“How To Get a No-Code Role”: Amulya Vishwanath, Head of Developer Relations, Emerging Markets at Nvidia (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Our next speaker is Amulya Vishwanath. She’s the head of developer relations supporting emerging markets at Nvidia. She’s passionate about making AI and emerging technologies. She was previously a product marketing lead for AI developer products at Nvidia and at Intel. Her favorite gadget is an AI-enabled drone. Welcome, Amulya.

Amulya Vishwanath: Thank you so much Sukrutha. Hi everyone, nice to meet you all. It’s so lovely to be here and hopefully you can take away one or two things from my presentation today. The whole goal is to give you a glimpse of what the possibilities are with many of the no-code roles. I would love to hear back from you after this session in terms of how your journey is going and did you end up making the transition, or any other questions and so on. Would love to hear from you. All right, so let’s get started. Thanks Sukrutha for the introduction. Can one of you confirm if you’re able to see my slide? Awesome.

Amulya Vishwanath: One of the most powerful message that I find that aligns really well with fundamentally who I am is, that you tend to work and you tend to think about work that you really love and something that means something, a purpose for you. This is a Steve Jobs code that really resonates with me. I thought it was important to just share with the attendees today. If you’re looking for something new, if you’re looking for a new challenge, don’t settle. All things related to heart, you know, it’s important to find something that really ticks you and makes you happy. You wake up every single day to do something exciting.

Amulya Vishwanath: I hope that in today’s presentation, I’m able to get you to start thinking about it, or maybe your next career move in the tech industry. Quick view of what I’ll be covering. I’ll be talking about key differentiations between technical code, no code, and then the very supportive and success building teams which are often are called as non-technical, but they are the key entities that help keep a company together.

Amulya Vishwanath: Then we’ll navigate through a job description walkthrough where I’ll show you how someone from the engineering background can navigate into technical product marketing journey. I have a very detailed guide in the form of a slide that has all the information, then a few roles that we are hiring for at Nvidia, so f you wanna learn more about Nvidia, feel free to look it up or you can reach me separately about it. I also have a deep dive blog on how to prepare for interviews that’s already posted on my LinkedIn. Feel free to take a look at that.

Amulya Vishwanath: A lot of the questions that I get is that hey, you know seems like your job is cool, that I don’t need to sit in front of a computer. How do I just move into a product manager role? And so on. There are a lot of myths because there are a lot of assumptions folks make just because they have not really spent enough time working with, let’s say, for example, a product manager or a product marketing manager, or someone from the content marketing team, documentation writer team and so on.

Amulya Vishwanath: It’s really important to understand that in order for any size or type of company to be successful, these are the three key pillars. There’s the, you know, coding or the programming unit or the research team, which is, you know, of course they are technical, they are going to be programming or researching and, you know, applying different techniques, thinking about system level you know, different tools and STKs and so on. I’m not gonna cover that because there is are awesome speakers lined up to talk more about the coding interviews in general.

Amulya Vishwanath: Then, we have the super glue type of a model – that is the non-technical folks who really help us keep our product successful, or keep people together, or hire amazing people and so on. They become the fundamental or the glue of the company. They are the non-technical folks.

Amulya Vishwanath: The third thing is the technical no code. The reason why it’s important to add this differentiation is that while you may not be coding, you still need to know how the product works. While you may not be thinking about system design, in a lot of ways you still have to think about your customer or your developer pain point, and at the same time have a pretty good grasp of how the product works and so on.

Amulya Vishwanath: These are just a few roles I’ve listed. There are many more roles in the technical no code area beyond product marketing strategy and alliances manager, program manager, program coordinators even again, depends on the type of product program or service or in general, a company that you’re speaking with. It’s important to read through the job descriptions.

Amulya Vishwanath: Typically, we tend to look at the qualification section. I’ve done that for a really long time, but I would really urge you to look not just the qualification side, but understand which team is posting this job description. What do they primarily do? What are they looking for? What are the bonus section? Like, where they talk about you would stand out if you do X, Y, Z, or if you are doing X, Y, Z things, pay attention to those things, right?

Amulya Vishwanath: The differentiation here is that everybody in these different categories are going to be really important for the success of a product or a company. Remember that. You might be an individual who has done amazing on the programming side, but want to test out something different. I hear a lot of people coming in and asking, Hey, I want to get into a non-technical role. I wanna become a product manager, or I wanna become a developer advocate. But guess what, it’s still a technical role and it’s important to know the value here. I’m happy to have an offline conversation if any anyone wants to love learn more about any of you know, these specific categories. But again some of the key questions that I keep getting is, how do I gain experience?

Amulya Vishwanath: It’s not always the case that you have experience in that specific domain to easily transfer, but there’s always going to be a transit point or transit set of skills you can gain in your existing role. Start thinking about who you are as an individual and where do you want to start transitioning into. Sometimes it could be just a direct jump from technical code to technical, no code function. Sometimes it might need a few tweaks. I’ll talk a little bit about switching functions and the related pay questions and so on later on.

Amulya Vishwanath: Let me just dive in really quick. This is my career progression. My you know, background has been in electrical engineering, but you’ll see that I’ve tried software engineering. I was a hardware researcher back in my master’s program, I got into app application development for signal processing products. I continued to gain a lot of the fundamentals from my engineering degree, but also getting more exposure on the programming side. I realized that I wanted to channel it in a different way where I’m able to talk to customers and customers developers and just be out there speaking to folks and understanding their pain points and really trying to think innovatively, think on the feet and you know, derive success and growth from that.

