How I accidentally got into Product Management
The Hype (not in a good way)
There is a lot of hype and excitement around Product Management in the last few years. It seems to be the job, just like consulting/finance jobs were the job when I was studying.
The most popular analogy to the question of what a Product Manager (PM) does is that you are the CEO of your product! Great!! But I’d like to say that I don’t like it. In fact, I hate it. It’s overly pompous and self-serving. The basic problem I find with it is that it makes it look like Product Managers do decisions/strategy and little else. It creates a wrong illusion that it’s a powerful role where you will tell all the teams what is to be done.
I am a product management professional for the past 6 years. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know that a role like this existed till I graduated from my MBA. When I was first offered this role, I outright rejected it because I didn’t understand it. However, I accidentally got into it in my previous company, Hopscotch. When I started with the role, there was hardly any reference points. But in the last 5 years, this has grown leaps and bounds. I used to get lots of requests from LinkedIn about how to become a PM. Random people will send their resumes for feedback or ask inputs on how to transition into this role or rather how I got into this role and so on. Most of them are either in tech/analyst role or just graduated from college and wants to become a PM.
Whenever I talk to any aspiring PMs, I always think about how I got into it. It was by chance rather than by choice. This is my story about how I accidentally end up being a PM.
How I joined the start-up world
When I graduated in 2014, hardly any start-ups came to campus for placements. It’s the usual Finance, Consulting, Marketing jobs. I got into IT consulting during my final placement. When I joined, I realized immediately this was going to be too much of a comfort zone for me and soon I would be traveling to the U.S and would never come back. But I didn’t know how to get out of it. At that same time, e-commerce was getting lots of traction with Amazon launching their Indian site in 2013, and almost every day you would come across some never heard before start-ups raising Series A, B, C, etc. (soon would learn all about these alphabets). I was fascinated by all this and wanted to work in such a place. But the problem is, I didn’t know where to start with, what kind of roles available, and most importantly who is going to take a chance with me.
As luck has it, one day I was chatting with one of my college seniors, Venkatesh and he was talking about the start-up, Hopscotch he recently joined. I was pleasantly shocked to know that Kids' clothes are being sold online and it’s doing well also. I asked him about any roles available there and he referred me to the Hopscotch’s team. One thing led to another, and I got an offer in 3 days’ time. There was a catch. They wanted me to join as a Product Manager. I asked them what a PM does. I got answers like, you will work with the tech team and build stuff. I did my own research, but I couldn’t find much information about it; just the Venn diagram with UX, business, tech, and how the product management sits in the middle of all three. I didn’t even know what UX was, at that time. I was worried, as it looked like another tech role. So, I rejected it and asked for an Analytics role. After a lot of back and forth, they finally agreed to it.
At Hopscotch, I started with streamlining and building analytics for the Merchandising team. The business model of Hopscotch is Boutique/Flash sale, so every day new collections/brands would be launched, and I had to keep track of the performance of every new launch and share it with Category managers. The initial few months were very difficult as I struggled to understand all the new terminologies and the role of different functions within the organization. Most importantly the culture. In smaller start-ups, your CEO will be sitting next to you and you end up talking to him daily. For someone who worked in big conglomerates like Oracle and Morgan Stanley, where there are a huge hierarchy and no access to leaders beyond my boss’ boss, that was such a huge cultural shock (in a good way).
How the transition happened
When I joined Hopscotch, the company’s size was 30+. However, it started growing exponentially (both in revenue and employee strength) as they recently raised funding. Within 6 months after I joined, there was so much dependency on me as the entire Merchandising team had to wait for data from me daily. I was becoming a bottleneck in the system, also the workload also increasing every day.
One day, I was discussing this problem with my manager, Puneet Sehgal and he suggested how we can automate everything, and he asked me to figure out the fastest way to do it. To cut the long story short, I built an internal dashboard with the help of my friend, Rima Malvankar from the tech team. She built the front end using Ruby On Rails and I gave her all the complex SQL queries (my time with Oracle helped) required to pull the data. Designs were done with paper and pencil on my notepad. Entire testing was done by Rima and me. That’s the beauty of working with smaller start-ups. You don’t wait for the design team to give you a design or wait for the tech team to give you DB queries or wait for QE team bandwidth to do testing. You just do it.
We built the dashboard in 2 months. I still remember the happiness/surprise on the faces of our Merchandising team when I showed the demo. It was one of the high points of my time at Hopscotch. After the demo, my manager pulled me aside and told me what I had done is what Product management was all about.
- You understand your user pain points. (how category managers can get data on a real-time basis without anyone’s dependency, so they can understand their brand’s performance and make decisions about inventory etc.)
- You built a product to solve the pain point. (Internal dashboard)
- By solving this problem, you added value to your users (faster decision making) and business (increase in GMV)
Over a period, I learned there are few more dimensions to it such as stakeholder management, over communication, understanding consumer behavior/psychology, User experience Design, and most importantly prioritization.
So, this is how I accidentally end up building a product and transitioned into the Product team. It’s a roller coaster ride so far, with lots of struggles, my fair share of mistakes, and a few successful products. I loved every minute of it.
This is tailor-made for…
This is a perfect role for anyone who wants to be a generalist rather than a specialist. It’s a multi-disciplinary role and you should know enough of each discipline to be responsible for product development. It gives you a 360-degree view of what’s happening in different functions and gives you an opportunity to pick ideas from everyone’s brains. It helps you to listen to everyone’s point of view. Over a period, I have learned one very important lesson; Hard skills like data, tech is important. But soft skills like communication (written & verbal), listening, user research, design, copy-writing, empathy is much more important. It's a lifelong learning experience.
This is one piece of advice I always give to any aspiring PM. Don’t think of yourself as the CEO of a product; think of yourself as the voice of the customer and have a growth mindset, you will do well
I am planning to write a series of articles on different aspects of product management like problem exploration, solution exploration, building, and optimizing solutions, setting success metrics, etc. Also, all the mistakes I have made along the way, which I learned from that.
