Look to my manager for approval . 
 Only his view matters who cares what the user is feeling , your pay and your job is dependent only on him

Product Manager

When no one is planning to stay in the company for long term , everyone optimises for short term. 
 Unfortunate but true

Break down large features into a smaller MVP. 
 Figure out if there are ways to quickly experiment it out via A/B or a quick hack. If it works plan for the larger engineering effort. 
 Remove your personal bias or of anyone at the company. Build and share the proto with someone you know who might fall in the target user segment. Get feedback. Share it with someone who might not be in the target segment, see how they interact.

Also product analytics - focus on what you track, get insights from data. 
  
 Screen recording tools also help sometimes to know exactly how users interact with your product.

I'm always doubtful, even after doing rigorous customer validation and analyzing user data. Happy to learn from folks here.

Welcome to Product Managers's Private Community

PMs, how do you ensure you are solving the right problem?

PMs, how do you ensure you are solving the right problem?- Grapevine

Would you rather be an Engineer learning how to Product or a Product Manager learning how to Engineer?

Answer is obvious mate. And it's already in motion. 
 Everyone knows current product management breed is a messed up fraudulent bunch. They will run into poverty if they don't change ways🙂

Founding Engineer

There are lots of videos and blogs from US PMs, but nothing from Indian PMs. What am I missing?

How to know about Product Management in India?

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

Consultant, Investment Banking went from sought after careers to fads post 2008 crisis when the world realized that these folks are crooks due to their role in propogating the Great Financial Crisis.

Given the backlash tech companies has been getting and global layoffs, will Product Manager also become a passing fad?

Seeing lot of anti Product Manager sentiment on this app off late. Was Product Management also a fad?

Someone here said engineers can become PM but PM can't become engineers. It can't be more correct than this. But reality is, it sounds goods only in theory.  
  
  I asked this same question to my director, why have you hired us when engineers clearly know more about products than us and are capable?  His answered that before the organisation formally created a team of product managers, it was only engineers that were handling product for decades. But that resulted into substandard products being developed, chaotic product release and consistent drop in revenue. The reason being engineers became backlog managers and engineers beging engineers, never focused on business value. Instead, they focused on technical aspect heavily. Engineers never bothered to check if what they were developing will actually sell in the market or not.  
  
 And mind you, this was a product that all of us use in daily lives. The numbers of users in India alone would be millions. So to summarise, yes, engineers can become PMs but generally they stay loyal to their pedigree of BE/B.Tech and become very shitty PMs. They like to have more technical conversations than strategic discussions and hate things that are not quantifiable, subjective. And business facing people here in forum would know, things are always not quantifiable in business planning, market outlook. It is based on assumptions.  
  
 An excellent PM would be someone who is an engineer but knows how to focus on business value of the product, make it customer oriented etc. I had the pleasure of working of one such PM in my last stint and he was truly outstanding. CEO knew him personally and this is in an organization with thousands of employees

Program Manager

I have over 5 years of experience in product management and have worked with 2 companies in the past. On multiple occasions i felt that I am struggling with what to build next.
Generating a laundry list of ideas could be easy but generating an impactful roadmap is something that i struggle with. Is this because I am incompetent as a product manager or other PMs also get stuck in similar situations, if yes then what do you do to come out of it?

Struggle to generate impactful roadmap

Sales Manager

Hey everyone, excited to be doing this AMA!

A brief about me, I work currently as a Director of Product at an Indian unicorn startup 

About my career: 
- Did my undergrad from IIT and then masters from an Ivy league school
- Have been in product for almost 10 years now - across 2 Indian unicorn startups and a publicly listed company

Would love to take questions on what it means to be a PM, growing within the role, building your career, and other things :) 

Will be back here at 4 pm and start replying
Shoot away!

AMA 🎙️: Hey all, I am pmsprint, Director of Product Management at a Unicorn in India!

AMA. Happy to answer anything about the Product. I'm looking forward to it.

Director Product at one of the respectful US based Product company in logistics space. AMA.

Ask me anything except my company name, or things that can reveal my identity. I may respectfully choose not to respond to your question based on my own judgement.

Here’s a brief intro about me: I’ve worked as both software engineering manager & software technical architect over the last 18+ years on various tech stacks managing backend, frontend and a little bit of cloud. I have seen ups and downs in the software industry. Currently I’m working as a senior architect in one of the product based companies in India.

I’ve been an Engineering Manager before. Ask me anything.

Software Architect

Acquiring funding for a startup in india has become a hassle. I myself have been doing research on seed funding Vc's and angel investors. All they ask is pitch deck and LinkedIn profile. Which they don't even go through and just reply with an email saying we are not eligible for funding. On the other side US and other countries are getting funding at the ideation stage. I guess we can't even go for crowdfunding. Started building MVP, but halfway through the hurdle and unable to resume the development due to limited resources.

Tired of applying everywhere for funding.

Can anyone help me how to tackle b2b products especially dashboards ux problem statements because most of the time i cannot find references to understand how other products solved some kind of issue

While in B2C it looks so easy and user research is also easier to find..

How can I be good at b2b what key aspects should i understand to be good at these companies who solve enterprise problems (saas)

B2B vs B2C(mobile apps)

UX/UI Designer

In July 2002, Google did something crazy:

They hired a 22 year old computer science student and made him the product manager for Gmail.

