10 Things I learned the hard way in Product Management

As someone new to the product management role, here are few points that I have learned over time and jotted down for the product management community to benefit from —

1. No one is against you, everyone is on their OWN SIDE — There will always be difference of opinion and that too almost on daily basis. And when you’re new to product management, you might feel overwhelmed in these situations. But just take a step back and try to see that everyone is fighting their own battles. The designer is just trying to design the best user experience for the users, the engineer is just trying to develop a robust code he can be proud of, and the QA is just trying to ship a bug-free product. So, LISTEN to their side of the story before you get all baffled up. This has helped me immensely in being empathetic towards others and having open mind to the feedback I receive on day to day basis.
2. Execute, execute, EXECUTE— If you’re just starting your career in product management, then it’s possible that you’ll hesitate to execute. I vividly remember when I joined Pratilipi, I took almost a month to analyse the data and then came up with the idea of just an extra button on the website. Even though I had hundred other ideas, I went ahead with the safest one, which obviously was not a genius idea. It took me months to overcome that hesitation and it’s very important that you overcome this at a very early stage before it becomes a part of your work-style. As someone wise said “Overthinking/over-analyzing by default means under-doing”. When you execute, you learn hundreds of the ways that don’t work and this will help you in coming up the ideas that will actually work.
3. STAY unbiased — YOU are the person who has the ability to fool you the most. Be mindful that you’re not fooling yourself, biased-ness has the ability to take you down. If you’re biased with ideas, you might be shipping the features no-one wants. If you’re biased with people, you might be just listening to the PEOPLE and not the IDEAS. Be conscious of the decisions you’re taking, have a logical reasoning behind each and every one of them.
4. LEARN TO LEARN on the fly — In the beginning of my career in product management, whenever I heard something I didn’t know about, I used to note that down and used to think that I’ll read about it later. But that later never comes. As a product manager, you work with the experts and hence have the opportunity to learn things from the professionals everyday. Whenever you hear something you don’t know about, ask questions. This way you’ll learn a little bit of business, design and development everyday.
5. HAVE and GIVE a sense of PURPOSE — Create goals, not tasks. Set a goal for yourself and for your team. Even when an engineer changes the text of a button, he should feel that he is helping the company reach 1 million content reads/day. Even when you create a Jira task, you should feel like you’re going one step closer to having that 5X organic installs per day. This will increase your product velocity in unimaginable ways.
6. MEASURE your own GROWTH — As most of us will agree, product management is not the type of a job where you get immediate results and hence the numbers will not always be there to show whether you’re growing or not. So, be mindful that you’re not making the same type of mistakes you made last week, and you’re not struggling with the same issues you struggled last week. Use your previous learnings in ideating new experiments, and keep a check that your hypothesises are improving.
7. MINIMIZE your presumptions — Whenever building hypothesises, it’s very very natural to think that this will definitely work (or won’t work). We try the experiments we think will work but never execute the ones we PRESUME won’t work. It is very important to test all your hypothesises at least at the beginning of your career. With time, you might get a little bit of product intuition and your old hypothesis experiments will help you filter out the shitty ideas. It is better to say that it didn’t work than saying I thought it won’t work.
8. KNOW your technology — I can’t stress this enough. If one thing I could change about my product management career until now, it would be to go back in time and understand the tech better. Here is a brilliant article on how to go about for understanding tech — Getting to “technical enough” as a product manager. Better understanding of tech will help you plan your features/experiments better, but more importantly this will bridge the gap between your engineers and you otherwise you’ll be asking for some non-feasible features to be built and the engineers will keep believing that you don’t know shit what’re talking about.
9. PICK your battles wisely — Be very wise in choosing what things to work on. As I learned from my CEO, taking up a task should be decided on the basis of 3 criteria — effort that particular task requires to get done, probability of that task being successful and the potential ROI that can be expected from that task. Pick the low hanging fruits first. In the end, it’s not about how complex the engineering problem you solved was, or what complex UI you have build. It’s all about moving that metric.
10. Learn to be OKAY with FAILURE — This is probably the best thing product management has taught me. Your 5 experiments will fail, before that one experiment is successful. But failing is when I assess myself brutally and find where exactly I was lagging. Turn the self-doubts into learning opportunities and this inevitable situation of failure will teach you to get your shit together and bounce back.

Here’s to becoming a little bit better product manager everyday, and shipping amazing products! Cheers!