Image credits: https://unsplash.com/photos/1tTLrL50bpA?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

Key learnings from my Product Management career so far

I recently completed 7 years into Product Management and thought it might be a good idea to reflect on my key learnings. These are learnings from the mistakes I have made. So may / may not be generically applicable. This post is not me dishing out advice.

1. It is very difficult to do the same right things every day, especially when you want to stay excited by new things daily. But consistency on basics is what will take you far. 90% of the job is boring. The remaining 10% of it makes it more than interesting. But to succeed, you have to do the 90% really well, every single day.
2. Meet customers and observe them using your / competition’s products (not just data, research decks, etc.), so that when you are making tradeoffs you will have a bunch of humans you met on your mind and not just fictitious personas
3. Don’t get intimidated by complex products made by others. Given enough context and focus, you can always build similar / better products. Don’t allow impostor syndrome pull you down
4. Just like everything else in life, practice makes you better at product management. So if you work at a large company where products get built slower, build side projects / concept-notes / tear-downs on the side for your learning. At startups, mostly you won’t have the time to breather :P
5. Actively invest time in learning to define the problem well. Do not marry a solution, especially the solution you came up with and definitely not the first solution that comes to your mind.
6. Learn to write. Writing is a tool to think, more than anything else. But writing well will also allow you to make yourself redundant — to your stakeholders, team, etc. That’s how you get more time to think / write more about customers and their problems. And the sooner you get comfortable involving the whole product team (PMs, Engg, Design, Analytics at the very least) in arriving at the solution, the better products you will build.
7. Be humble. As PMs, we do the least AMOUNT of work in building the product.
8. Learn to say No. As they say, ‘if you want to please everyone, sell ice-cream’. PM is a job where you will have to say ‘No’ an unbelievable number of times daily. Learn to get better at saying it.
9. Don’t be boring. You will always be strapped for time. But if you treat people like systems whom you give input and expect output, you will at best just-build products. Your job literally is to sell the customer’s problem. And selling is a creative job.

I will be try to keep updating this with my learnings in future as well.
What are your key learnings?