Product Management
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 intermediate stations to touch while getting there, where to pick up fuel, how much space to people vs goods etc. So they 'direct' the train in the right direction while engineers fuel the train forward.
This is a very very rough analogy to define what product management is, as i understand it so far. Also product management has existed only for the last 15-20 years while locomotive trains are very old - so that further proves how ineffective they are as an analogy for the product management job. And also, this is the first analogy that popped into my head. Anyway, this is enough to get started and we shall refine this further.
Why Product Management?
From all the jobs on offer in the b-school, product management seemed the most attractive to me for a long time. I was/am interested in the design of things, places, spaces, systems etc. and design thinking as an approach to problem solving. And product management seemed the closest to my interest while still being a traditional MBA type of job. I thought of it as something in between design and business, sort of enabling business by better design. And so product management at Flipkart it was.
How has Product Management fared so far?
The actual work has always got be different from the perception one has, either good or bad or just neither but still different. I realise that my perception of product management has been mostly from either a front end point of view or from a physical product/service point of view. But i got into/was put into product managing the Flipkart Data Platform, which handles all of the Flipkart data. This is a backend product/platform with users being the different teams at Flipkart.
Here i got exposure to the aspects of product management that i did not realise existed or did not think of them as that much important. Understanding the user needs and identifying the pain points and designing your solutions accordingly is obviously an important part of product management. But, and i realised this in the current job, so is envisioning where you want your product to be in the next 6 month or an year and how you want to get there. Another important aspect to product management that i realised is managing your stakeholders, prioritising the asks coming from them and most importantly saying no - the last is something i am not very good at, i realised, but i am slowly learning.
Where are we going with Product Management then?
I am still learning much about my job. I have been a slow learner i think, partly because i haven't made a conscious effort to sit down and think about the job and partly because maybe that is my inherent nature. The second part of that is fine and this blog is sort of the solution for the first part. Let me chalk out a few things that i would like to to understand my job better and so be better at the job too maybe:
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 intermediate stations to touch while getting there, where to pick up fuel, how much space to people vs goods etc. So they 'direct' the train in the right direction while engineers fuel the train forward.
This is a very very rough analogy to define what product management is, as i understand it so far. Also product management has existed only for the last 15-20 years while locomotive trains are very old - so that further proves how ineffective they are as an analogy for the product management job. And also, this is the first analogy that popped into my head. Anyway, this is enough to get started and we shall refine this further.
Why Product Management?
From all the jobs on offer in the b-school, product management seemed the most attractive to me for a long time. I was/am interested in the design of things, places, spaces, systems etc. and design thinking as an approach to problem solving. And product management seemed the closest to my interest while still being a traditional MBA type of job. I thought of it as something in between design and business, sort of enabling business by better design. And so product management at Flipkart it was.
How has Product Management fared so far?
The actual work has always got be different from the perception one has, either good or bad or just neither but still different. I realise that my perception of product management has been mostly from either a front end point of view or from a physical product/service point of view. But i got into/was put into product managing the Flipkart Data Platform, which handles all of the Flipkart data. This is a backend product/platform with users being the different teams at Flipkart.
Here i got exposure to the aspects of product management that i did not realise existed or did not think of them as that much important. Understanding the user needs and identifying the pain points and designing your solutions accordingly is obviously an important part of product management. But, and i realised this in the current job, so is envisioning where you want your product to be in the next 6 month or an year and how you want to get there. Another important aspect to product management that i realised is managing your stakeholders, prioritising the asks coming from them and most importantly saying no - the last is something i am not very good at, i realised, but i am slowly learning.
Where are we going with Product Management then?
I am still learning much about my job. I have been a slow learner i think, partly because i haven't made a conscious effort to sit down and think about the job and partly because maybe that is my inherent nature. The second part of that is fine and this blog is sort of the solution for the first part. Let me chalk out a few things that i would like to to understand my job better and so be better at the job too maybe:
- Understand where the boundaries of my job, as in what i should bother about and what i shouldn't bother about
- Get used to the ownership of the job which is something new to me and am taking some time getting used to it
- Understand the technical side of the Flipkart Data Platform - i should make a structured approach to pursue this, maybe keep aside 2 hours a week (when?) to read up
- Draft a vision for my product (Flipkart Data Product) (12 months vision) and materialise sprints/quarter plans building towards that vision - this vision should be the guiding light for the all the product developements
These are the things that i would like to do over the next shall we say quarter (Feb, March, April) and take a stock of where i am at the end of it.
But the things that i mentioned so far are very specific to my current job. I took up product management because of my interest in design and the thought is to maybe approach the job that way. I would like to take stock of my current product from whatever i read up on design and design thinking, maybe i can borrow some thoughts/approaches. The question is how do i materialise this process? Should i carry a small notebook around in which i can make notes whenever i encounter an interesting thought, like a design notebook? I always had this fantasy of having a design notebook where i would make observations which i can incorporate in my product. Carrying a notebook all the while seems impractical, so i will use my phone to make these notes - i will get a good 'note making' app installed in my phone.
I think this is enough about my current stand on Product Management and my job.
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