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

There is no feeling as satisfying as making people feel heard, understood, and validated. It's a cathartic feeling. One of the biggest joys for me, if not the highest achievement, is when I lift the voices of people at work and in the product management community at large, besides shipping meaningful products impacting millions of people. 

I started a personal project called "Speaking From The Heart" to profile the impact of women in Product Management, featuring several mid-career PMs, VPs, and Directors across startups and F500 companies in an effort to tackle diversity, equity, and inclusion. As someone who has confronted challenges with no playbook to lean on, I wanted to write this for myself first. It's a one-on-one, intensely personal conversation that highlights how Product Management happens across different company cultures and helps imagine non-linear career pathways into product. 

It has had over 100,000 views on LinkedIn since its launch. In the process, I realized many peers were directly benefiting from my candid conversations and that gave me a lot of joy!

From enabling customers to share their problems, being the sounding board for peers who need more representation in their line of work to showcasing experienced technology leaders who are silent change-makers, I'm constantly seeking to bring under-served people to the spotlight. 

Check here: Speaking From The Heart

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

Unstructured operational processes in high-growth product enterprises made it quite challenging for me. 

It's normal when the team is small. However, as we grew 4x in team size and moved upmarket in a multi-product company, operational scalability was the #1 challenge. It meant we had to interface with hundreds of product and engineering teams, each working as a mini startup with conflicting priorities. It added all kinds of inefficiencies one can imagine. 

For instance, one of the elephants in the room was limited and sometimes even zero access to data due to historical neglect of customer behavior. This made it difficult to get buy-ins for new ideas, communicate priorities to the team, and even make sense of progress because we were often collaborating at a subjective level. 

I led the effort to make data accessible to different job functions by internally evangelizing data-driven product management. Eventually, with a lot of walking through walls, we rolled out efficient operational workflows along with the development and adoption of an in-house customer success platform. 

When you are pushed into the deep end of a river, you first learn to stay afloat and survive strong currents. Only with time can you afford to swim against the current. The concern for newly minted Product Managers, especially for women who enter fields dominated by men, has always been when to play along and when to push back. I was doing more of the latter by questioning their decades-old status quo. However, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to directly work and learn from the VP of Product Management who appreciated my enthusiasm, created a safe atmosphere to challenge ideas, involved me in several strategic projects, and amplified my work visibility among 10,000 employees which in many ways helped navigate these complex challenges.

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

I can share my experience of busting a myth that I see common among aspiring PMs from non-traditional backgrounds. 

Right out of college, I had to make the hardest decision of my life: pursue a stable job in an international chemical firm as a gold medallist or leap into an unfamiliar career in an obscure software startup I had no credentials for. This was at a time when product companies and product opportunities weren't yet mainstream in India.

Looking back at my early tech blogging on my site makes me embarrassed, but it was valuable to win me The Best Campus Blogger title from Google Students Web Academy and land my first product role at a small Series D startup called Freshdesk. Almost everyone who joined the startup from my university left to pursue grad school or moved to companies that are household names. Without the peer support system (which is super helpful in early career years) and the immense pressure to pursue a higher degree, I struggled with insecurity although I loved my work and the culture. 

A tiny but powerful voice in me kept telling me that cookie-cut career paths are not meant for me. Two years later, I got a chance to open up my insecurities with a well-known veteran in the Indian SaaS ecosystem. That interaction helped me realize my unique strengths and opened up big opportunities. 

This one drop of clarity changed my world — similar to the moment in the high school chemistry lab when you’re titrating a solution and the content in the beaker changes from pink to clear. It gave me the conviction to be a constant learner and not fall prey to conventional wisdom.

Even very recently, I decided to forego my admits to top grad school programs in California and across the USA. Although I do think grad school programs such as an MBA provide chances to fast-track both professionally and financially, and of course the job market has bias for MBA candidates, the best Product Managers I've worked with are incredibly curious learners with atypical backgrounds. My team and manager from my recent company Kissflow have helped me grow from shipping releases to releasing strategic ships. Ultimately, it is the people you get along with who take you forward in every step of your career.

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

1. Likening themselves to a CEO with a lot of authority. You're a Knight. Not the Queen. This manifests as pride, oftentimes. It's incredibly rare to find down-to-earth Product Managers.
2. Mixing corp. communication style into personal life. Trying to find a formula or framework for seemingly mundane things.
3. Being in denial of failures and not seeing them for what they are. 
4. Trying to force fit popular frameworks they read in a book or Twitter thread. Frameworks are only good at communicating solutions, not in finding new solutions.
5. Having cognitive dissonance that results in bad compromises. In Product Management, life becomes super easy when you have a good alignment between what you really care about and what you work on. Making bad compromises has quite terrible consequences. From career crisis, burnout, lifestyle incompatibility to lack of fulfillment.

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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?

A Novelist or a Screenplay Writer, maybe?

The best story wins hearts. Picturing your ideal audience, developing interesting characters, envisioning their wants and needs, having an instinct for immersive plots and subplots, thinking in terms of scenarios, tensions, conflicts, and resolutions require uncanny empathy, creativity, consistent routine, and a keen sense of strategy to publish a standout novel. 

In many ways, Product Managers are storytellers. They need to know who their audience is and vary how they communicate the story for them. They need to have good instincts about markets and plan for several scenarios. Great writing skill helps Product Managers distill several ideas into a clear winner.

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

1. You are alone responsible for finding impactful work. Don't expect someone to hand it to you. 
2. Your network is your real net worth. 
3. Strong convictions and the ability to adapt when faced with new evidence are rare skills. 
4. The customer might be your king but the market is your god. 
5. As a woman in product, you’ll stumble on people with ulterior intentions, beyond learning and collaborating with you. Be vigilant about your boundaries.

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