Q1. Please describe your career before the MBA and your transition to product management.
I had no clue till I did my Engineering as to what direction I wanted to give my career. Like everyone else, my mom wanted me to get good marks. When I topped in Delhi in Class 12th, everyone told me children like me go to engineering or medical. I was scared of surgeries. So medical was out. Y2K had just hit (I entered Engineering in 2001), so ECE was a choice again made by my parents. After Engineering, companies were coming into campus. All that mattered was to make money. So I got into a good paying job not knowing if that was what I really wanted. It was only a few years into the job that I started feeling unhappy with the way my career was shaping. Despite all the money, status and success, I was not really enjoying. And that is when I started asking myself what I wanted to do, introspected on what my strengths were and what I would want as a long-term career. I saw PMs around me and I liked what they were doing. I did a lot of introspection in marrying my strengths as a professional with the choices available to me. I then saw what it would take to get here and decided to take a break to do my MBA and get into product management.
On the IIM Campus, I did not take up any job offers even though they were paying me well, simply because they were not aligned with my long-term career goals. Eventually, I got into Yatra.com as Product Manager, Holidays. Since then, there has been no looking back.
Q2. So, what does a product manager do?
A product manager (PM) is someone who sits between business and technology and helps draw the fine balance. The PM owns the customer experience of a product. Every time, you experience a product, be it physical or digital, the PM has gone through enough hurdles to ensure your experience is the best in terms of user flows and the product is intuitive enough for you to adapt to.
I am now with Amazon Home Services, building a product to help customers avail Amazon’s services at home. So, I talk to customers, understand what would make them comfortable with people coming into their homes, how they would select a service partner and so on. I then design the tech-product to come up with the product tactical and strategical roadmap and plan its execution. As part of Paytm, I worked as Head of Seller Products. I met a lot of sellers and asked them what features could I provide them for making selling easier for them. I then worked backward and executed on the product strategy with the goal of making selling easy for vendors.
Q3. How does an MBA help in a product manager’s role?
An MBA helped me bridge the gap between technical skills and business understanding. My MBA sharpened my skills in stakeholder management and time management. It made my thinking more structured, which helped in writing product documents as part of my job.
Q4. What do you think you would have lacked if you moved into product management without an MBA?
As an engineer, I was given a task which I completed without understanding the impact of my work on the overall business. As a product manager, I now ensure all my engineers just don’t think of ‘how’ to solve a problem but even why is that problem important to be solved over all the other problems.
Q5. How did IIMC help you find a job in product management?
I found my job post-MBA off campus. There were not too many product management openings on campus. And I had a location preference. Having IIM-C on my resume helped me gather recruiter’s attention offline. And then, it was up to an individual to take it ahead. An institute’s stamp is important but not the only thing which makes a difference.
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