We had hosted Prashanth Tavalam for an AMA session on our Slack channel. In case you missed it we regularly host product managers and talk about everything #product.

Prashanth is a Senior Product Manager at Dell Technologies. He Coaches product managers and helps teams Productize in a fast and efficient manner. His passions are in creative and problem-solving space. He is a certified Trainer/ Facilitator and loves to contribute to the product management community.

Here are some key takeaways:

What does the role of a PM at Dell involve? How is this different from consumer PM roles?

Dell had backend team which are tech-heavy like and Api team or Data validation team...so you have to have tech experience and in some team, you need supply chain experience. So being a backend team PMs influence internal stakeholders mostly and indirectly influence end customer experience..this way the roles are different from consumer products..yet it interesting how we manage major platforms like dell.com and premier.com

What excites you most about PMing?

I think the opportunity to work closely with users/customers is what  excites me most about PMing

While interviewing PMs, what are 2-3 aspects which make a candidate stand out?

Below are major skills we look for in a candidate:

1) Problem identification and validation skill

2) The skill to metricize problem and stakeholder expectations

Just wanted to develop on my basics, can you walk me through what productisation of service is? Some Dell Tech examples would be interesting to hear.

Can you imagine positioning APIs as a product for the internal team ...APIs can be loosely treated as a web service..with tech-heavy user stories trying to fulfil technical requirements we are trying to change the narrative by looking at internal stakeholders also as customers and apply PM practices to existing agile teams...example emphasis on user-centricity and data-driven approaches have been given more weightage across teams

What advise you would give to someone who wants to transition into Product management domain?

Get certified at a credible education service provider like IPL, Pragmatic, or PLabs and Product School or PM school... Volunteer for a startup to scale as a PM

What do you think would be the best way to do MVP for sectors which require heavy Capex (Like manufacturing, health-tech etc.)

Talk to customers about the idea because the products in manufacturing are mostly B2BThe customers rely on deep-rooted relations might also need investment in a POC ( small working model) to convince the customers

Any certification recommendations for the product managers in different phases of their careers?

Checkout PLabs https://plabs.live/ for  practical exposure to Product Management

Wanted to ask how important are people management skills for a PM. People think that a PM is an Individual contributor role. What is your take on this?

People management skills are necessary because PM has to live with people, convince or sell to people and take the heat from people ...you have to improve this through experience..to scale faster spend more time in people interactions increase your people interaction rate by 10 per cent every month to see improvement in people management skills ...watch out for the invisible bruises along the way.

At times, updates are not installed by all users. Is there any other way to approach this problem? How can one measure the success of a GTM strategy?

The update is not installed by all users because the whole process of installing new updates is not designed well ...user guides may be missing to understand the 'how to' of  using the updates...marketing communications are not explaining the benefits of the new updates in simple language lots of tech mumbo jumbo also complicates the installation experience

Counter-examples are a good way to learn. Can you share any examples of a good product that was marketed poorly?

Lots of products have failed due to bad marketing techniques..e.g.cars launched with names which translate to something funny or vulgar in international markets are examples of good products gone bad with marketing Also Nano is a good example for bad positioning and not evolving with changing customer expectations

3 books you recommend reading?

1) Design of everyday things

2) Mindfulness for creativity

3) Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk

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