Building a foundation in design, business and tech: My journey
The “why” behind the quest
While I was trying to build my own startup, Trustio, in 2016, I realised that I had few hard skills.
There is a reason for that.
When I was in class 10th, I had a different realisation. I realised I needed to work hard on my soft skills. I did have a knack for leadership from early school life, but overall needed to learn a lot in terms of working with people around me. Humble acceptance, I fluctuated between being an asshole and a pushover.
When I entered college in 2010, I made it my #1 goal to develop my overall personality, and improve my soft skills.
By the end of 2015, I would like to believe that I had succeeded in building a more well-rounded personality. The deep focus on improving people management skills, interpersonal communication skills, negotiation skills, listening/articulation skills and a few more had paid off. As I kept getting better with people around me, I kept getting more and more leadership roles. In most of my roles, I was never expected to make major individual contributions. I was supposed to “manage” things — people, situations, finances, reputation, everything. The only other thing I probably did was to “present” or “articulate” my thoughts, ideas and expectations to people around me, who in turn were supposed to implement things and get back to me with results/feedback.
As a result, I kept improving even further. And the more I improved, more I was supposed to be removed from “implementation” and engage with “management”. This cycle kept going on till the end of 2015 (graduated in June 2014 and worked for 1.5 years) and soon I started viewing myself just as others viewed me — ready to be an entrepreneur.
However, this focus on improving soft skills for 6 long years had one major drawback— lack of hard skills.
This hit me hard when I started Trustio. There was so little I knew about anything. I could pitch to investors/incubators/accelerators, get the cofounders to leave their jobs and join me, get mentors/partners/vendors and be a public evangelist of the startup. But that was the extent of my skills.
When I joined SlicePay as a Product Manager in Jan 2017, I decided to change that.
You can read about my experience Building products at SlicePay here.
After some introspection, I realised that if I ever wanted to have a real crack at building a scalable company in my life, I should first get a handle on the art of product management.
I would define my end goal to become so good at building products that -
- I can get 1 designer, 1 android dev, 1 iOS dev and 1 backend engineering intern from a college and yet manage to build a basic product, without any help from others. This would severely reduce the cost for me to start something later and hence this is the most valuable skill set I could learn at this stage.
- I can work with a team of 20 highly qualified developers and a design team in a multinational company, yet hold my own and make genuine contributions to the product. This would free up the potential to work with the best professionals in the software world and hence faster growth due to cross-pollination.
If we are being honest to ourselves, getting to this level will take time.
So to start with, my idea was to get the foundation right and then get at least a surface level understanding of the entire product development process from start to finish. My goal was never to become an expert in every aspect, hence I went for the breadth everywhere.
This post is building that flat “hyphen” of the T-shape.
You can read my last post on Connecting the dots to product management here.
Today, there is an availability of high quality content on the internet for almost all the topics. Between Youtube, Medium, Podcasts, Coursera and eBooks, you can find sufficient information to create your own learning plan.
I have written this post to share my own learning experience. I hope that it would help aspiring product managers, as well as existing product managers, discover existing knowledge and skill sets, identify the gaps present and work on filling those specific gaps.
Before we start, if any reader wants to first get a basic understanding of what is product management, the role of an ideal product manager, skills required, etc. then I recommend reading the following high quality articles, later, in your own time -
- A product manager’s job by Josh Elman
- Minimum viable product manager by Brandon Chu
- The black box of product management by Brandon Chu
- The past and future of product management by Matt LeMay
I have also compiled an ultimate product management resource list. You can read it here.
PMs sit in the middle of these 3. Getting a foundation in all 3 would help setup a foundation for your career.
Design foundation
Since I have a natural inclination towards design, building a foundation in it was a lot of fun for me. Below you can see how I got my concepts cleared.
The first step here is to understand the role of design team in modern software companies.
Must read article: How to work with designers, by Julie Zhuo
Courses:
- Interaction Design Specialisation by UC San Diego — Coursera
This course was phenomenal. It is one of the most respected MOOCs on Coursera and really clears the basics. However, it demands attention and efforts across its 8 modules that included topics like human-centred design, social computing, user research and prototyping, information design, running and analysing design experiments and a Capstone project at the end.