Gmail engineers were shocked.

Gmail was the most important new project at Google. Its target was 10M users.

And this guy, who was just out of college, would be the PM?

But they were overruled, because Google had a bigger problem:

Product managers.

Google couldn’t find good PMs.

Co-founder Larry Page rejected all the super-experienced PMs from Microsoft, McKinsey, etc.

They talked about management and strategy and business. Larry Page hated this.

He wanted Google PMs to be technical.

Otherwise how would they work with the engineers?

That’s when a Google VP, Marissa Mayer, had an idea:

If we want PMs with technical skills and don’t care about their experience, why don’t we hire computer science students from college?

Thus, the Associate Product Manager (APM) program was born.

Brian Rakowski, a 22-year-old CS grad from Stanford, became the first APM. He was put on the Gmail team.

Brian was scared.

How could he work with super experienced, super senior engineers on a super important project if they didn’t respect him?

Marissa gave him the answer: Data

She explained to Brian that a PM didn’t give orders to engineers. His job was to be helpful to engineers.

If he had an idea, first he should do a small test on 1% of users. If it worked, he should show the test data to the engineers to work on it.

Thus, data became the centre of decisions, not seniority or politics.

The rest is history.

Gmail was a huge success.

APM program was a huge success.

The first APM, Brian, was a huge success. He’s currently the Vice President of Product Management at Google!

Reference : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shreyans512_in-july-2002-google-did-something-crazy-activity-7192496184895115264-nKXF?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Cordially inviting all deserving tech bros

Found this on Twitter, Source: https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1778414659000840399/photo/1

What do you think? 

PS: I kinda like his tweets sometimes.

Director of Product: I was pushed out after building a startup to what it was over 7 years. Equity went from $10M+ to <$1M.

With over 10+ years of experience in Product management within the insurance and Fintech sector, I’ve realized that product management is still not understood/defined well as a role. I’m open to all sort of queries.

Ex-Policybazaar Product Head #AMA

Product Owner

Experienced Product, Tech, Sales, founder folks of GV, what would be your one piece of advice for a new APM/PM (1-2 yoe) in the industry, that would help them in the long run.
Feel free to also let us know any mistakes you made as a Product guy, early in your career.

Advice for PMs!

Hello everyone,

I'm a non-engineer who's been working as a PM/APM for roughly 1.5 years.
 I wanted to know what kind of course (short or long) could help to progress in a product management career (especially if I'm targeting to work in the sports/gaming/fitness/entertainment industry in and around Mumbai or anywhere remotely)

Would really appreciate inputs from experienced PMs

Pathway to Progress in PM Career

Welcome to Business Roles's Private Community

Hello Everyone, 

I am a 2018 BTech (NIT) pass out and  2022 IIM pass out with a total of 2.2 years of Workex (1.2 yrs post-MBA) and currently working as an Associate Product Manager. I am not really enjoying my role and I feel Product Management is not suitable for me because of multiple reasons some of them being,


1. I am doing issue resolutions rather than problem-solving which I love to do.

2. I am not very much interested in driving technical discussions or solving technical challenges in the process of Product Development which is the case in my current role. 

3. I want to be part of a Business role where I can leverage the knowledge I have gained during my MBA and work on some problem statements related to the core businesses of the company. 

4. There is no skin in the game of a PM compared to Devs, QAs, and Designers. As a PM I feel I am just delegating, prioritizing, and following up with the requirements. Most of my learnings are around managerial aspects and not business knowledge. 

5. I want to be a part of business roles where I can go deeper into problems and come up with my recommendations/thoughts on them. 

I am looking for new roles where Strategy, Analysis and Core Business Problem solving are involved. I am really not sure what kind of roles are these. 

Please help me with the roles I can explore and how to approach the job search for such kinds of roles. 
Thanks In Advance.

Need Advice - Job Role Switch.

Inspired from @salt post in Product Managers channel.

What was the most important learning you have had as a Product Manager?

Growth Manager

Welcome to Data Scientists's Private Community

Talking to my nephew nowadays seems like the AI bug has gotten to him. Even going back during the early parts of my own career and even undergrad, ML and stats was still a fledgling field. Most of the smart folks went into SDE roles at top tech.

I still remember that even back then, hiring for roles like these were extremely theoretical. You would test even experienced candidates with undergrad topics which was slightly outdated tbh because most of the functions were abstracted away and it is obvious that you would not remember the matrix approach to finding weights for a simple linear regression model.

Has this changed now? Because I don't think interviews like that actually evaluate the accumulated wisdom that experienced professionals bring to the table.

I mean it is generally a waste of time for anyone to brush up manual derivations or remember SQL niche intricacies. Usually it is better to test for the 80% knowledge that is actually useful on a day to day basis. I mean if the main things that companies test in experienced candidates is something that can be rote-memorized from a book then they are not testing the right things no?

What do you all think? Just wondering about this for some time now especially considering the hype around AI?

Is Data Science a bad bet for your career longevity?

Can anyone help me with what most common asked questions are as a product designer of experience 2 years

Product designer interview questions

I am currently working as a PM in B2B Space. But I want to develop PM Skillsets for B2C space as well. 

Can someone  please share what are most important skills/tools a B2C PM Should know. 
Do share relevant resources if possible!

PMs, how do you ensure you are solving the right problem?

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