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

Dunzo has to be the most satisfying part of my career till now, very rarely do you get to change how consumers behave in a product career and I am extremely grateful to have been able to be a part of creating something that has fundamentally changed the way India will shop and send things from one place to another, there is no going back from this. Within Dunzo I think it would have to be Dunzo Daily, our new quick grocery service, it's a 0 to 1 project that I got to lead right from user research and data analysis, to the first hand drawn mocks to eventually shipping and being loved by our customers and driving business outcomes for Dunzo. It is going to be at the heart of Dunzo's growth story for years to come and I am so happy that I was a part of it.

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

I think Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) put it well that there are 3 kinds of work : Produce, Arrange and Impress. Produce work is things you do that are directly related to delivering customer value (User research, Design brainstorming, Writing PRDs etc), Arrange work is things you do to make Produce work more efficient and effective (Running sprints, Creating document templates, Standups etc) and Impress work is things you do as a proof of work / competence (Status updates, Present to execs). I do not enjoy Impress work, but in most largish companies, you have to do it to ensure your team is getting their due, so I try my best to automate and templatise this as much as possible, I also pick projects and companies where this is lightweight by design :)

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

That Product Sense is something that you "have" whereas it is just pattern recognition from hours and hours of curiously observing products and learning about them.

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

1) Spending too much time in solutioning and execution vs. identifying problems.
2) Trying to plug every hole in the team without asking for help and burning out (hello Hero complex)
3) Not blocking out time for yourself to learn

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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 mostly be some kind of a creator - Musician, Writer, Movie maker, Standup comic maybe :) I get the most joy out of seeing people enjoying the things I contributed to making and creating products is something I stumbled upon and realised I am good at. The skillsets that are common among PMs and any type of successful creators are things like being curious, being a keen observer of people and their behaviours, being good at pattern recognition and then finally having the tenacity to keep at it until magic starts coming out

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

To not attach too much of your identity and self worth to your work, you are a lot more than the products you work on :)

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