Edition 6

AUG '21

PRODMAG
Demystifying the world of Product Management

IN THIS ISSUE

This edition of ProdMag begins with demystifying the role of PM

along with the various misconceptions attached to it. The issue also
covers a detailed interview with a PM intern elucidating his summer
internship experience. Followed by which we have explained some of
the latest tech topics in layman's terms. Finally, Harsh Gupta,
PGP'16, shares his experience as a PM in Amazon. We have also
added a resource page to help you get started on the Product
Management ride

FOLLOW US |
 INTRODUCTION TO
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
"What is product management?" - A question, when asked,
would fetch one several different but overlapping definitions,
all pointing to the fact that product management as a field has
loosely defined boundaries.
A reasonable way to understand the field is by describing the
need for a product manager.
Need For a Product Manager
In his book - INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products
Customers Love, Marty Cagan talks about his experience with
building a product at HP. The product being developed was
worked upon by engineering by continually innovating over a
year. It was innovative, indicated by the several patents it
added to HP's portfolio. A trained sales force aggressively
marketed it. Despite ticking all the right boxes in the
engineering process, the product was a complete failure in the
market. While being technically impressive, the product was
not something the customers needed.
Marty Cagan's experience point's to two key questions that
have to be answered before building a product:-
What to build?
Is what we are building useful?
It is the responsibility of a product manager to answer these
questions to ensure that the product being engineered is
worthwhile to build
1
By Rohan Patnaik
PGP 2020-22
Formally defined:
A product manager is responsible for evaluating
opportunities and determining what gets built and
delivered to the customer.
Product Management Skillset
A fundamental attribute of a good product manager is having a
product thinking mindset - the skill to understand what makes
a product worthwhile. Julie Zhou (ex-VP of product design at
Facebook) posits that a product thinking mindset can be built
by inculcating the habit of observation and inquiry.
Observation involves paying attention to how customers react
to a product. A product manager practices observation at 3
levels:-
How they respond to a product
How the people around them react to a product
How the world reacts to a product- through reviews, surveys
etc.
Building a curiosity of figuring out the "Why" behind a
observation is essential to build the habit of inquiry. Customer
interviews, data analysis and secondary research are some of
the activities taken up by product managers to deepen their
understanding of the "Why" behind certain behavior.
Expectations from a Product Manager
A good product manager is expected to have the following
attributes/skills:-
Deep Understanding of the Customer: A product manager is
expected to be an expert in understanding the needs, desires
and pain-points of the customer.
Understanding of the Business: Understanding how the
business works enables product managers to align products
with the goals of the business.
Industry Knowledge: A product manager is expected to have a
thorough understanding of the industry the business he or she
works on exists in. For example, a Netflix program manager
needs to be up to date with the latest trends in technology,
customer expectations, competitor offerings in the content
streaming space
Product Management Fallacies
Fallacy 1 - Product Manager is a mini-CEO: While product
managers are held accountable towards the success or failure
of a product, they have no authority over the team involved in
building it. Exercising influence without authority is a
fundamental PM skill. Moreover, unlike a CEO a product
manager has no control over the resources of the business he
or she is working in.
Fallacy 2 - Product Manager is the sole decision maker on the
features to be built: It is the responsibility of the product
managers to convince the stakeholders on the viability and the
need of a feature. Therefore, it is important for a product
manager to involve the stakeholders in the ideation process
and understand their perspective.
2
Fallacy 3 - Product Management is the same as project
management: Product managers, as discussed, are responsible
for strategizing goals and features of products that get built.
On the other hand, project managers are responsible for
managing resources (workforce, money, etc.) that contribute to
the development of the product. A project manager has a
limited say over what features get built. Moreover a project
manager is involved primarily during the development cycle
while the product manager is involved before and after it
Fallacy 4 - Product Managers should know how to code:
Product managers bring product ideas to the market while
collaborating with engineering, design, marketing and
management without writing a single line of code. However, an
appreciation of technology as a competitive advantage and the
knowledge of emerging trends in it is a must.
Conclusion
The likes of Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Marissa Mayer
have risen to the top of some of the most innovative firms after
serving as product managers. This indicates that product
management is a field that leaders of tomorrow should pursue
and learn from.
References
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/il
n1iv/yall_might_like_this/
2. https://brainmates.com.au/brainrants/project-manager-vs-
product-manager/
3. https://future.a16z.com/product-thinking/
4. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love -
Silicon Valley Product Group
5. https://medium.com/swlh/10-dilbert-strips-that-show-a-
product-managers-life-ae0fcc7aa1b3

INTERN EXPERIENCE - MICROSOFT
Hello Krishna ! Could you give a brief introduction
about your educational qualification and work
experience?
I passed out of NIT Calicut in Electrical Engineering in
2017, and for the last three years before joining IIMA, I
have been working with TATA motors. I worked
predominantly on the infotainment system, which also
included developing vehicle connectivity apps for iOS and
Android devices. My primary job responsibilities were
developing product roadmaps, design, and delivery of
various features across all Tata Passenger vehicles.
What were some of the factors which helped you in
narrowing down PM field for your summer internship ?
Before joining IIMA, I interacted with various seniors
across B-Schools to better understand each sector. Based
on the information obtained, I found out that my previous
work experience had a good skill overlap with the product
management sector. Also, I was passionate about
technology and building new things, which fell right into
the product management bucket for me. Another
important factor personally for me was that as compared
to other sectors, the workload is relatively lower in PM,
allowing you to maintain a healthy work-life balance
3
By Sai Krishna Narra
PGP 2020-22
How did you go about with your preparation for the
Product Management sector?
Shortlists are somewhat unpredictable, and I decided to
hedge the risk by prepping for multiple domains. I
started with consult sector preparation in late
September. A good amount of consult prep overlaps with
Product Management. It also helps you develop a
structured thinking approach to solving problems. Late
October, I started with PM prep. A vital aspect of PM
prep would be mock interviews, and it is crucial to have a
prep group to do mock interviews with. Apart from this, I
used Decode & Conquer and ProdMan club prep material
“Futuristic Outlook to Product management”. Following
PM blogs like Product Folks and Stellar Peers helps you
keep in touch with the latest happenings in the PM space.
Exponent channel on YouTube gives you an in-depth view
of how PMs of the top companies tackle interview
questions
Could you give a short brief of your interview
experience?
Microsoft had a two-stage interview process:- Group Fly
and Interview. In the Group Fly process, you are given a
design problem to solve, which is later presented to
senior PMs.
Once you have aced the Group Fly round, the interview
process starts the next day. There were two rounds in the
interview process. First-round was focused majorly on
product design questions where I wasn’t able to drive the
interview. However, the second round was a general
discussion sort of round where we discussed the major
happenings in the technology space, and I was able to
drive the interview to my comfort zone to a certain extent
What do you think were some key factors which you
think helped you ace the interview?
Would you recommend any particular courses that
you felt were quite helpful during your internship
during the first year?
Few Courses from the Information System domain like
IEB (Internet-Enabled Businesses) and TBIT
(Transforming Business through Information Technology)
were quite helpful. These courses brush up on the latest
technologies and provide insights on how these
technologies are leveraged to turn around businesses.
Apart from that, BRM (Business Research Methods)
provides much-needed exposure to primary and
secondary research methodologies. Communication
courses like WAC were quite useful while drafting PRD
(Product Requirement Document) during the internship

In Group Fly round, coming up with a clearly defined

problem statement simplified the whole problem-solving
process. Also, while tackling the design question, I took
into consideration the competitors and benchmarked my
product design against them which I felt differentiated
my submissions from others. In interview rounds, