Banking Product Manager Dilemma
I work for a private sector bank in India as a product manager. The bank is still lagging behind in terms of tools and softwares. We never use JIRA, Power BI or any other commonly used tools/software in product management. It is largely MS Excel,word or Powerpoint driven. Though the story is pretty much same for all Indian banks but I want to upskill and be confident enough to interview for any PM role outside of banking. Please suggest what should be my upskill path and how do I stay competitive.
There's hardly any Product management is banks. It's mostly project management.
@TepidFanny11 @WillingBed38
Have a slightly nuanced, but specific query.
I would have assumed working with Nish would be good, learnings, impact, etc.
Why are product folks leaving kmbl?
FriendlyJeep
Stealth
a year ago
You can learn the Epid>Story>Task format in JIRA from an introductory video. Also learn to use filters for searching.
Try out confluence and the above things in JIRA with a free account. Confluence has templates, you can create a dummy PRD into that for practice. This is 80% of the work, the rest is organisation specific.
Do some basic prototyping in Figma. Use plugins to get the icons.
Also checkout any app for kanban boards. Not very necessary but may come handy.
I feel JIRA is just a tool and won’t make you any better Product Manager, excel can do everything.
Going back to main question, “How to pivot from banks?”
Try becoming subject matter expert in banking domains like - Lending, Payments, API Banking etc. Fintechs usually look for people with such backgrounds. I know multiple people those who moved from such banks to new-age fintechs, especially in Digital Lending.
Most of the fintech JDs don’t ask for domain!
I think in order to build something and enter quickly they do not care about domain initially .
But if they need to scale they cannot get away for deep domain knowledge.
Just basic lending knowledge and payment flow , ecosystem is sufficient for these fintechs
“Basic” has many meanings, it’s debatable. Talking about the OP specific problem, I feel that’s the best pivot strategy :)
ChelseaBlues
Stealth
a year ago
I had a better experience in an Indian Bank than I am having in a leading Fintech. People at the top knew what they wanted to do while I'm just satisfying the so-called leaders' ego now.