Total time — 8 months (1 month approx. for each module)
Total cost — Free (as I applied for financial aid. I was doing my own startup and had 0 income)
You can read about my experience completing the Capstone project here — Reimagining the smartphone homescreen
- Multiple small courses on Interaction Design Foundation
I completed the “Gestalt Psychology and Web Design: The Ultimate Guide” course and understood the basics of visual design. I was not able to complete the other courses I enrolled in. I will not highly recommend people to do complete courses here, because it might be too in-depth for someone who is not interested in becoming a designer. But do read the blogs (which are free). It is a very high quality collection and if I were a full-time designer, I wouldn’t mind paying the subscription for continuous skill development.
Total time — Self-paced. Roughly requires 1 hour per week per course
Total cost — INR 6120 for 1 year subscription (courses are free, but available only to subscribed users)
Books:
- The design of everyday things, by Don Norman
This book is based on the basic premise that well designed products teach the users how to use them. If, as a user, you are not able to figure out how a particular product works, then it is not your fault. The product is designed wrong.
It has lots of nuggets of wisdom on designing for the user.
- Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to web usability, by Steve Krug
I read the whole book during a 2-hour flight. It is just plain common sense and talks about how users on web want self-explanatory, self-evident and obvious designs.
It will give you a good idea about the basics of usability.
- Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days, by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz
To be honest, I have not read this book cover to cover. However, I have been part of active 5 day design sprints and can personally vouch for the magical results it brings in terms of clarity across the board.
Practical training: I learnt Figma on the job and am fairly comfortable with the tool today. It is a light-weight, cloud-based substitute for Sketch. I am able to do most of my wireframing and prototyping on Figma now. Other tools I use to make life easy — Draw.io (simple mindmapping tool) and Canva (graphic designing for non-designers). Both are super easy to use and highly recommended.
You can read about my experience of Building products at SlicePay here.
Final thoughts on design foundation: I spent roughly 8–10 months on setting up a design foundation. If you are serious about getting your design foundation right, Interaction Design specialisation on Coursera is highly recommended. I loved interacting with friends who are professional designers. Watching an experienced designer work on a concept on a piece of paper and convert it into a complete product is one of the best learning experiences.
Business foundation
This was the area where I was most comfortable and at ease. I think the foundation was already set for me here. Obviously there is a lot to learn in business, but I have got the next 25 years to become a master in it.
Courses:
- Business strategy specialisation, offered by University of Virginia on Coursera
I completed the first course of this specialisation and I found it among the limited number of business courses which are NOT completely outdated, boring and incorrect in many assumptions. Do this if you have time.
Total cost: Free (as I applied for financial aid. I was doing my own startup and had 0 income)
Total time: Officially 7 months to complete 6 modules
Books:
- The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
An honest account of the hard things that you face while running a business. No fluff. Straight to the point. An awesome book to understand the world of business and the tough decisions you have to make every single day to survive in that world.
- The lean startup by Eric Ries
The book that helped inspire a 1000 startups. Its Build →Measure →Learn loop is legendary in startup circles.
The lessons from this book are common knowledge today, but it was one of the first books that talked about rethinking the ways of doing business in the modern world.
- Zero to one by Peter Thiel
One of the most respected books in the startup world. This book helps in setting the right mind map to understand how successful and profitable businesses are built. From startup foundation to inventing the future and everything in between.
Practical training: I started my career in Akosha (the same week they announced their Series A from Sequoia) in a “new initiatives” sort of role. Then I had a similar role in Zostel (joined at Seed funding stage and left at Series B stage). Post that I started Trustio — an alumni network for borrowing and investing. Even before joining SlicePay as a Product Manager, I had decent experience navigating the market and I understood the basics of business. You can read here “Why we built Trustio?”
Final thoughts on business foundation: I spent nearly 2.5 years in business related roles at early stage tech startups in India and managed to learn a lot. I didn’t particularly do any courses, however, I have read more than 25 books on business in these 2.5 years and you can see my reading list on goodreads.
