Rohit Utmani
Career Milestones
Organization and You
Core Competencies
Go to food for thought
Favorite Products
What accomplishment in your product management career has brought you the highest level of satisfaction and joy? Can you narrate why?
In the past decade, I have worked across different consumer internet businesses ( Mobile Operating System, App Store, Real Estate, Wedding etc.) and launched & scaled several products to achieve profitability. With each product launch, I have been fortunate to solve the problems of millions of Indian customers in solving their core needs be it:
1) quickly find a verified house to rent in a new city at Housing.com or
2) hassle-free booking experience of wedding venue & wedding related vendors ( photographers, mehendi artists etc.) at Weddingz.in or
3) using their smartphone & app store in their preferred choice of Indian language at IndusOS & App Bazaar.
Every time I see a customer using the Product I created to solve their core need in a simple and effective manner, delivering them happiness and value, I feel that my career choice of entering into Product Management was right and meaningful.
With App Bazaar, a made in Indian App Store that runs in 12 Indian Languages ( like Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali etc.), we have provided 250 million Indians with an option to easily find their favourite apps and games in their choice of mother tongue. Many of these users find it very hard to find & search apps in English, and therefore exclusively use App Bazaar as their default and only choice of App Store in Indian languages.
The fact that we have been able to provide access to the digital world to a sizeable part of India's population who due to their circumstances ( lack of English language awareness) were unable to access it otherwise, makes me product an Indian Startup Leader.
What aspect of product management did you struggle the most with? How did you overcome it?
When I started my journey at IndusOS ( an Android Mobile Operating System company) I had to overcome a steep learning curve to understand the tech stack that powers the Core Mobile OS. Given I didn't have a CS background, it took me some extra effort to deeply understand the tech nuances of the business. However, I took it as a challenge and put in extra effort to conduct my own research and readings and then spend time with my engineering team to first hand understand the key complexities that are unique to our business. It helped me develop empath towards my team and also come up with creative ways to solve customers' needs that are supported by the available technology solutions. I am happy to share that after a 7-year learning journey today I can easily lead even deep engineering and technical conversations on behalf of my team.
What's one common myth about product management that you find common among aspiring PMs.
I have often seen young PMs in my team struggle to strike the right balance between managing scrums/team stand ups and actually spending time talking to customers & creating product strategies. As PMs it's often easy to find yourself buried with project management-related tasks, spending your time gathering requirements, creating PRDs and managing sprints. But it's even more important to spend time in understanding larger macro trends that impact your business, customers and the economics of the business. Having a strategic approach to in your early days differentiates you as a PM and helps you grow into a leadership role quickly. Another myth I have noticed is that PMs must only care about customer experience and delight and don't have much P&L responsibility. I believe in the contrary. All PMs in my teams are trained to think holistically. The times of growth at all costs are over and it's replaced with holistic profitable growth. It's only possible if PMs understand and take up P&L responsibility mindset and ownership as well in their roles.
What are some common pitfalls that product managers must be aware of?
PMs need to make sure that all stakeholders ( engineering, data, design, QA, business, marketing etc. ) are in alignment with any new initiative and have their common goals aligned. Teams work best when they are in harmony and in case teams have conflicting goals they must be addressed early on to avoid any confrontation or failure during the development or after the launch. Therefore they must learn the art of influence and effective communication early on. They are bound to be in situations where teams have conflicted views and they need to be able to create an atmosphere of trust, positivity and creativity to obtain the best possible outcomes. Another thing that PMs must also encourage in their teams is the culture to fail fast rather than spend months of planning, development and testing waiting for the perfect product for launch. Unfortunately, the nature of business is such that we are bound to see failure more often that success and finding the failure early on saves a lot of time and effort so that teams are closer to success.
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?
If not in Product, I would have probably ended up in Marketing, as it's fundamentally very close to customers and shares similar skill sets. I like to surround myself with creativity and innovation and find new ways to make customers' lives better, and it could also be achieved as a Marketer. Another alternative career could be as a Venture Capitalist as they are also trying to solve customers' problems at scale with passionate founders. My education at London Business School in Investing, Entrepreneurship and Finance would fit well with it too.
What is something about product management that you wish you knew when you started out?
Problems become very different in nature when you are operating a product in a 0-1 scale, vs. 1 - 100 and then again in 100 - say 10,000. In the first you generally are working on PMF and the latter you are working on much mature problems that only scale of the business can make you realise. Example, we were okay with say 5-10% download failure rates when were had just 10-50K users using our app store every day. But when we scaled to 200 million users, we became obsessed with it and got it significantly down. We learnt this my making a lot of mistakes and living with sub-optimal experiences for quite some time. Had I know these earlier, would have better prepared my team to handle at least some of these mistakes.
