I was listening to a recent podcast by Think School ® with Amit Jain and among many insights, this one about evaluating senior leadership candidates for hiring stood out —

When assessing a candidate for a senior leadership role, he emphasized the importance of identifying true leaders who inspire their teams, rather than relying on fear-based management.

Amit Jain suggested that interviewers should focus on understanding the career progression of the candidate’s former subordinates. A good leader will have mentored and inspired their team members, leading to successful career advancements. Despite not being in regular contact, impactful leaders often maintain some level of connection with their previous subordinates, who value the significant contributions made to their professional growth.

This approach highlights the lasting influence of exceptional leaders and their ability to foster long-term professional relationships.

Do you agree?

Link to the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eRkhcGny

P.P.S. In another news, I am thrilled to announce that I am now offering career guidance, 1:1 mentorship, resume review, mock interviews among other services as a product expert through my Topmate page!
Visit my topmate page to see the list of services that I have to offer or, click here to book a 15-min discovery call for free.

I had started writing about my learnings being a Product Manager after I completed a year of being one. At that time I had thought I’d write this every year.

Well then, procrastination took over and rest, as they say is history!

Picking it back up after another milestone year (and hoping I write more regularly now on), here are my top 5 learnings through these years —

1. 50% of a product manager’s learning happens at work and the rest 50% from the time invested in learning outside work

We often get so involved with our work-related deliverables that we don’t prioritise outside work learning. However, I’ve observed that consuming content unrelated to work (reading/listening about different industries, new technologies in all spaces) brings a fresh perspective to work that leads to innovative ideas and solutions.

Here’s how it works: Our current scope of work is always in the back of our minds and while consuming content such as how a new technology would change the world or how a particular strategy did/didn’t work for a company, we’re able to relate this subconsciously to our current work through a chain of ideas and there comes the lightbulb moment!

How to do it?
Start with a few highly recommended newsletters and podcasts such as The Ken, The Pragmatic Engineer, The Hard Copy, Lenny’s Newsletter & Podcast, The Product Podcast.

To begin with, one should slot 15–30 min daily into one’s existing schedule. What has worked for me is to slot 30-min reading in the morning while having breakfast.

2. Measure, measure, measure

If one is asked about the importance of data in the organisation, everyone would say it’s very important. However, when it comes to execution, this statement remains mostly as lip-service.

In the whirlwind of investors looking for stellar features, the sales team pursuing million-dollar clients, and a PM gunning to release feature after feature to get that coveted higher rating, we often overlook the fact that we’ve amassed numerous features with unknown impact.

The subsequent challenge arises when investors, the sales team, and company management seek impact and profitability, but the path appears elusive. This is due to accumulating features that we hesitate to retire, having invested considerable time and resources, resulting in an overly complex and unscalable product.

Hence, to define why we are building a feature/product is more important than building the feature/product itself.

How to do it?
a. Pre-development stage: Spend significant time on understanding the problem that we are trying to solve and estimate the impact for the same.

b. Product development stage: Dedicate time to constructing sample funnels for impact measurement, utilising established tools like Mixpanel, Zoho Analytics, or Google Analytics.

c. Post-development: After shipping the feature/product, promptly assess data and funnels within 2 days to ensure tracking accuracy. Then, iterate measurements weekly. Draw insights, form hypotheses, and make iterative changes. Continuously measure impact to definitively determine whether to proceed or revert.

While exceptions exist, particularly for nascent startups or features tied to external factors, embedding a culture of continuous measurement from the outset remains crucial.

3. Make time for Deep Work

I had mentioned this briefly in my previous article. Yet, this deserves a mention even after 5 years because this is the single biggest reason why some PMs are not able to achieve the desirable results.

Despite being constantly pulled in multiple directions, setting aside daily focused work blocks is imperative to ensure the quality of user research, design feedback, PRDs, and data analysis. Otherwise, these tasks are relegated to a perpetual fire-fighting mode, resulting in the bare minimum being accomplished.