Tech foundation
This was the one area where I had to work the most. And after getting comfortable with design, I tried wrapping my head around software development.
Must read article: I was lucky enough to get my hands on this wonderful article at the right time — A guide to becoming a full stack developer in 2017.
You can get access to most of the free tutorials here.
Courses:
I know that you don’t need to program to become a better product manager. However, I was so curious about software development (and insecure at the same time) that I thought about genuinely starting from 0, and building from there. I completed the Front-end section of Freecodecamp and learnt HTML, CSS and JS, along with frontend libraries like Bootstrap and jQuery. I found the Algorithmic scripting part challenging at first, but soon got the hang of it and understood the beauty of creating shorter algorithms.
Total time: Depends on your speed. Complete FCC course requires 1800 plus hours officially, but I am sure a smart person can complete it in half the time. I spent roughly 2 months, along with my day job as PM, to complete the first 3 modules (without the projects required for frontend development certificate)
Total cost: Free
I was not able to complete the rest of the FCC course because I expected something more hands-on, and something that could help me quickly create smaller projects. Since I was working full-time as a Product Manager in the meantime, I was not able to give this course as much time as I should have. However, I would highly recommend this course for college students who have more time in their hands.
This was exactly what I was looking for. Rob directly goes to practicals and gives almost nil theoretical background. He keeps speaking about how you can do x, y or z while executing the same on computer screen. Then he gives the student an open problem and requests them to pause the video and complete the assignment. Once the student is confident of his solution, he can play the video to see Rob create the whole thing right in front of you.
I will admit it was super easy, and probably not the right way to learn development. However, this is exactly what I wanted as a product manager! I didn’t need to make big projects. I just needed to understand how “anything” is ever made. And this course did that wonderfully.
Total cost: Initially used it for free from a friend’s account. But bought later for INR 600–800 (on sale at $10)
Total time: 2 months
Here are a few things that I made using Javascript, as part of this Udemy course.
This is probably one of the most well-developed courses available online. Also, the assignments and support are outstanding. A reviewer from Udacity reviews the code submitted in assignment and gives decent feedback on improving it. However, this course was more suited for freshers who want to build a career as a programmer (although this would be Level 1 of that journey).
I bought this course on an impulse during the last week of 2017, when they were offering 20% discount. However, when I bought this course, Udacity was offering it in 2 parts — FS 1 and FS 2. They seem to have revamped it now and combined both into one. I completed FS 1 and learnt about the fundamentals of database, writing SQL queries, using Git, about protocols like HTTP and REST, along with running Python on Terminal.
Total cost: INR 13463 (for only half the current course, ie Full stack 1)
Total time: 3 months
Here are 3 exercises I completed using Python, as part of this Udacity course.
The assignment on SQL was more challenging than this (for a beginner).
Books:
- Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham
You don’t need books to learn about software development, however this book is the closest thing that can help you understand the psyche of a developer, even if you have 0 understanding of technology.
I read this book in 2014, just because I am a fan of Paul Graham. It will have 0 impact on your ability to build something, but will definitely help you understand the philosophy and psychology behind software development.
Practical training: While communicating with developers at SlicePay, I learnt a lot about best practices for making builds, deploying builds, staging strategy, security risks and scalable architecture. Not to mention the learnings I had while seeing the shortcomings during handovers — design-to-tech (via product) and tech-to-product (ie release).
Final thoughts on tech foundation: I spent nearly 6 months on setting up a technology foundation. Since I am from engineering background (Mechanical Engineering), I focussed on learning actual software development, rather than understanding basic technology like “how internet works” or “how computer works”, etc. I did spent roughly INR 14000 on this and I could have easily saved the money I spent on Udacity (because my goal was not to become a developer). However, I don’t regret that decision. As a working professional, I have more money than time. And it is only natural for me to compensate one with another. Had I been a student, and as a result have more time than money, I might have learnt development from free resources.
Day-2-day product management
Now, while building a foundation in business, design and tech was great, it still didn’t help me do my day-to-day job as a PM any better. To familiarise myself quickly with Product Management, I did the following other things.
