What accomplishment  in your product management career has brought you the highest level of  satisfaction and joy? Can you narrate why?

I think this would have to be my current stint at Jiva. What we build, actually creates a step change in the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and micro collectors. Jiva was founded just before the pandemic and most of us had not been able to meet our users for a really long time. When our team visited the ground after 2 years, we were pleasantly surprised and overjoyed to know that farmers were keen to talk to us. They said Jiva offers “Honest Scales”. Jiva does not cheat on weight and prices.Building tools that empower the underserved is an extremely rewarding feeling. Everytime a farmer or a micro collector buys inputs at the right price or sells their harvest at the best price, using Jiva’s platform, without the fear of being cheated or taken advantage of, it just gives me that sense of purpose and accomplishment. Being able to create a functional line of products which are impactful, can handle great scale, and complexities of different geographies, crops, farming practices and yet remain simple enough to not overwhelm a not so digitally savvy audience; is probably one of my greatest accomplishments.

What aspect of  product management did you struggle the most with? How did you overcome  it?

Prioritization. How do you balance between a sureshot low business value deliverable vs. an unclear high business value deliverable? When you are racing against time, the immediate next release narrows your horizon significantly, Often this results in reduction of scope and the features that primarily take a hit are the ones around delight or analytics. Most of the MVPs out there lack these.  In the absence of quick follow up releases, good incremental development and the discipline of paying back tech debt, the product quickly becomes shoddy. Having a framework that considers the true business value, an impact map of effected stakeholders and systems and effective categorization of deliverables across metric movers, customer delight and service requests helped me keep the bigger picture in mind and not just phase things out for the sake of phasing things out.

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What's one common  myth about product management that you find common among aspiring PMs.

Most aspiring PMs out there think that as a PM, you always get to work on intellectually stimulating features and ideate strategic plans. A huge part of PM is repeated documentation and gruntwork, countless follow ups with different teams, negotiating with stakeholders and trying to build a case for your hypothesis - basically, getting things done. It's a bit of begging,borrowing,stealing of time and resources to deliver a business outcome. The execution part that essentially happens most of the time is not as pure and academic as it seems.

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What are some common  pitfalls that product managers must be aware of?

1. Building more features to solve a symptom rather than trying to solve for addressing the root cause.

2. Not focussing more on high leverage tasks. Don’t give equal parts of your time to all tasks. Ration your mindspace.(Shreyas Doshi’s leverage framework is a work of art)

3. Aiming for perfection when building something new. Learning is continuous and iterative and striving for perfection when we don’t have enough data points leads to analysis paralysis.

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If not product  management, what career would you have picked? Are there any complimentary skillsets that you see between being a PM and your alternate choice?

I would probably be a guitarist in a jazz bar. I don't think it’s a complimentary skillset but a similarity, a guitarist in a jazz bar doesn't perform alone, they need a team/band and they need to play their part of well individually and as a team for a good performance/outcome. Sounds very similar to a PM role :)

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What is something  about product management that you wish you knew when you started out?

Product Sense is, in most cases, an acquired skill. If you are able to build executive allies across other business functions and spend quality time in researching and using products, you can build an extremely powerful product sense.