While most meetings PMs are required to attend are related to projects they lead, allocating equal importance to focused, time-boxed deep work is essential.

How to do it?
Prioritise ruthlessly and communicate clearly. For example, respond to each Slack notification with consideration for the context switch between deep work and quick replies.

4. The Cost of a Buggy Release is Usually Higher than the ROI from Releasing it Sooner

If product managers would’ve earned a dime each time they’re pushed to release a feature on a certain date, they would’ve earned a hefty side income!

Jokes aside, being pressured for a deadline can stem from external factors or artificially induced urgency. Regardless, it’s crucial to recognize that thorough testing before release outweighs meeting deadlines.

First, we’re placing the responsibility on users to encounter and report bugs. However, consider this from a user’s perspective: encountering a buggy product or feature often leads to frustration, not immediate reporting. Thus, the user who does report a bug is either deeply dissatisfied or exceptionally loyal. While cultivating unconditional user loyalty is challenging, the consequences of disgruntled users can be severe.

Secondly, the turnaround time for resolving production bugs is typically longer. Bugs detected in lower environments can be swiftly addressed by developers and tested. However, when a bug is reported in production, there’s a delay between user notification and the development team’s awareness. Subsequently, the QA team conducts a sanity test, followed by code merging and other release activities.

Now, don’t misunderstand my stance — I firmly believe in the ‘fail fast, fail often’ philosophy. However, it should be reserved for experimental features and not serve as an excuse to compromise on quality.

How to do it?
First, closely monitor the project and anticipate any potential delays. Proactively manage these delays by unblocking the team, escalating for resolutions, or adjusting scope as necessary.

Second, while maintaining the focus on timely feature releases, also recognize the true drawbacks of prioritising quality over meeting deadlines. Clearly communicate these trade-offs to management when advocating for quality-focused decisions.

5. Failures are personal and successes are for the team

I’m sure you’ve read this everywhere and this is no new information. However, as a product manager, I cannot overemphasise its importance.

As a product manager, owning the product end-to-end entails bearing responsibility for any shortcomings within teams. While the direct accountability rests with the respective teams, the PM is indirectly answerable. Although failures aren’t solely their fault, PMs often shoulder the responsibility, which can feel personally challenging, especially after investing substantial time and effort into a project.

On the flip side, when a product flourishes, it’s the result of collective effort from developers, designers, marketers, salespeople, and others. While the product manager crucially orchestrates the process and maintains alignment with the overarching vision, success isn’t achieved in isolation. It’s the culmination of the team’s collaborative spirit, unwavering dedication, and collective expertise.

Navigating this balance is undoubtedly challenging for PMs, yet good ones exhibit resilience in the face of setbacks. They willingly accept accountability for failures while also recognizing and appreciating the invaluable contributions of their team members.

How to do it?
Well for this, nothing other than practising this for every new product/feature release and gradually internalising it.

P.S. In this world full of GPT-generated content, this is 100% original. (~_^)

Hit that clap icon below if you found this helpful. And drop your comment(s), I would love to know your thoughts.

P.P.S. In another news, I am thrilled to announce that I am now offering career guidance, 1:1 mentorship, resume review, mock interviews among other services as a product expert through my Topmate page!
Visit my topmate page to see the list of services that I have to offer or, click here to book a 15-min discovery call for free.

How does it feel to want something in life, getting it the harder way and then living with it? Surreal, isn’t it? I wanted to be a Product Manager (the backstory of why & how is a story for another time) and today I complete a year of being one.

How do I feel? It’s a mixed bag of emotions. This one year has been full of learnings, some of which I want to share.

1. To establish accountability, do your homework well!

As a Product Manager, the entire system depends on how thorough your research is. Hence, it’s important to invest time in first understanding the requirements yourself, only then will you be able to steer the project in the right direction. If you do this right in the beginning, you’ll find a lot more time in hand because then you won’t be attending meetings and/or calls for discussions you could’ve preempted.

