Showcasing the work

As a product manager, I am responsible for a part of a product in an organization. My team and I are always working on something critical with respect to the product. Part of the job is to keep the stakeholders informed. But an unspoken responsibility is also to showcase the work the team has done. …

Features vs Value

I used to be in marketing before I became a product manager. One of the earliest lessons (thru feedback) that I learnt was that while writing customer facing copies one should always talk about the value that customer will get rather than writing about the feature that the team has shipped. Both are technically same …

5 PM tools that I use

Here is my list of 5 tools that I use regularly at my job as a product manager. 1. Confluence Confluence is my go to tool for any writing work. In a PM world 95% of the work is writing work, remaining 5% is talking about the writing. Writing helps me talk to myself, helps …

Understanding the customer cohort

Today I went to a pet shop, to get some aquarium plants for my fish tank. I've gone to other pet shops in the past but I always found it hard to get everything (fish, tank, sand, plants) from one shop. But this one was different, they had fishes, plants, drift wood, pebbles, fish food, …

Twitter and the blue tick

One of the recent books I read, 'Are your lights on', made this claim that we merely displace a problem when we solve for a problem, it is fundamentally a tradeoff between problems. Ever since, whenever I look at a solution, I try to see the new problems that it introduces. It has been a …

Measure what matters – Book recommendation

Measure what matters had been recommended to me for quite some time now and I always thought it was about product metrics, what are the right metrics to measure and what are the vanity metrics but boy was I wrong! Finally, a month back I came across this book right in time for our annual …

My interview with IT Chronicles

As a Product Manager, you are also the evangelist of what you have built and what your vision is for the future. It is important to articulate that well, in a way that is easily understandable by others who do no live and breathe the product/topic as you do. I recently had an opportunity to …

Scope = pain points + more value 👍

I've written here about the process of product management, where I emphasized on understanding the user's problem. Recently I was made aware of something deeper and helpful. Yes, understanding the pain points are important but when we start solutioning, we should consider the scope of the product that is larger than the pain point. Scope …

Finish what you start and on time.🕰

Nothing takes the fizz out of feature like not shipping on time. The more the delay the more frustrating it gets for everyone - the team, the stakeholders and the customers. That doesn't mean, you deliver something haphazard just because you are nearing the deadline. The ideal is deliver what you promised and on time. …

Words, mocks, working product

That's the order in which you can create delight when you are talking about a feature to your customer/prospect. Mock screens trump words and working product trumps mocks. Photo by Headway on Unsplash If you show your prospects/customers a slide deck about the feature you are not gonna impress them, that should be the last …