Perspective is debatable, Experience is “similar” but “NOT congruent”& Realizations are common as they are absolute truths
UBS forum conducted Product Management meetup, for which I prepared 1 week before, below are few points covering all “Perspective, Experience & Realizations”.
1) Predicting the Future: Evolving Role of PM by “Principal Group PM of Microsoft”
- Those who don’t have a strong sales strategy must focus on building product that lead to user Acquisition, Growth, and engagement by users themselves.
- It’s a decade problem “Consensus”, “Effective Prioritization” which will continue to exists.
- Future of PM lies in “Experimentation Mindset”, And Validating every hypothesis via a/b testing.
- AI will not replace PM but empower us to delegate our routine. (GPT-3, Dall E etc)
2) Path To become Chief Product Officer by “Associate Director of Products of BYJU’S”
- There is no straight way to become CPO, its often years of effort, doing your “Karma” building product & slow progress (getting promotions).
- Sometimes if that 1 product/feature was a huge success due to viral or some reason then surely you get promoted but not directly to a CPO.
- 1 great insight was PM focuses on building a product, if It goes viral then its win for PM as well. Consider it luck.
3) Product Led Growth through Gamification (Awesome) by “VP of Products of GamesKraft”
- Among so many competitors if a product grabs “share of attention” of the user, then it will lead to grab “share of time”, which leads to User engagement which in turns captures a share of their mind, repeatedly capturing a “share of mind” will lead to monetization on the product.
- How do you Gamify? By Defining business objective, User behavior, User cohort, Activity loops and never forget the fun part. Example:?Google fit not many use it, but Pokémon Go, SSG gamified the experience
- Don’t enforce Gamification, wherever its not needed.
- Gamification in legacy products is very hard.
4) Product Mapping to support Business with Commercialization by “Director of Products, Walmart”
- Focus on research, business goal alignment, and conceptualization than Solutioning.
- The case study of Logistic & the wireframes gave better clarity.
- Without Data PM, is blind
- Often focus is on Researching but User journey, Segmentation all need to be looked into
- User behavior is never the same. Example:?Walmart ONCE created 2 websites with exactly the same UI/UX, for B2B & B2C but on both websites, they saw different USER journeys due to different User needs, and user behavior.
5) Defining Toolkit for Future PMs by “Senior Director of Products of Publicis Sapient”
- Toolkit: PM must have Customer centricity, Data & tech Aptitude, and Agile. Adding to it is the “Strategic, Business Acumen etc”
- PM must be jack of all trades but a master of none.
- I learnt a lot of deep insight & Philosophical insight share by Publics sapience in below Panel discussion due to his past Project Management Experience
6) Panel discussion: Product manager (PM) vs Project management (PRM)
- It consisted of 6 panels members headed by Piyush Khanna asking deep questions PM is Problem solving/Customer pain point management, PRM is more internal stakeholder management.
- PM has slight control on Internal stakeholders but PRM has highest control even though the Internal team don’t directly report to PRM. (I mean Reporting Manager and PRM different)
- PMs are always in chaos, but PRM are always methodical moving STEP-by-SETP process
- PM need to think for feeling of the Customer but PRM need to think about “Fear of things going wrong”
- PRM existed before but PM specialization came afterward due to increasing complexity in IT.
Insightful example by “Senior Director of Products, PayPal
Piyush added a insightful example : If lets say PayPal office is relocating from Electronic city to Chikkakannalli. Then in a PRM interview, PRM must know and think about “What an all things can go wrong” but during PM interview expectation is PM must ask “Why are we doing this. What purpose are we fulfilling Both have a different mindset.
7) Effectiveness of AI/ML in PM by “Senior Director of Products of CISCO”
- AI/ML will have helpful impact on the PM job.
- Few of the case study to which I am deeply astonished are
- Twitter created AI/ML bots to tweet back to real users, and in after few hours the Bots started replying with Abusive words as it learnt the way real users behave.
- Amazon to hire best Talents, used AI/ML to analyze the top creamy layer candidate and found AI/ML being biased more towards one gender. From 1 & 2 conclusion is that AI/ML need supervision at time to time.
- Lil Miquela an AI/ML Influencer has 1M subscribers on Insta and she is a complete digital content creator. Not a real person. (Now that was mind-blowing. Hope Arnold/Will smith will save us.)
- Current AI/ML is currently in Supervised learning but soon future will turn to Unsupervised AI/Ml similar to how a kid is constantly supervised in childhood days but later once he leaves home you can’t check on him.