This is additionally important as it addresses one of the biggest challenges for a PM, i.e., getting work done by a team that doesn’t report to you. Only when the team trusts you to provide complete and correct information, can you fix accountability on each member to deliver their part. Accountability is essential in ensuring all parts move together in the right direction and in eliminating confusion and diffusion of responsibility.

Documenting discussions crisply in emails and Jira tickets (or whatever you use for project management) comes in handy here.

2. Be a hard taskmaster while displaying empathy

I learnt the hard way that being miss goody two shoes doesn’t always help and you cannot keep everyone happy all the time. In the interest of product roadmap delivery (the primary KRA for a PM), you have to sometimes take hard calls and push people to get work done and at times to meet unreasonable time constraints. However, the most important thing here is empathy. The team needs to know that you’re there for them and you appreciate their work.

Engineers, I’ve felt, are not as expressive or chatty as others and connecting with them personally is a great way of understanding their problems. A one-to-one connect really goes a long way.

Once one of my engineers was working on a big feature all by himself and it was taking him a lot of time to fix certain bugs in the end. Because we shared a great rapport, he was able to tell me that he’d gotten bored of working on it and hence, he’d need a break. Thankfully, it was not urgent at that moment and I could delay it by a day or two. I then prioritized another small interesting feature for him for the next two days. And, because he took a break, he was able to look at the previous feature with a fresh mind.

If you were to take one learning from this article, it should be this!

3. Delegate work (Keep learning along the way)

A PM is expected to potentially know everything about the project. Even though I know pretty much about my product (or so I think), very often I am expected to provide a solution to a problem that I’m not well researched on. Earlier, I would start learning about it, which of course, would take some time. This would eventually lead to an unintentional delay in response. I later learnt to delegate solutioning to someone who would know more than me, which helped with faster responses. However, I would learn about it in the meantime so that I can tackle it myself the next time.

For instance, if a user is seeing some issues that I haven’t heard about, and if I’m crunched for time, I would ask the engineer to coordinate directly with the user. After he/she is done analyzing the problem, I discuss quickly to validate the solution and have him/her take it forward. However, I make a note of it for future to handle it myself.

4. Separate noise from real work (Ruthless Prioritization)

I make a task list for myself in the morning and work towards checking items off my list throughout the day. Even though I would keep busy the whole day, sometimes I wasn’t able to complete even 50% items from the list. And then would constantly feel inefficient & unproductive at the end of the day. I then realized that I was spending most of my day killing the noise, only to start another day doing it all over again. Therefore, as a PM you must bucket tasks to understand where your time is being spent, in order to accomplish real tasks that add value.

The below quote really resonated with me —

Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.
― Greg Mckeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

5. Beware of Energy Vampires

Finally, because the PM is the focal point of the entire system, he/she is subjected to multiple conversations with different people throughout the day. And you might be mindlessly expending your energy with the energy suckers who suck time and enthusiasm out of you without providing value in return. Hence, it’s important to quickly reflect on each conversation and your energy levels later.

Think about the time you were in a productive conversation, and now think about your energy levels after that. I’m sure you would’ve felt energetic and accomplished. That’s the feeling I’m talking about!

In all meetings, keep two things in mind:

a. Keep a razor-sharp focus on the meeting agenda

b. Time-box every meeting

It’s been just a year and I already feel I’ve unlearned and learned so much, with so much more to learn.

P.S: This is my first medium article, finishing this has rekindled the joy of writing in me and I shall be back with another one soon!

Hit that clap icon below if you found this helpful. And drop your comment(s), I would love to know your thoughts.

P.P.S. In another news, I am thrilled to announce that I am now offering career guidance, 1:1 mentorship, resume review, mock interviews among other services as a product expert through my Topmate page!
Visit my topmate page to see the list of services that I have to offer or, click here to book a 15-min discovery call for free.