience a purpose. Product is where you decide what's worth building in the first place, and you make that call far better when you've personally felt the cost of building the wrong thing.
Roadmapping, implementations, rollouts, support: I'd done every one of those as a practitioner before I owned them as a product manager. That's not a detour on the way to leadership. It's the whole point of it.
Why the accumulation matters now
Today I'm leading engineering and, through Curious PM, building AI products, a technology that barely existed when I started. None of my earlier experience is obsolete. The programmer's instinct for how things actually work, the program manager's feel for delivery and risk, the product manager's discipline about why, all of it still applies, just to a new kind of system.
The path was never a series of pivots. It was an accumulation. And the most useful thing I can do as a leader is keep every one of those lenses in focus while the technology underneath keeps changing.
Sameer skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Sameer Sudhakar Deshpande was part of the April 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 18 other talented participants.