8) Having power to Understand Customers by “Head of Product of OLA”?
- (Best advice) : Don’t be always dependent on Sales, Customer success, presale to understand customer data points. Try doing survey by speaking directly to them once in a week to understand the customers pain points.
- Question asked to customer directly will not tell their pain points, but rather deep diving in will.
- Never take in customers advice or solution. Focus on customer pain points ****
9) Hypothesis to experimentation (A/B testing) approach by “Director of Products of Tata CLiQ”
- A/B testing is double edge sword
- Sometime gut feeling/intuition is the solution and not always being dependent on A/B testing.(This is best line).
- One of google designer resigned just because of GOOGLE doing A/B testing for a small color, doesn’t make sense.
10) Bringing the culture of Prioritization, Collaboration & Agility by “Senior Director of Products of Meesho”
- Agility?= Velocity + Changing direction
- Prioritization: It is a mindset. It’s best advice to know that sometimes even after using the RICE, IMPACT, etc. prioritization model one might have to turn some feature P1 due to Business needs. And not to act like AMAZON where they Prioritize 1yr before what they will work on.
- Collaboration: Most conflicts happen because people are not aligned to common objectives like PM is for building his features, Engg manager for his team members bandwidth… but end of day objective is to Build for the customer. A little appreciation to internal stakeholders like Engg team for what they build strengthen the relationship. Many times UX designer apporach PM to talk to Engg as if PM mediator. This mindset must change which PM can push towards.
11) Strategic insight: Is PM a mini CEO by “Director of Products Flipkart”
- CEO holds/Impact the STOCKs, PM don’t.
- One can’t fire CEO easily as investor stand behind him, PM can be fired.
- CEO?has responsibilities across various functions. Product managers don’t worry about culture, hiring, sales or?marketing.
- In Most company CEO even though an employee but is Owner of the company, PM is the employee.
- PM can learn from CEO the strategic thinking, business acumen etc.
12) Case study: How to build a Go-to-Market Strategy by “Senior Director of Products - Samsung Electronics”
- Product evolves over time : Example: The creator of Bubble wrapper made the product first as a wallpaper but eventually one day IBM suggested using it for handling electronic equipment
- Mouth washer was first used as a floor cleaner it
- First electric cars were created during the era of Henry ford but were crushed by Cars function on Fuels. That era was different thus it required Cars functioning on fuels whereas the current ERA is different which requires Electric cars.
- A/B testing must be done in similar problems to compare and not in an order
- Awareness about the product is a must else Users will use it for a different purpose Example: Initially Samsung created the washine machine & after pushing it into market got to know people from Punjab using it of Lassi .
13) Panel discussion: Design thinking
- It helps convert the business thinking more towards a Customer thinking.
- Traditional problem-solving often takes a methodical, almost scientific form, but design thinking makes it human centric
My Query: Limited data points in B2B to make a decision by “Director of Products of SAP”
There is often a lot of data points one gets in a B2C company but its really hard to get the same in B2B company. What one can do to excel in B2B with limited data about customer pain point and build a strong product?
- Experimentation is one way to go
- Getting on board an Expert of that specific domain will help make products with customer centric
- In B2C you make products for 10000 + customers thus a lot of data is required to even proceed with, but in B2B you customer base is just 100+ customer at max, so focus on 10-20+ customer to gather data points.
- Look at other domains to get the experience
Valuable experience shared for PMs in early stage of career by “Head of Products” of Samsung Ads
- Generally PMs, think himself from a USER perspective while building a product. But he fails to think from different users perspective. The Problem research gets limited to what he as a user is thinking.
- PMs must not always look at the competitors features and start building things, as sometimes there context of having had built something will be different which might not fit with your own product.
- Just by accessing 18-20 USERs and building for 1-5million users is a wrong approach.
Head PMs mantra while HIRING : (Helping aspiring APM, PMs)
- Hunger for knowledge ( Hope all this above content makes me right fit ?? )
- Empathetic/ Customer centric thinking
- Analytics skills
- Prioritization skills
- For Financial Domain Head PM , domain knowledge is a must.
CISCO PM said (for people trying to get into CISCO :)
- Ability to Articulate clearly
- He/She must be aware about “What things he/she bring unto the table”
- Pallavi doesn't really focus so much on Domain knowledge
Would Love to hear your comments on what you liked….
