Posts

What i want from Google

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Its been 3 months since i started working at Google as a product manager. This blog is my attempt to articulate what i expect to learn at Google so that i can come back to it every few months and reflect if i am achieving what i had intended. 1. Product Strategy So far, i have not had enough opportunity to work on product strategy. This roughly translates to articulating who the target segment for the product would be, why should we build the product for them (which pain points are we solving, and why are those pain points under-served by other players in the market), what is the opportunity we are chasing here and how does that fit into the overall direction in which the company is moving. This sounded simple to me, and i thought i could nail this within a week. How naive! Its been 3 months and i am still struggling with framing the strategy for my product in a satisfactory manner. Doing a good job at articulating the strategy involves really immersing yourself in the ecosystem for wh...
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Reflections on 1.5 years at redBus

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7th June (2022) was my last working day at redBus. I had joined the organisation in Sept'20 and have spent about 1.5 years building products for the Singapore and Malaysia geography. This blog is my refection on these 1.5 years. The first thing that comes to my mind, which i felt quite regularly even while working here, is how much fun i had in this role. I would say this is the most fun i had working, so far in my professional journey. I often think, why would that be so? What worked best for me here is the amount of ownership and the difficulty level of the problems i was solving. The ownership was phenomenal - i was in complete control to decide which problems to tackle and to create solutions for them. It was an amazing rush! I think i work very well when i am myself convinced that the problems i am working on are important and and i am personally excited to solve them. At redBus, that was exactly the case.  Additionally, the problems here were of the easy to moderate difficult...
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Product Management - In a Context

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A thread on Twitter around how important context is in product management made me think about the context of my current job at redBus, and write this post to articulate these thoughts better. But before that, a bit about the thread. It talks about how context of the business and the organization is very important to the style of product management. There are varied styles to it, and the one which is successful in a team/org might not work very well in another. For example, a PM who is very detail oriented and gets involved in all things - from detailed data analysis, to spec creation, design feedback, testing all possible scenarios and charting out the marketing strategy - will be very effective when working on a specific product with a small scope (say the referral flow) but might struggle while working on a large scope product (say user engagement and retention). The former requires an eye for detail v/s the later requires, most importantly, identifying the right areas to work on and...
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Who is a product manager?

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The rise of the tribe of product managers (PM) is a recent phenomenon. There were no PMs in the old organisations like say L&T, Dabur or HUL, though there could be people doing a similar job. The explosion of internet based solutions to people’s problems has given rise to a PM. If we want to understand who a PM is, we have to examine exactly what happened in the internet revolution that enabled a PM to set up shop. Internet Revolution The internet revolution was an information revolution. The internet made a lot of information available at the fingertips of the human being - data about weather, flight schedules, stock market, football scores etc. With internet availability becoming cheaper and the speeds becoming faster, the number of people accessing the internet increased substantially. Businesses soon realised that the internet is a huge new lever to prop their businesses up to newer heights.  Why?  Because the key part of most business transactions is consumption of in...
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Product Management

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It makes sense to start with Product Management as this is my current job. Let me make a typical start with why's and what's and so on, for the lack of having a better way to start. What is Product Management? A few words here wont do justice to this question. This probably deserves another blog post altogether and even that would not be doing justice. But let me make an attempt to get things started at least. To draw an analogy with an train, engineers (software engineers in my job) are the firemen of the train, powering the train in the direction it is going, along with identifying any technical difficulties in the train. Business strategy makers are the people who decide the end station where the train is supposed to go and how much money it should make and coal it should consume going there. Product managers are the people who design everything (ok not everything, but most things) in between like - which would be the best path to get to the end station, which intermed...
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Why blog about work?

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This blog is about my meditations on work and work related stuff. I think it would be a good idea to write about work as the writing will make me stop and think about the work, which i rarely do in the regular course of life. I tend to get caught up much in the day to day activities of my work to think about: how well do i understand my field of work and what i am doing? how can i get better at my work? where do i want to get to in the long term? where else can i explore options to work that would be more fulfilling? So this blog will hopefully make me think about those things and also document all the thoughts at once place along with potential opportunities, contacts etc, which is always helpful. To put in other words, i am trying to understand or to establish a context and perspective for what i do as a 9 to 5 job and maybe get a feeling of how and where it is evolving.  Apart from these things, what i am hoping from this blog is for some interesting 'To Do's...
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