Crossing into the 0-to-1 Product Track

Let me convince you why should you listen to me!

I did not build my career as a product management specialist neither did I rise through the ranks from an IC PM to a product leader. I would call myself a ‘lateral entrant’ having worked at the intersection of business problems/opportunities and product strategy and development throughout my 13 year career. I am a happenstance product leader and I continue to learn my craft 'on the job'.

I got fascinated by start-up when I was an undergrad student. The stories of the likes of Facebook, Google, inMobi, Flipkart became incredible source of inspiration and I knew I had to be part of it someway. The earliest experiences came to me in the form of writing business plans while still studying and one of those business plans being good enough to get some seed funding and that’s how I founded Kidovators, an edtech startup that I ran for 8+ years.

What I learnt during my entrepreneurial journey was that I am a vision type of person and a (product) builder. The whole journey of dissecting problem and user needs towards building effective solutions continue to come naturally to me. It is also something I enjoy a lot! While I was a jack-of-all-trades at Kidovators ranging from driving sales to customer support, what I enjoyed most was building the product as the de-facto product head working closely with designers and engineers. Our product found decent traction with almost 150k MAUs.

Post those early formative years (my 20s), I spent a couple of years at a non-profit (GAME) where I focused on building strategic products and initiatives for small business owners. One of those was an accelerator program for small business owners who saw collective sales increase of over USD 7Mn and 300+ direct jobs created within a year of the program despite covid adversely affecting them. While I was at GAME, I got asked by a $300mn+ AUM VC fund to drive the digital transformation of one their portfolio companies with a 1500+ member team and $40mn+ ARR but no product (as their CPO). Here I built and led a team from scratch across product and engineering. I was able to fold multiple business lines from services into a dedicated product experience in less than 10 months that got the company closer to its intended goals.

Post completion of this assignment, I landed in my current role to drive product at a UK-based Series A edtech startup Virtual Internships. I came here as the first technology leader building the technology team grounds up and launching the MVP in 5 months.

In 2021, when I took my first dedicated product leadership role, I accelerated across 3 counts:

• Reading the most impactful product, business and strategy books - Why Books? The best books are the most well-packaged, most well-written, reviews and edited form of seminal information. Probably only research papers score higher in the process of what it takes to publish
• Consuming very diverse content across podcasts, videos, blogs/newsletters, research papers everyday diligently - This layer fills your day to day learning quota with actionable insights and content being the most useful (some great examples include continuously updated content such as Lenny's Podcast, Elena Verna's Growth Scoop Newsletter and Shreyas Doshi on Twitter - now an Almanac, as well as one time seminal pieces like this Paper on Heuristics and Biases by Daniel Kahnemann & Amos Tversky, this Post on PMF by Marc Andressen, and this Post on Starting up by Paul Graham) among many, many others that I read regularly. The reading has only accelerated over time as I continue realising how little I really know and how much is there to know out there
• Learning from the best product & growth experts around the world - There is an incredible set of experts sharing their learnings, expertise painstakingly. The best thing one can do here is consume this content regularly. It is actionable, thought-provoking and challenging to your current norms and beliefs. This would not have been possible even 5 years back but thanks to an exponential set of experts willing to share what they have learnt over their careers, you have a treasure trove to continue expanding your knowledge.

If you are someone who is:

• looking to break into your first Product role
• making the journey from an IC to product leadership roles
• navigating the product leadership journey including building teams and culture
• wanting to move to a product role from another department where you have made your career so far
• building 0 to 1 products
• introducing product-led growth & sales in traditional setups

you will find value in what I share and it will be additive to your journeys.

What I will be sharing with you are my experiences and experiments, things I do and have done to get better at my job, skills, behaviours and traits needed for what you want, the best collection of resources, thoughts around building and growing products grounds up, operating in a product setup in a start-up environment and much more.

Stay tuned in 2024 and do subscribe if you think any of what I have said above i of value to you. I would love to get your questions / feedback either on [email protected] or on my Linkedin DM. Here’s wishing you a year of great learning and growth in 2024.