What accomplishment in your product management career has brought you the highest level of satisfaction and joy? Can you narrate why?
In the past decade, I have worked across different consumer internet businesses ( Mobile Operating System, App Store, Real Estate, Wedding etc.) and launched & scaled several products to achieve profitability. With each product launch, I have been fortunate to solve the problems of millions of Indian customers in solving their core needs be it:
1) quickly find a verified house to rent in a new city at Housing.com or
2) hassle-free booking experience of wedding venue & wedding related vendors ( photographers, mehendi artists etc.) at Weddingz.in or
3) using their smartphone & app store in their preferred choice of Indian language at IndusOS & App Bazaar.
Every time I see a customer using the Product I created to solve their core need in a simple and effective manner, delivering them happiness and value, I feel that my career choice of entering into Product Management was right and meaningful.
With App Bazaar, a made in Indian App Store that runs in 12 Indian Languages ( like Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali etc.), we have provided 250 million Indians with an option to easily find their favourite apps and games in their choice of mother tongue. Many of these users find it very hard to find & search apps in English, and therefore exclusively use App Bazaar as their default and only choice of App Store in Indian languages.
The fact that we have been able to provide access to the digital world to a sizeable part of India's population who due to their circumstances ( lack of English language awareness) were unable to access it otherwise, makes me product an Indian Startup Leader.
What aspect of product management did you struggle the most with? How did you overcome it?
When I started my journey at IndusOS ( an Android Mobile Operating System company) I had to overcome a steep learning curve to understand the tech stack that powers the Core Mobile OS. Given I didn't have a CS background, it took me some extra effort to deeply understand the tech nuances of the business. However, I took it as a challenge and put in extra effort to conduct my own research and readings and then spend time with my engineering team to first hand understand the key complexities that are unique to our business. It helped me develop empath towards my team and also come up with creative ways to solve customers' needs that are supported by the available technology solutions. I am happy to share that after a 7-year learning journey today I can easily lead even deep engineering and technical conversations on behalf of my team.
What's one common myth about product management that you find common among aspiring PMs.
I have often seen young PMs in my team struggle to strike the right balance between managing scrums/team stand ups and actually spending time talking to customers & creating product strategies. As PMs it's often easy to find yourself buried with project management-related tasks, spending your time gathering requirements, creating PRDs and managing sprints. But it's even more important to spend time in understanding larger macro trends that impact your business, customers and the economics of the business. Having a strategic approach to in your early days differentiates you as a PM and helps you grow into a leadership role quickly. Another myth I have noticed is that PMs must only care about customer experience and delight and don't have much P&L responsibility. I believe in the contrary. All PMs in my teams are trained to think holistically. The times of growth at all costs are over and it's replaced with holistic profitable growth. It's only possible if PMs understand and take up P&L responsibility mindset and ownership as well in their roles.
What are some common pitfalls that product managers must be aware of?
PMs need to make sure that all stakeholders ( engineering, data, design, QA, business, marketing etc. ) are in alignment with any new initiative and have their common goals aligned. Teams work best when they are in harmony and in case teams have conflicting goals they must be addressed early on to avoid any confrontation or failure during the development or after the launch. Therefore they must learn the art of influence and effective communication early on. They are bound to be in situations where teams have conflicted views and they need to be able to create an atmosphere of trust, positivity and creativity to obtain the best possible outcomes. Another thing that PMs must also encourage in their teams is the culture to fail fast rather than spend months of planning, development and testing waiting for the perfect product for launch. Unfortunately, the nature of business is such that we are bound to see failure more often that success and finding the failure early on saves a lot of time and effort so that teams are closer to success.
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?
If not in Product, I would have probably ended up in Marketing, as it's fundamentally very close to customers and shares similar skill sets. I like to surround myself with creativity and innovation and find new ways to make customers' lives better, and it could also be achieved as a Marketer. Another alternative career could be as a Venture Capitalist as they are also trying to solve customers' problems at scale with passionate founders. My education at London Business School in Investing, Entrepreneurship and Finance would fit well with it too.
What is something about product management that you wish you knew when you started out?
Problems become very different in nature when you are operating a product in a 0-1 scale, vs. 1 - 100 and then again in 100 - say 10,000. In the first you generally are working on PMF and the latter you are working on much mature problems that only scale of the business can make you realise. Example, we were okay with say 5-10% download failure rates when were had just 10-50K users using our app store every day. But when we scaled to 200 million users, we became obsessed with it and got it significantly down. We learnt this my making a lot of mistakes and living with sub-optimal experiences for quite some time. Had I know these earlier, would have better prepared my team to handle at least some of these mistakes.
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