A day in the life of an APM @ Flipkart
Understanding a Product Manager’s day to day job can be difficult, specially if one has never done it. Although the nature of the role is very dynamic, there is a method to this madness. To put this in perspective, I will take you through the journey of a single product that I worked on, right from its inception to its launch. It can be used as a reference to extrapolate a typical day for a PM who would usually be working on multiple products simultaneously.
A little background: I am currently working on Digital Value Added Service products like warranty, buyback and protection plans etc. for categories like Mobile, Large Appliances and Electronics.
My time for the day is usually divided into the following four buckets. The proportion of time can however vary depending on the stage of the product life-cycle that the product is in.
- Discovery and Ideation
A PM’s most critical job is to find out the right problems to solve. Data and customers are usually her two dearest friends in this phase.
While some of our products for Mobile category were maturing, we did not have much presence in another fast growing category ‘Large Appliances’. Hence, there was a dearth of data to draw insights and build the right product for customers. So we worked closely with our business team to conduct a market research, followed by customer interviews. Through these interviews, we understood our customers, their context, their concerns and pain points when they buy a Large Appliance from the platform.
Once the research concluded, I started putting together what is called as a PRD. A PRD clearly defines the specifications of how the product should be built and is the guiding document for taking any key product decisions. It also lays out the roadmap for the product, identifies dependencies on other teams along with the product’s success criteria.
Key skills: Problem Solving, Vision, Customer Empathy, Data Analysis
2. Planning
This phase is important for a PM to prioritise the most critical problems from a bunch of problems that she might have at hand. It would typically take into account the resources, tech capabilities, budgets and certain other constraints.
This phase involved a lot of juggling with multiple teams (who were identified in the previous phase) to ensure that our product is prioritised for execution in each of those teams. During this cycle, the team could be stuck in continuous meetings with the leadership or other stakeholders and presenting the potential impact of the project and its roadmap. Although the continuous back and forth can sometimes appear to slow things down but the importance of this phase is paramount.
Key Skills: Communication, Negotiation, Influencing
3. Execution
After the groundwork of ideation and planning is done, a PM goes with full force to build the product. This phase involves working closely with everyone and bringing them together to ensure that the product sees the light of the day.
In this phase, I was working closely with the engineering team, taking them through the detailed product requirements. On other days, I could be making wireframes and working with designers to build the right visual experience of the product. This phase involved working together to resolve any roadblocks that might come up and track the progress of development. Since our product had dependencies on few other teams also, we were doing multiple follow-ups and monitoring progress with them as well.
Key Skills: Execution rigour, Collaboration, Stakeholder Management
4. Launch and Monitor:
Once the product is tested and launched, the PM’s job is to closely monitor the metrics and make ensure everything is working fine, with no major customer issues.
As the build cycle was nearing its end, we were preparing with the Business team for the launch of the product. We needed to make sure the data tracking for the product is in place and the product is tested end to end. There were few bugs that came up after the product went live, so we worked with the engineers and customer support team to make sure those were fixed. Simultaneously, we were also gauging the performance metrics on a daily basis and working with the analytics team to ensure the integrity of the data.
Key Skills: Stakeholder Management, Storytelling, Data analysis
A product’s journey is never finished with the first version of the product. Good product managers will continuously iterate to ship out the best product for customers.
To sum it up, as Ben Horowitz says in his classic article on Good PM/Bad PM: “Product Managers are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails”.
Credits: As an APM and being fairly young into the organisation, I had immense support from my colleagues and everyone involved during the course of launching this product and I am grateful to them.