Please note that I was already a Product Manager when I started reading these books or doing these courses. This was a way for me to learn quickly on the side. These courses or books were NOT responsible for getting me into Product Management. No snake oils on my watch.
Courses:
- Agile development specialisation by University of Virginia, on Coursera
Although I did only the first course (Agile meets design thinking) in this specialisation, I think it was a very good exposure for me to understand how professional software development process works. I would recommend this course to add more lattices in your mental model.
Total time: 4 weeks
Total cost: Coursera subscription required
This one is controversial. Because it is very costly. Most product managers in the industry view these kind of courses to be robbing people of their money because product management can only be learnt in a hands-on manner.
I have different thoughts here.
I think these industry courses are a boon. They are costly and might not be best suited for college students (affordability issue) or for people who are looking for “placements” just because they paid the fees. My class (online only) had some 60 odd people I guess and almost 100% were working professionals. If you are the kind of person who cares whether you got 76 out of 100 or 83 out of 100 in a test, then you will be disappointed because this is not school. If you are the sort of person who wants someone to give you a “placement” after completing the course, you will be disappointed because this is not college.
I considered this course an average investment, with some pros and cons. I might have spent some more time on Coursera, Udemy and Youtube, and might have learnt a lot too, but I was just lazy. Remember, working professional = more money, less time. I completed this course end-to-end and I scored decent marks as well. I was also amongst the top 3 most active people in the class in terms of participation in discussion forums and asking questions/answering them. This course gave me a curated summary of everything (A to Z) about Product Management and had some really high quality videos by existing product managers and some demanding assignments. To me it felt like a crash course with lots and lots of quick and dirty exercises. It forced me to think about all aspects of product management, in a very short period of time.
Total time: 6 months
Total cost: INR 150,000 roughly
Now here is how I changed this average investment into a profitable one by hustling. After completing the course —
- I talked to the editorial team at Upgrad and got the permission to write blog posts for Upgrad. I wrote a series of 5 posts. These helped me clear my own thoughts and also build some online presence.
- Since I did well in terms of grades and was already pretty active in discussion forums, I wrote to Upgrad team to make me a grader at Upgrad. I checked assignments of other batches which started after mine. Upgrad pays you for that kind of work. I worked as a grader for 6 months, but money was not the motivation here (it was peanuts anyway compared to the salary of a PM). The main thing I learnt by working as grader for 6 months was to understand the thought process of others who solved the same question as me. It was amazing to look at the creativity of other people. I learnt a lot from that variety — solving the same question in different ways. As a product manager, that was an enriching experience.
- I started taking live webinars on some of the more industry specific topics for Product Management enthusiasts.
Reiterating again, I don’t want to create any FOMO for these costly product management courses. If you value time more than money, then do it. Otherwise ignore. They, in themselves, will not help you get a PM job or become extremely good as a PM. Everything in life comes to those who can hustle.
Books:
- The Product Manager’s survival guide by Steven Haines
Decent book for learning the “job” aspect of product manager as well as career track.
However, I was not “wowed” by it.
I have heard that there are other books which can fit the bill. Like — The art of product management by Rich Mironov or The product book by Product school.
Since I never prepared for any product management interview, I didn’t read any of the interview books. But I have heard that Decode and Conquer by Lewis C. Lin and Cracking the PM interview by Gayle Laakmaan McDowell are actually awesome.
Practical training: SlicePay was my first official job as a Product manager. You can read more about my experience and learnings “Building products at SlicePay”. However, unofficially, I have been involved with building products for quite some time and you can read “Connecting the dots to product management” for that.
Final thoughts on day-2-day product management: It is true that no matter what you learn in books, podcasts, videos or courses, the real learning in product management will happen on the job. However, unless you are working under an experienced PM, it will take you a lot of time to get better at Product Management if there is nobody to teach you about it at the workplace (as was my case at SlicePay).
It took me a considerable time to write this article.
It helped me in consolidating my own thoughts and remembering the journey of the last 22 months.
Hope it helped you too.
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