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

The new app we launched for The Ken's subscribers in 2020 really comes to my mind here. It was a ground-up redesign with a fundamentally new experience and underlying tech. I'm proud of the amount of thought we put into the process. Design decisions that put subscriber experience front and center. Our tech choices made it super easy for us to release the app quickly and simultaneously on multiple platforms. And some great decisions around the people that ensured a focused, lean and impactful team.

We set a high bar of quality with this app, visible in the app's performance, reading experience, and overall user experience. The bump in subscriber engagement validated our process

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

I started my career as an engineer. Engineering tends to index heavily on quality of output. In product management though, we often need to make low-fi choices to see feedback quickly.  Identifying where I should be stressing about quality and where it's okay to do "just enough" tends to become tricky. The engineer in me would be embarrassed to put anything low quality out for the public to see.

I've learnt that it helps to explicitly rate how important quality is for a feature. It can make us realise the relative importance of quality depending on the context.

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

That the job is all about running A/B tests. It often depends on your company, target audience, what you're testing. Very often the easiest way to test if something works is to roll it out and see how it works. It's uncomfortable, yes. But if you've got *good reasons* for trying an intervention and if the potential downside isn't too high, A/B tests just delay things and increase overheads

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

Don't be married to your backlog. It's usually good to have a backlog, but it would often make perfect sense to do things that aren't on it. Why? Because the market changed, or your company's goals changed, or you learnt something new and you haven't found time to put it on the backlog yet.

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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?

Having tried 2 already (Software engineering and Consulting), today if I had to pick an alternate career, I would look to found my own company.

A lot of the personality skills are similar. Sense of ownership, influencing others to do the work but not being bound by this dependence on others, result-orientation. Plus, all the hard skills of the PM job are probably useful as a Founder too.

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

1. To know the following about entry-level PM jobs:
2. Startup product management: High stakes, low mentorship
3. Large company product management: Low stakes, high mentorship

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