Product Managers — Are you a PPM ???

PPM > Passionate Product Managers, the new role — how i define it

Being in a Product Management role for about 10 years now, have had the privilege of working with varied businesses be it classifieds, real estate, recruitment or be it e-commerce.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to wear multiple hats in my career, starting from working for the no.1 player in the industry, moving on to a small time startup which was able to write down its success by its own efforts, moving to be a successful start-up founder running a niche segment e commerce business, to a business which caters to a mass audience which fights each day with competition and stands tall.

Most of my career has been in a Product Management role only, but going through all the phases and journey’s, wearing multiple hats — I feel that a traditional Product Manager Role is not what right businesses need, nor should one be in.

A Passionate Product Manager — PPM role as I define it, is not something which starts with a regular PM day, in fact PPM has a never ending day.

For a PPM — If you are passionate about your product or the things you are doing are self-driving factors, to push you out from your bed to your desk, then you are at the right place, with the right people doing the right thing at the right time.

If your product continuously makes you ponder about what are you doing? — is it making a real impact, are you working towards solving the right questions for your users, do your users love your product, do they keep coming back and get others along.

Are you thinking day / night about your user’s experience, about the impact your solution is making to your audience. Then you have moved way beyond a Product Manager’s role.

Some of the traits of a PPM should be:

PPM should be the first most aggressive user of the solution he/she is offering.

If you are not using the product or the people around you are not even convinced with the solution, then it’s time to go through the entire puzzle and understand the what, where, why and how of the problem.

· At the very first level itself

o if you are not in love with your product

o You are not aggressively part of the market where your product is competing

Then you can never understand the experience your product is delivering, you cannot go down to the granular level of identifying the minuscule of problems and if you don’t know the problem then you don’t even have no clue about the solution.

You might not be a Director or a CEO by designation, but if you don’t feel about your Product from the top notch level, where you measure every movement on your Product, how the smallest changes are impacting your users, you can-not be a Passionate Product Manager.

Most importantly, if you don’t need anything to drive your spirit / your motivation — apart from your users, their feedback, their voice, their actions, these are the self-driving factors which makes working hours longer and sleeps shorter.

If these are the thoughts that make you ponder at wee hours, then you are at the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.

The toughest part of being a Passionate Product Manager is the fact that you would always be surrounded by people around you or over you — who would be not as passionate as you are or are not willing to push as hard as you do but trust if your drive is strong and you are smart enough to keep moving faster and stronger in the right direction with the right armor by your side, you will be changing things at every level.

But honestly if you are not driven by your own Product — you are at the wrong place buddy.

Would also love to add an easy definition of a Passionate Product Manager

· I call a Passionate Product Manager as A Peace Maker

o between the problem and the solution

o between the present and the future

o between one team and the other

o between a data and an insight

o between a cost and a value

o between a quality and a quantity

· Last but never the least, a peace maker between his life and work.