Starting up as a Product Manager? Here’s what you need to do in first 30 days..
Be curious and listen more to learn…
During my initial days as a PM, I didn’t really know what to do which could have helped me set in the right direction early on. While there is a lot of theoretical text book stuff online but practical advice basis on ground experience is missing (at least I couldn’t find it then). So, compiling my learnings based on the challenges I faced and how I overcame them.
How to know if there a scope of improvement in the current version of the product?
Tear down the product and start asking why.
Take a look at current state of product with first principles in mind. Question everything regarding why this has been built in this particular way and think about different ways to solve the same problem. This is really important in initial days before your thought process gets coloured by the thinking process around. e.g. Ever thought about, why does Uber takes progressive inputs whereas Ola shows Where to and different cab options on the same page?
How to figure out the answers to some of the questions in mind?
Become self reliant to generate insights.
Understand the analytics stack underneath the product and start learning different tooling being used to capture user and business data. This includes web/mobile analytics tools, different database sources, competitive info tools and others. You should make yourself self reliant asap so that you can start generating insights which will help answer the questions and enable you to come up with new ideas. Also, get yourself comfortable with most commonly used metrics like visits, visitors, conversion and any other metric the team swears by. E.g. In the same example above, to figure out which approach is better.
- One should be able to figure out what %age of DAUs (Daily Active Users) on each of the platforms are converting.
- How much time on average a user is taking to complete a booking?
- What %age times a user books a cab from current location or from some other location? Answer to this could help define whose approach is better.
- How does it vary by different user cohorts? Does it work well for repeat but not for new users?
Who are the users for whom I will be solving for?
Interact with your user base to understand the market.
Listen to customer support calls to understand the pain points and user expectations. Also, go to field/call up some of the users to understand their usage patterns and expectations. This will help you empathize with user needs and solve for them. e.g. Are there some particular scenarios when users don’t prefer booking an Ola or Uber? Which are those and how can we solve for them?
How the current systems are built up?
Get yourself accustomed to internal tech stack.
Understand the different system components and the role each of them plays. While it is not possible to learn the details about each of the system in first 30 days but an overview of each component would be helpful. Understanding the same will enable you to ask the right questions.
Whom to reach out to for each of the specific areas?
Understand roles of different teams involved.
Shipping a quality product is all about coming together of people across multiple teams so it’s important to understand who are they and what role each one of them plays. Other teams comprise of Dev (Front end, backend), QA, Design, Marketing, Revenue/category, Customer support, Legal, Security and others. Set up time with people from these teams and understand what they do to learn from them.
Once you start executing,
- Understand the problem you are solving for before jumping on the solution. This is very important! Very tempting not to do it because we want to do something quickly to get our hands dirty.
- Define the goal upfront and keep questioning yourself/take feedback on whether the goal is being met with the proposed solutions.
- Share your thought process with people around — This helps in refining your own thought process further because when you start thinking about defining a problem and a solution in a way that you can explain it to others, it helps you bring clarity.
- Keep the platform in mind for which you are solving for — Desktop is very different from Mobile, Mobile apps are very different from Mobile web, Android is very different from iOS. Also, newer platforms like WhatsApp and Voice enabled interfaces have their own unique set of challenges.
- Proactive and effective communication — This is a very critical skill being a PM because you need to explain your thought process to multiple people and across levels. Concise and clear communication becomes very important to keep everyone informed and up to date on what is going on so as to avoid any disconnects later on.
While the list is not comprehensive in terms of the skill set required to be a great PM but this will be good starting point for someone who is starting up in a PM role.
Feel free to add/critique anything, would love to hear back and chat on anything related to this.
P.S. These are my personal views and reference to Uber & Ola is just to explain the points above as I don’t really know which one works better than the other. For me personally, Uber is the preferred choice due to quick booking process and better availability of cabs.