Amulya Vishwanath: I myself have made that transition from core engineering to product management and group product marketing and now developer relations. The reason why I have these blocks interconnected is because you’re consistently accumulating skills and you’re basically stacking them. Remember that while you may think that, well, I’m a programmer, I’m not sure, you know, if whatever I’ve done connects with a role that I’m interested in, the Apple Developer relations team, for example, you definitely can. You just need to map out your journey.

Amulya Vishwanath: I urge you to take a look at a simple template like this, map it out, see what you really learned from each of your previous roles, and start thinking about, you know, what are the things that you need to see in your next role or want to develop on and come up with a plan. Alright, so moving on. The tip is that, some of you might have already done this. The first one is get to know yourself. And one thing that really helped me very early on in my career is doing a SWOT analysis. Address, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Try to do a SWOT analysis. There are a lot of templates online. You probably have a couple of apps also that allow you to maintain these in real time and kind of update it on a weekly, monthly basis and so on.

Amulya Vishwanath: If you haven’t already done it, please do consider doing a SWOT analysis on just yourself. And then the second thing let me tell you, every single role, and most of the calls that I’ve gotten from FANG companies in general, and a lot of the unicorn startups have been through LinkedIn. If you haven’t already updated your LinkedIn, please do so, make the most out of your LinkedIn profile. Again, I’m sure there are newer mediums, but something that I can swear by that has really worked for me has been LinkedIn.

Amulya Vishwanath:Update your summary, update your job-related information, the certifications that you have done or you’re currently pursuing. And you know, anything that can add value in terms of where you are headed. Honestly, one of the things that I underestimated was when I started out on LinkedIn, I had about 95 connections. But today, again, you know, nothing to boast about, but more so try to find your crowd, right? Try to find your group the type of interest that you have and so on. I have about 5,000 folks today. And I learned, I just learn, just looking at the feed, right? I don’t need to go and look up TechCrunch. I don’t need to go and look up something on Google. And elsewhere, most of the things I’m learning from my peers are LinkedIn connections.

Amulya Vishwanath: If you are headed somewhere and you know which domain or interest areas are important for you, make sure you are following folks in that domain and increase your connections in that area. That way it’s much easier for you to pick up the lingo, pick up the products that are making the rounds and just in general the type of folks that are getting hired into such companies or for such products.

Amulya Vishwanath: Step three is prepare to stand out. I have a detailed blog on this, so I won’t be covering a lot in this session. Here’s just an example, right? Apple has posted a job on developer product marketing manager. Go through the details. In the summary, you’ll see that it’s a combination of product marketing, product management in the developer relations organization who would’ve known. And they’re very open to hiring somebody with a background from software developer, product management or product marketing, which is the blue arrow that you see here.

Amulya Vishwanath: Pay careful attention to the job descriptions. It may not necessarily show up in the dropdown list where you just select product management or product marketing and so on. Pay careful attention when you’ve decided where you want to you know grow. It’s a combination of product management, product marketing, and developer relations.

Amulya Vishwanath: Such a cool role, right? It requires a combination of presentation and product demonstration skills, subject matter expertise, competitive analysis. Find the folks who are in product management, product marketing and dev, follow them on LinkedIn. Understand, you know, where do they place most of their time? And emphasis on you will get the lingo, you will understand, you know, what’s more important. Again, pay careful attention to the summary of any job function and key qualifications.

Amulya Vishwanath: It’s a very detailed guide to make a transition if you’re coming from the engineering background, want to explore you know more of the no-code roles. This is a detailed version I’ve written for product marketing, but you can certainly apply this to partner manager roles, developer relations role, and product management as well.

Amulya Vishwanath: We have a combination of no-code, code roles and a lot of other you know glue roles, right? That are important for the company. Take a look at them. If you wanna learn more, feel free to reach out to me. Two things that has been clearly communicated from my HR business partner who offered me these hot jobs that are open at Nvidia is that number one, you might see that some of them are remote roles and some list as US California, Santa Clara, Austin, and so on. That’s because these fields are restrictive, sometimes they’re only able to select four or five of these locations.

Amulya Vishwanath: Always have that conversation with the recruiter. Always have that conversation with the recruiter and ask, Hey, you know, I’m based out of New Jersey, is this open and new, New Jersey, and so on.

Amulya Vishwanath: Don’t self eliminate yourself even before getting into that process. That’s my number one tip. And then the second thing is that, when you’re looking for jobs under filters, especially job category, remember to not just look at marketing or product management and so on. Sometimes product management roles sit within the engineering organization. Sometimes they sit within sales teams because they’re looking for a product manager to build sales tools and so on. Make sure you optimize for your keywords, your area of interest, and the domain that interests you. Don’t go by just the, you know set list of jobs or categories that you see in any company’s website.

Amulya Vishwanath: That brings me to the end of my presentation. If you want to learn more, get more interview tips, please feel free to scan my LinkedIn profile and you can find my blog about all things on how to prep for interviews. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Girl Geek team. Thank you so much. That thank

Sukrutha Bhadouria: You. Yeah, this was wonderful. All right well hopefully stay in touch on, on LinkedIn then. Thank you everyone.

Amulya Vishwanath: Good. Thank you.

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner or Career Fair? Talk to us!