1 year as a Product Manager: reflection and key learnings
A bit of context (please!)
As the days are passing so slow these days, it has been a little more than a year since I graduated. Looking back, the last one year has been really eventful and a phase full of learning.
Just a year and a half back, I would often wonder why am I doing engineering? As a kid, for many years, I idolized Harsha Bhogle and dreamt of being a cricket broadcaster like him. For the next decade, I wanted to be a journalist because I loved reading, writing and public speaking.
Aspirations aside, I landed up doing engineering but didn’t know what’s next? Hence, I made a point to explore anything and everything that I could — I started writing for a number of digital media portals, started a storytelling blog (just when Jio was launched), did extensive email marketing campaigns for the technical workshops we had in our college, organised a hackathon, did projects on design thinking and did two internships — one on web development and the other on building a video recognition model using 3D CNN.
The good thing about all this stuff was they gave me many clues of what digital ecosystem is. After shutting down our startup — Frontbench (an online marketplace for 1:1 mentorship) within 9 months, I was looking for a meaningful job.
In September 2019, I joined Internshala. All I can say that it has been a dream run for me (so far) as I just didn’t work on incremental changes (as most young PMs get to do) but worked on the portal that recruiters use (from ideation to go-live) for shipping a new business line i.e. Internshala fresher jobs. (In fact, fresher job portal was my first major project)
PM (ing) in retrospection
Product management is a hot cake these days. I still don’t know — Why?
At times, I have felt that I no longer have the super-power to build things single-handedly. I have envied designers and developers (:p). I also feel that PMs are lesser aware of the industry vertical/ business (compared to consultants/business folks) as perhaps this is beyond the scope of their job.
Keeping grumblings aside, my guiding light has been these two random tweets —
7 key learnings …..
My learnings aren’t just a sum total of what I did (correctly). It has shaped much better in cases where I made mistakes. It also includes a bunch of thoughts and self-realizations I had after shipping a feature (Oh! I could have done this slightly better)
1. Be relentlessly curious
Product managers are (supposed to be) generalists. When I had just joined, I felt overwhelmed as I was interacting with designers, data scientists, developers, business folks etc. It’s one thing to convey your requirements and ensure alignment but as PMs you are there to put up your point of view (POV) and add value to the table.
Since we didn’t have product documentation (then), the only way I could figure out things fast was by asking questions (in fact! a lot of questions).
Being curious isn’t just limited to asking the right questions. I believe that when we are genuinely curious our mind intercepts and anticipates new ideas much better.
2. Develop your own framework(s) to think
I remember while interviewing me for the job, Vikram (my manager & Internshala — CTO) told me that the only thing we look for in product managers is — Are they thoughtful enough? It had struck me since then as any product is an outcome of hundreds of thoughtful decisions put together.
I have tried figuring out the best way to think by reading hundreds of articles on structured thinking, critical thinking, first principle thinking and cognitive biases but none has seemed like a magic wand. Over time, I have figured out two frameworks (and hopefully will figure out many more this year)
- ऐसा क्यों करना चाहते हैं? (For my English readers (:p) — Why?)
This may seem too simplistic (and a desi substitute for WHY?) but every time, I proposed a feature/idea/suggestion, Vikram would say — ऐसा क्यों करना चाहते हैं and listen patiently.
I was quite reluctant to face this question early on but later on for every line I wrote in PRD, I made it a point to ask myself - ऐसा क्यों करना चाहते हैं ?
This single phrase has immensely helped me to be thoughtful.
- Form counter-arguments (upfront)
As a product manager, for every major feature you want to ship, you need to be persuasive and convince your stakeholders. And every time, you would present your ideas, you would be asked counter questions and supporting information.
Anticipating, framing a list of counter questions and seeking answers well before a catch-up not only makes you more aware and lively but also saves you from saying — ‘I will get back to you on this soon’ too often.
3. Your document is your product
PRDs (we call it FRS internally) form the genesis of what we as PMs do and convey. I have learnt immensely from the reviews my previous manager (Radhika) did of the PRDs I wrote. I am always in awe of the way she structures PRDs and has kept one of her PRD for my constant reference.
PRDs for me is the product story I want to convey myself first and developers, designers and all stakeholders next. After reading a lot about how to write PRDs, I am convinced that a good PRD essentially includes all the best practices of good copy-writing. Additionally, nothing should be left ambiguous and should be as detailed as possible.
4. Love testing (don’t hate it!)
I remember initially I was very sceptical to do testing. To put it bluntly, I thought testing was a mean job. (:D)
I am glad that my (not so good) thoughts about testing have vanished so fast.
- Testing is the fastest way for a new PM to attain product knowledge.
- No matter how much you read about UX, cognitive biases etc, it’s only when you test your product (as a user) you get a real hand experience of user experience. You will be surprised to discover tons of usability issues no matter how thoughtful and detailed your PRD was.
Testing puts you in hold of your product and system.
5. Communicate .. communicate .. communicate
Almost everyone will say that soft skills are an important skill for a product manager but effective communication isn’t about how good you can communicate in English.
I have read a lot on what effective communication is all about but I believe communication depends heavily upon the context.
- When broadcasting, one should always give a context and be as detailed as possible (so that everything makes sense to the folks on the other side)
- When sharing requirements with the developers, designers and other stakeholders, one should not sigh from ‘over-communication’ just to ensure that nothing is left out.
- While having a product conversation, one should form compelling and persuasive arguments backed by supporting data and information.
Don’t be a pushover. Ask the right questions. Deliberate and be open.
6. You learn (exponentially) only when you ship
As someone has rightly said — You learn more from one day of practice than from a hundred days of theory.
One thing I realized very soon is that product management is quite different from what it sounds in books, blogs and podcasts. For me, my learning curve has been proportional to shipping velocity. After every feature, I shipped (be it a small copy change) my confidence and conviction of what I’m doing has increased substantially.
7. Be data-informed … (as much as possible)
After Netflix product team popularised data-driven product decision making, every product folks talk about being data-driven.
I have learned the significance of being data-informed the hard way. For instance, we believed that our keyword search algorithm is pretty basic and there is a scope of exponential improvement. I started working in the direction of implementing elastic search when Vikram asked me to analyse keyword search results first.
Intuitions were ripped apart. We found that out of top 500 search results, only ~0.02% search volume used keyword search and 98% keyword search returned correct result. We asked ourselves again — ‘Do we really want to improve this?’ The answer was definitely — No.
Data, on the other hand, shouldn’t be seen as a panacea to all product decision making. As Vikram says, ‘We will track only things when we aren’t sure of something”.
Data removes ambiguity. Data should help in saying No. Data shouldn’t be a mandatory condition for saying — Yes.
The last one year has indeed been fulfilling. It has been so because of two reasons — great mentor (Vikram) who have put immense trust in me and the choice I made to join Internshala and said no to e-commerce. (my passion for ed-tech + recruitment space has worked out really well). I am looking forward to many more years ahead! Open to DM’s here:- https://twitter.com/venkygupta1800
