How I got into Product Management

There are several articles on the internet about breaking into PM, so I want to set the context before you read further to help you make the best use of your valuable time, this piece will be most useful to those that are/have been in the same situation as me. I grew up in Bangalore, India did my school and college there; where I learned computer science. I then moved to Boston University(BU) for my master’s in computer science and now work in Silicon Valley as a Product Manager. And this is my story. 

Product Management as a career choice has gained a lot of momentum over the past few years from engineers and non-engineers alike. More so the rise of the PM role in the software space has created the buzz. Software is still going to eat the world, and the role of the PM is only going to become hard to get. It’s a job where you solve technical problems for your users, the skillsets for the role of a PM vary company to company and there are certain abilities that are needed for people to be successful in this role. 

I come from a family that has people in academia, business, manufacturing, IT Services - most of whom are engineers. The least risky career path for me was engineering, so that’s what I did. I did put thought into it and it was something I wanted to do after researching in depth. Having heard stories of how Infosys started in a garage near my house and now is a billion-dollar behemoth, I was keen to explore what they did and how they became successful. I got bitten by the bug of tech entrepreneurship and started doing small side projects before I began college. 

I have always been lucky to have some friends doing great stuff; in college I met Palak during Udbhav - our college festival and we started brainstorming so many ideas everyday as ambitious college kids. We even spoke of an Amazon Go like product for consumers, spoke to some investors about it back in 2014. We never understood the other side of the spectrum, the businesses that would opt into this method of cashier-less checkout, that too in India. I was grossly not prepared to do it. That never stopped me though, even prior to this I worked on a bunch of crazy ideas and tried executing most of them and learned a lot along the way. 

More importantly, I got to meet really amazing people and mentors along the way, one of them offered me a part-time role to help them figure out what to build. They were 4 founders, 3 engineers who had experience in the Valley who had moved back to Bangalore and one business person concentrating on marketing and fundraising, they got me and another designer on board. I didn’t know what it meant then but it was a role where I had to go out speak to potential users, validate what the team built, collect feedback and also help in fundraising. I then always wanted to do something for a startup apart from programming more so on the business side, this seemed like a great opportunity and I jumped on. As work progressed I did more of the product validation and completed the customer feedback loop to the team and eventually started managing the execution of the features that came through the feedback. Seeing my work a mentor then told me to consider becoming a Product Manager. For a 19 year old, that seemed very exciting, the more I researched about the job and career prospects it was really meant for me and since then I’ve optimized to become one.

After working with several startups in Bangalore and working on some ideas of my own at the end of engineering I had to choose what I wanted to do and get paid for. Though my college had great companies visiting for recruiting, none of them were hiring for a role that was meant for me. I had a few options then; either return to one of the startups that were in hyper growth stage at that time(now a couple of them have been acquired, well bump missed that boat) or go to graduate school in the US. I chose the latter, I picked Data Science at BU. While at BU I learned, actually went to class - interacted with some pretty amazing peers from around the world. This experience was very valuable to understand people, markets and embracing diversity. I got a taste of the Boston education and entrepreneurial ecosystem from Harvard, MIT, BU, Tufts, BC, and Northeastern. I used to spend time around Build Lab at university around several peers working on some ideas. By this time I had worked on several ideas and with people from around the world so I thought getting an internship during grad school would be a natural segway.

Plot twist, it wasn’t :) - mainly companies and recruiters followed a specific format for resumes and work description that I wasn’t aware of, well most international students weren’t so spending time working on the resume I thought would help me getting interviews. That wasn’t enough either, my resumes were going into black-holes of career sites of companies, I needed to stand out among the 1000+ applicants that apply for the role. This is where having a presence online by giving product breakdowns on Medium, Twitter and engaging in Product Hunt communities helped. I remember that a Facebook Messenger DM to the CEO helped me get my product role for the summer of 2017. 

I continued working with startups as a Product adviser and also helped businesses in India with expertise in building more global products and I’ve learned and shipped a ton over the years by collaborating with many people across geographies.

In summary if anyone wants to break into product, apart from cracking the interview of course :) :-

1. Be entrepreneurial - execute on any crazy idea in your head with your friends/peers. Learn and grow from it. Product Hunt is such a good channel to put your idea out.

2. Talk to users, take that feedback into producing results and measure the relevant metrics (I’ll write more on this later).

3. Learn more about markets/sectors you’d like to build for and talk to people who have built for those - don’t underestimate the value of Twitter, Facebook in this.