Learnings, Resources and insights of my journey in Product management.
Folks, let’s cut it down — there’s no magic trick, do what you are passionate about and when you do it give all you got to be successful at it.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
- Steve Jobs
I am fortunate enough to realize what I enjoy doing and start early in my career, this would not have been possible without the immense support that I have got from people around me. Always going to be thankful for this.
I was working as Business analyst trainee at Sdreatech.com, at that time I was super curious to learn the domain in depth. Fortunately at that time I got introduced to concept of Product management and that was the day till today this space has keep me uptight curious. I started reading blogs, finding resources to learn, did multiple courses, started attending webinars, reading books and joined communities. I will be sharing list of all above things at end of article — Feel free to jump directly at end part if you want.
My first Product management Internship.
I started off as Product manager intern at Zeda.io which essentially was my very first encounter to realizing Product management is not fancy as written in LinkedIn and medium articles. Shoot, this one too a medium article? I swear I will try to keep real as possible.
With blaze of luck or the right timing, I got opportunity to be in talking with Prashant Mahajan who was building his startup Zeda. I joined Zeda in its very early days and got chance to build product from scratch. This would not have been possible if it was not Zeda which gave me platform to demonstrate my learnings. I remember on the very first day, “ The work of PM is to get things done” followed by “Any good work done is result of team’s effort and anything that goes wrong is responsibility of PM”. The sole responsibility of PM is to make sure that every requirement is fulfilled and are no blockages.
During my tenure at Zeda.io, I essentially spend time up scaling my skills and implementing them in the work I do. I can not thank enough to the team and wish them all the success. Zeda has grown from an idea to company now, the feeling of proud keeps escalating.
The second step in Product journey.
The very essential part in PM interview is doing the case study/assignment, so here’s what I penned, hope it helps to give you approach. Check here. I wrote this article randomly and surprisingly it got me opportunity and I started my journey with Clientjoy.io.
Clientjoy product was already in market from a while, had defined team and the whole ball game was different. I was excited, thrilled and curious!
I started off as a PM intern and then got offer to work as full time Product manager, being an undergrad! This make me realize every nut is possible to crack. I got immense support from Anupama, Co-founder and CTO of clientjoy, Yash Shah, Co founder and CEO of clientjoy, the Tech team, Growth team and name would keep on going! Here are key learnings and practices I followed-
- Own it up, take full accountability of work you do.
- Build bonds, always have sense of learning and listening.
- Prioritize — Company first, team second and individual third principle.
- Feedback is a gift, take continuous feedbacks and keep them in loop of how you are working on it.
- Overcommunication is good then no communication.
- Somedays get tough but when you see users using your product it sums up everything, strive to make each of user happy.
Everyday there is something that I learn, super excited to see the next steps with my journey and clientjoy.
Giving back to space
As I mentioned earlier, when I started I got much support from people around me, now it is my time to do a bit. I joined Product Folks, it is a volunteer driven community of product people. It drives to help product enthusiast to grow in their career by hosting events with best minds in system, organizing events, building products that folks can use to scale their ambitions.
Product management resources — https://coda.io/@shreyanshi-shah/product-management-resources
Books and what I learnt from them, list is ongoing! — https://coda.io/@shreyanshi-shah/learnings-from-books
Communities — The Product folks, Product school, Creators of Prod, Product tree, Product buds.
Case studies — https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/case-studies/home
