Of the various hats I have worn all these years – Founder, Sales guy, Deployment Specialist, Level 1 and Level 2 Support, DevOps, Coder, Cheque depositor – I have come to realize I was a Product Manager all along – right from the get go. Putting a label on what you do is extremely important. It helps you define the job you do, appreciate it, read more on it and helps you improve...
This post is not about “tools” which will make you (integral)dx more productive. This post is about telling you rules of the Jungle called Product Management. So you are the Product Manager, Right ? You just graduated out of B-School (or even worse completed your bachelors degree) and you have been given the product manager tag in the company you decided to work in. Welcome to the Jungle. Unless...
Recently I was called into a mid-size software organization – and got right in the middle of a heated debate that had obviously been going on for some time. Development wanted to move to a Scrum-like agile model, and put pressure on the established Software Product Management (SPM) department to change their name to Product Owner which SPM refused vehemently. Development argued that the agile...
When organizations are relatively small, it is possible to keep all parts of the company – execs, PM, sales, engineering, QA, operations, etc – in sync with the direction and with the vision of the company. Communication across the company can be seamless and everyone can remain aligned to what they are working on and understand how their work maps to the broader vision. However, as...
Product camp is a unique event format where attendees get to drive the agenda. It is borne out of the bar-camp or un-conference movement that started in US and spread to other countries across the world a decade back. Traditional conferences do not allow attendees to provide inputs to the agenda. P-Camp gives them a direct opportunity to create the agenda, choose the topics and the speakers...
In this #PNHangout, Seema Joshi, Lead Product Manager – BMC Software, shared with us her insights about Product management and the challenges and scope on the road ahead for Women Product Managers. Why did you choose to be a Product Manager? There are two aspects to why I chose to be a Product Manager. The first is related to the evolution of the Indian IT industry and the second my personal...
Ensure that the right things gets done in the right sequence A product manager helps a company to achieve its goals by helping customers get their jobs done in an unique and delightful way, and getting customers to payin some form (money, attention, information). Let me elaborate on the key responsibilities encapsulated in the above definition. Getting jobs done: A parent purchases your app to...
Who is a product manager and what does a typical development cycle with a product manager look like? Product managers are often the most overlooked job descriptions in startups. The “let’s hack together” mindset is great but might not scale after a certain point. It becomes imperative that someone is incharge of defining the “what to build” part of the problem extremely well, keeping the...
Every Byte Counts Earlier I worked as a field engineer in Schlumberger, providing Drilling Services. Drilling is a very high tech, and arduous task; whether it’s on land, on a river, on deep waters. My job on any rig was to determine the direction of the oil well and properties of the rocks we burst through – its density, its resistivity, its shear strength, its porosity. We did this via...
Every product that you build has to be used by people. This is irrespective of “who may pay for the product“. This is an often brought up topic of “User vs Customer“. And if the product is used only by machines and not by real people, then it’s perhaps best to call it “technology”. As far as technology products are concerned, a significant factor of differentiation they claim and deliver on is by...
