The Journey, Path to Progress !!!
Rupesh Kumar
EMBA Student @ Emory Goizueta Business School | Life long Learner & Listener | Curious Mind | Building Cloud Security Solutions using Agentic AI and Solving End User Problems | Passionate about Fitness - Body n Mind
The Journey from Engineering Leader to Product Person?
"Journey of 1000 miles :)"?
Continuing my last message of “Training Your Mind Like You Train Your Child.”
“You are imperfect, wired for struggle, but worthy of love and belonging.”?
I am an Engineering Leader getting transformed into a Product Leader and the journey is so Enticing that the more I am learning it, the more I am in love and passionate about this Marathon !!!
I will start with a thank you note to my mentor and guide who gave me a chance to be in the Product Marathon, Thank you for everything. You don't know how this opportunity transformed my complete career and mindset !!!
Now the Journey !!!
When I got a chance after working as a Cloud Engineering Leader to join the Product Management Field, I started with a growth mindset. However, there is always a surprise waiting for you.?
Being a Leader doesn’t mean that you know everything and that was the case with me. I then started with a “Day Zero”. I started my struggle of learning from scratch the science behind “Product Management”. I started with learning and writing Stories/Epics of Product features and functionality. However, I had the feeling that there is much more beyond this.
Everyone in this world is busy handling his own set of tasks and responsibilities and then I landed up in the team knowing nothing more about Product and the science behind it. I got the opportunity to grow in this space and I prepared my mind and told myself? “Challenge Accepted” To date every day is a new challenge for me.?
However, I learned one thing, people will have lots of expectations but learning new aspects of the Product and Technology takes its own sweet time. Life is a Marathon and not a sprint we have to play and win every day.
Slowly and gradually I started with the Day Zero mindset, I started gelling with my colleagues and started learning from them. All concepts, and keywords were new to me and I was putting all my effort into learning about-
In my mind, the curiosity to learn more had been piling up and one day I decided to take a dig at it. I started to learn more about how I could be better at the Product Management Role.
One of my neighbors who is a Product Engineering Leader in one of the Leading Technology Companies advised me to take a course in Product Management from Kellogs North Western University.
Without delaying further, I started learning more about the course and got admitted there. I started to invest in myself as in one of the books I was reading, I learned that a person should always invest 3% of his earnings in himself to keep learning and growing and that’s how one succeeds and grows in life.
I learned a lot from that Product Management Course however I felt a lot more that can be learned further in this field. I felt that I was just starting on it. So I started exploring further and then I started building the habit of Learning and Growing
Then I? started exploring other options of further learning in Product Management and I had this notion to go for an Executive MBA in Management and Technology. As I am living in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, I thought that I am having the privilege of having two great colleges in the City of Atlanta?
Both colleges are pioneered in providing education. After preparing for six months to get admission to these two great B-Schools, I have gone through multiple steps of acceptance finally, I landed at “Emory, Goizueta Business School”.?
I always had the thought of getting admitted to Georgia Tech for a couple of reasons. One of the biggest reasons was the Fee Difference, however, God has a different plan altogether for me and I landed up here in the United States of America. [I will talk about my Journey of life on a different topic altogether, "How a small-town boy from Gaya, Bihar landed up in the USA"]
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During this whole journey, my support was and is my wife and she was standing like a pillar with me at each step of my life. We both were thinking about how we fill the gap in the fees between both the Premium Colleges, but with our inner instinct I got my admission in “Emory, Goizuetta Business School”.
I feel blessed at times that my complete journey is planned by the Supreme and he made me reach here and helped me get an education among such great people and Professors.?
During all these events of life, My life in Product Management shaped up and I moved from Engineering Leader of the Cloud Team team to being a Product Person of the Cloud Team. I didn’t settle there, I always worked with a Day Zero Learner mindset and with an intention to learn and progress every day as I enjoy learning this new Field of Product Management, and becoming a leader.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
The more vulnerable one becomes in learning, The more courage he needs.
Coming back to my journey of starting College Life, The first week was 3 days of college, full of learning and team building. I still feel that it was one of the saddest weeks of my life. I lost my sister with whom I shared my childhood as we used to go to school together, and we used to learn and play together.?
I was on 3 full days of EMBA beginner sessions when I joined the college and I was not so lucky to talk to her the last time when everyone in my family was able to share some time in person or over the phone. She was fighting her life with Breast Cancer.
I still miss her but like I said, God has been great to me and my family and she got relieved from her pain of suffering and that is What I wanted. Though I didn’t talk to her, however, I had the privilege to attend his last riot over a video call with my family and I said bye to her.
After that, I again get back to my track of learning, and from there till now and even further in my life my learning continues and I will keep on improving and learning.?
In my opinion, Product Management is an artistic and creative way of building a product and its execution. There are vast Majority of topics to learn however I feel we should know the basics of ? -?
Why are we building the products/features?
What are our competitive advantage?
How are we positioning the Product/Feature?
And then all the below topics are in itself a field of Product Science -?
Lists are not Endless but finite endless :). With this? I can say at each point a leader can explore and double-click on these points and learn how these topics related to each other.
Now every company is focusing and most of them are working on End to End Customer Experience while providing the Products and Services in the market. I.e. from looking at?
Customer Needs → Developing a Product/Feature → Marketing Strategy with 5C’s? → Product Distribution Strategy → Customer Acquisition → Customer Onboarding → “Customer Lifetime Value” → Customer Experience → Retaining the Customer?
In between there are lots of pieces of strategy that we need to sew together to make a successful Product and a Happy and Delight Customer.
Thanks for reading my article and I have one request to all my readers -
" I built a prototype on converting an Infra architecture to Terraform using an Agentic AI model. I request all the community members and my networks to give me some feedback on whether this will be useful in the upcoming time looking at the current evolution of Cloud Platform and Gen AI which require a robust Architecture Design and Security. The link below ??!!! "