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

Creating Glance & Bringing it to 100 M Daily Active users is the achievement that brought me highest joy because it helped me get closer to my life long dream of creating positive impact in millions of consumers’ lives  via technology.  Many of these consumers are first to internet, and Glance their default medium to access internet.  There is nothing that tops this in my professional career.

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

I have struggled the most with my perfectionist attitude  coming in the way of launching products which are good enough. This led to solving for corner cases, pushing teams unnecessarily and delaying launches, thus resulting in consumer insights reaching us very late/slow, leading to slow development, increasing chances of failure. Working with my leadership coach, I realised how a strong suit in my life (perfectionism) was now coming in the way of delivering impact and value to consumers in a “good enough way”. I have tried to overcome this by always remembering the one quote I live by in product development: “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”, and constantly being aware of this bias affecting my decision making. I will say, this is very much a work in process though.

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

I feel aspiring PMs confuse product management with solution ownership vs problem ownership.
In reality, product manager’s primarily job is to define the problem statement correctly, prioritise the right ones and have a point of view on which solution might solve the problem statement. The solutions however can come from anywhere else in the organisation, and it is important for the PM to create structures and environments to enable the same.

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

Some of the things I live by and keep sharing with my team:

1. Don’t give/get limelight too early: In general, giving or getting limelight too early, makes product managers start playing to the gallery, and organisation’s leadership, instead of the actual consumers.
2. The Sunk Costs Argument: Important to always look ahead, instead of back. PMs should always be ready to wind up incorrect product investments fast, and not get attached to making something work, when the verdict is already out there.
3. Looking 6-12 months ahead and being authentic to yourself: A lot of times product managers fall in the trap of getting lost in the day-to-day execution/incremental product development, and lose the forest for the trees. It is important to always look 6-12 months ahead, and plan out the journey towards an ambitious goal, balancing it with day to day tactical execution.
4. Do things that don’t scale at first: A lot of times in PMF kind of work, PMs should be ok doing stuff that doesn’t scale. Focus on seeing whether this is valuable to a user cohort, rather than worrying about scaling. Check out the Airbnb story from their early days of finding PMF fit. Even closer at Glance, we did a lot of stuff that was unscalable, which we eventually made scalable via innovation. I feel lack of scalability can sometimes be an IP.
5. Dont let perfect be enemy of good
6. Dont focus on metrics too early, consumer insights give best feedback in early stages
7. Separate PMF work from growth work from feature work and scaling work. Check out Reforge’s classification of product work. It is very important for a product manager to sequence the works rightly in the journey of any feature, product, product line.

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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 have picked being an astronaut or working at the bleeding edge of research in biotech. I think the need to further the frontier the possibilities of human civilisation gives me a kick. So any profession I choose, even in the future, needs to give me that kick.

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

I actually feel that if I had Reforge training during the formative years of my product management career, I would have had a more exponential career. Before Reforge, product management was tribal unstructured knowledge, and people used to equate it to operating from first principles. While it is still the same, the mental models and thinking frameworks Reforge provides, can really accelerate the journey, and avoid massive blind spots. So my general recommendation to product leaders is to enable Reforge learning to their product teams, to create the right foundation.

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