HOW TO CREATE AWESOME PRODUCTS

AN INTRO TO PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

▸ Dalan Mendonca

▸ Electrical Engineering / BITS-Pilani

▸ Design, web development, firmware, image processing, creating new businesses models, tried it all!

▸ Facebook - Data Analyst (2012 - 2014)

▸ Removing bad likes & reducing spam from Facebook pages

▸ Paytm - Associate Product Manager (2014 - 2015)

▸ Instamojo - Product Manager (2015 - Present)

HI!

WHAT IS A PRODUCT MANAGER?

▸ Product Manager : Product :: CEO : Company

▸ A PM (or the PM team) is responsible for every aspect of the product from bounce of the animations on the app to the speed of customer service. You own that shit & any product problem is your problem.

▸ PMs bring direction and clarity to the team so that each person knows what their work is adding up to

SKILLS NEEDED TO BE A PRODUCT MANAGER

▸ Hard skills

▸ Analysis/research

▸ Writing spec documents

▸ Wire-framing

▸ Project Management

▸ Basics of design and software development

▸ Soft skills

▸ Communication

▸ Conflict resolution

▸ Leadership

▸ Rapid Decision making

WHAT PEOPLE THINK I DO

WHAT I THINK I DO

WHAT I REALLY DO

WHAT DOES A PRODUCT MANAGER DO?

▸ Obvious things

▸ Prioritising things

▸ Managing projects

▸ Leading the team

▸ Designing “human systems”

▸ Not-so-obvious things

▸ Saying NO (politely)

▸ Tricking/seducing people to get work done

▸ Filling in gaps and leftover work

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT IS A WEIRD DISCIPLINE FULL OF ODDBALLS AND REJECTS THAT NEVER QUITE FIT IN ANYWHERE ELSE

Ken Norton, Google PM

WHOM IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT FOR

IF YOU WANT TO GO FAST GO ALONE

IF YOU WANT TO GO FAR GO TOGETHER, African Proverb

CAREER PROSPECTS

THEY’RE PRODUCT MANAGERS!Apart from $$$, the PM role is a great starting point to being an entrepreneur or a CEO

• Joel Spolsky, founder/CEO of StackOverflow was a PM at Microsoft • Kevin Systrom, founder/CEO of Instagram was an APM at Google • Sundar Pichai (current Google CEO) was a PM at Google

and many more …

QUESTIONS?