Prathima's Miles & Milestones

PM traits

• Product Analytics skill
• Problem solving skill
• Empathy towards customer service
• Leadership skill
• MUST HAVE — Technical knowledge

First time PM wish list

• Vision — Hit a number what feature we need to have
• Intuition — Breakdown to which KPI measure helped to reach the magic numbers
• Agnostic — Breakdown the company goals into numbers
• Know your users — Some of the surprises at Dunzo were — As per the reports, the most used use case in Dunzo was for Laundry. Another example is Hike. Hike initially started as a messaging service. Later worked on secret messages feature based on users request but not initially.
• Pick up a problem from the deteriorating metrics. Ensure its prioritised by the Product team and propose a solution.
• Look at the Roadmap — Bring in the innovation — Strategise it — Add the OKRs to measure the success metrics.

PMs journey

• Talk to the founder over a cup of coffee. No written documents can suffice such pep talks.
• Document and coding standards — Ensure developers make progress on a daily basis
• Motivate the devs — Let the devs use the app and ensure they handle the customer chats once in a while (during every odd sprints)
• Map your PM goals to the company goals.
• Product buy-ins — Listen to the Ops team, involve everybody, show them the latest numbers and the current priorities. Look for surprises. Their personal instincts are better than your numbers at times. Take that leap of faith.
• Manage your tech debt — Manage your backlog and groom the backlog often. Ship often and monitor the release cycle.
• Product market fit — Money, users, transactions, cohorts as planned by the founder/MVP. If you just serve a random use case, then you are not in the right direction. Eg: Hide feature in Hike, check your goal post often.
• Product is a subset of growth — Get your numbers right — This is a Do or Die. Tailor the product idea in all the use cases.
• Service — Create a product such that infinite users use your service on a daily basis. Eg: Dunzo on Twitter goes viral every other day. This isn’t a product goal. But it brings traction and new users curve goes high.
• Check the Product market fit in the initial stage. Ship it.

Step 1 — For your product ideas, create a Whatsapp group among your friends and ensure the reach is at least 250 members in 3 months. Define the success metrics by your gut.

Step 2 – Find a proxy and do a PoC (Proof of concept)

• Know the Net Promoter score
• Become a super app — Lots of people use it on a daily basis.
• Base resource — What all can you build? Build the use cases. Check if the features are sticking or not. Build delightful feature or a new feature. Check the numbers. Sort by profit and build Product features.

On a serious note, PM is expected to be the master of all traits. But, that’s an ideal scenario since the learning new technology and learning new skills never stops. Having little all round really helps to gain respect from the developers and the team.