‘Women In Product’ Conference 2017?—?Learnings & much more!

Standing at the cusp of change, my objective for attending the ‘Women In Product’ conference was to network with other women in product management & learn from their experiences to in turn understand if I am headed in the right direction with working on a transitionary path from Engineering.

After stepping in, I realized that it was not any small gathering but a sizable one with 1500 women builders under one roof from different countries (such as Taiwan) too! It was also inspiring to talk to all these amazing women & learn that the PM field is highly diverse with people from Engineering, Marketing, Law & Communications background!

Having been part of a roller-coaster event filled with discussion on a variety of topics, here are some key takeaways from some of the sessions :

Learnings : Scaling Enterprise Software

• On an average, enterprises have 1000+ cloud services within their organizations! Look at building Enterprise products similar to consumer facing products which are easy to use with minimal training that users will eventually grow to love, that is —

A “consumer-product” mindset married with an “enterprise software” business model

• It is the Golden Age for Enterprise Software and so it is vital to spend time with customers to understand how their work gets done and what are their distribution channels, so that we can partner with them to be part of a larger ecosystem
• If possible, aim to turn decision makers to users. Also, look at empowering champions to be well-informed self-starters who can efficiently make the case for trying new products
• 80% of value with 10–20% of effort is a key thing to remember in this rapidly evolving ecosystem and competitive landscape

‘Builder’ skills : Know Hows to be an effective Product Manager

• Improv skills that can be used as part of Product Management :

1. Practice Confidence
2. Take risks
3. Celebrate Failure
4. Try something new
5. Experiment
6. Notice your feelings

• Important things to ponder over for building an impactful product :

1. Why is our product important ? Is what we do changing our industry?
2. What are the Insights we are gathering from the data?
3. What did the Launch teach us?
4. How are our best & worst users treating our product? What can we learn from it?
5. Are we using our braintrust (Engineering Leads, UX Leads,…) effectively to move forward with product creation?

Inspirational : Moving past our Fear

• Three principal kinds of Fear & ways to deal with them :

1. Fear of rejection

— You don’t lose anything by asking but instead you always learn something

— The more you ask for things, the easier it gets & you develop a growth mindset in spite of rejections

2. Fear of being under-qualified

— Imposter syndrome - Recognize it & come to terms with it. It doesn’t go away really!

— First 6 months of this transition is bound to make you feel miserable but then it tends to get better

3. Fear of losing momentum

— Loss of Aversion : Feeling ‘losses’ twice as more as feeling ‘success’

— It is important then to move away from the track of comfort & external validation that has seduced you for so long in order to make the most of the current opportunity

I must say that this event filled with a mixture of Learnings, Motivation and Connections has given me the confidence to take the leap forward in pursuing the path of Product Management!