Prathima's Miles & Milestones

By definition, a great Product Manager prioritizes between engineering, sales, and design by keeping customer success in mind.

I aim to lead a process-oriented Product team. I believe in ruthless prioritization from the Product backlog leading to the Sprint backlog with multiple initiatives. Some of my learnings have been listed below — Do not prioritize just for one customer, Scale but try not to fail by scaling. Be customer-centric. Ensure that the PRD is crisp and clear with the success metrics, that’s where the battle of the PM begins.

Confession — I have been pretty much a noob PM when I started. I lacked the knowledge of OKRs and the KPIs which are very crucial for a PM. Having been mentored under various PM, attending many conferences on PM roles, being a part of Pragmatic leaders, listening to podcasts on Product Management — I have been taking smaller steps to improve myself and every day on the job is still new learnings.

A PM is the CEO of the product. I started with knowing the team and their motivational levels. Getting approval from all the stakeholders to execute my Product ideas has never been an easy task for me. I always ask for feedback to know my weakness. The saviour have been — Who, Why, What, Which, Where and How questions.

Knowing the nitty-gritty of what to measure lead to explore various tools like Amplitude, Clevertap, Firebase, Appsflyer, Adjust and many more. Getting the hands dirty to carve the best documentation to convey my points, in order to get a win-win situation among the stakeholders is another skill by itself. Funneling the information and metrics which will convince the team immediately needs a great research. Being a people influencer is a cherry on the top.

Another learning is that many of Product companies are also service-based. Fitting a product in a different domain, building an MVP, listing all the corner cases, learning the new industry curiously with mature thinking makes wonders happen. It’s a learn-as-you-go model. We need to up-skill our thinking and sell ourselves to the clients.

Cut down as many features as possible for the MVP. Be ready with the success metrics to track. Make sure they match the organisation level OKRs and team level OKRs.

Homework for PMs — Monitor Kibana logs, read about integration services with third-party apps like Knowlarity, Twilio etc, master Excel (most under-rated tool), setting up AWS services, micro-services, cloud telephony, web hook, cron-jobs, and the bugs & blockers which the developers come across. Eg: Prometheus error. Always ask the right questions when you converse with a developer — What, Why and How to be specific. Stand out when it comes to Technology, confidence, people and the impact you create with your team goals.

References —

• Cleartrip has wonderful UX. But its MMT that makes a bigger business. Hence, think smart.
• Every company builds an awesome camera but its the battery which always fails.
• PayTM’s Confirm the payment to the Merchant button was not a necessity. But its a huge add-on. It helps the awkward silence between the merchant and the consumer with relief even though the success message has been delayed.
• Engineer focussed companies like — Google Maps do not always speak to the end user whereas the internal brainstorming leads to the ideas rather than the PMs.
• Business-driven companies like — Salesforce, Oracle, SAP hugely relies on the Sales’ team inputs rather than the PMs. It’s the business queries, the industry need help them build the products in the supply chain management sector, ERP, CRM, etc.
• Consumer focussed companies like PayTM, Dunzo, Whatsapp, Cure.fit hugely depends on the Support queries for building their products being prioritized by the PMs.

A piece of valuable advice by the mentors is to — Start contributing as soon as you learn the domain, problem statement, product, and the metrics. This helps in excelling at your work. Always be humble since at times PMs have to request, threaten, drive the development cycle with the devs. Plan for success. Being a people’s manager is not an easy job. Be fair to everyone. Enjoy your work every day and add your quirkiness to it to bring in your flavour. Be open to learnings and explore. Monitor the OKRs. A/B test the features. Think of revenue generation. Never compromise on the user experience and never stop learning.