cin>>ProductManager
What happens when 3 smart, young and driven individuals set out to transform an industry with an app? They hire a smart, reasonably young and driven product manager i.e., ME, to help them with it (and I would like to believe I am all 3 of those simply because of the fact that the lack of that belief creates an existential crisis for me). And what happens when that product manager joins the company? He blogs! Product Management can wait for now..
The first few days were not all that exciting. I mean, who enjoys the work involved in trying to increase the ‘on-time delivery performance’ metric of your local lunch-guy (mine is Vijay, in case you were curious). Or the market research involved in getting sugar-free coffee which is still not easily ‘obtain-able’ in Bangalore no matter how much you hear about people becoming health-conscious in the cosmopolitan city. And don’t even get me started on all the young people smoking around those places where it is available..ugh..I’ll leave that for another day.
After fighting through all of that and having a few discussions with the product team (which is essentially the development team today) at Pulse, I can now claim to have an understanding of where the team stands with respect to building products. We are just like any other early-stage startup — a couple of well-thought out features that addresses the core-functionality and a lot of ancillary tabs that were built ‘quickly’ (keeping the sacrosanct Lean Startup philosophy in mind). There is also a feature that is simply ‘hanging-around’, feeling lost. It was built so fast that it has more in common with a premature baby than a feature. Should I work on that first then? Sure, it is on life-support now but a few weeks of effort and it could add to the core value proposition of the product. The great thing about writing is that you can leave questions like this alone and make it read like a profound philosophical masterpiece - to work or not to work! I, on the other hand, have to go back and answer these questions if I want to have a shot at continuing to call myself a PM at Pulse.
So here’s how I plan to answer them:
1. Define business objectives with priorities for the next 3 months.
2. Review existing features vis-a-vis the business objectives via metrics.
3. Roll-out MVPs to fill in the gaps between existing features and business objectives.
Simple, clean and easy it reads. The devil, though, is always in the details and the first devil I encountered is metrics. The first order of business then is to set up relevant dashboards to track improvements which is where my efforts will be going in the coming week along with the optimisation for the other key metric of Vijay. Something tells me that it is going to be a constant battle with Vijay’s metric and not something I can ‘standardise’ and forget. Who knows? I may eventually automate the messages and calls to him with a CRM tool.
It sure looks like an exciting journey ahead and I hope everyone switches to sugar-free coffee somewhere along the way.
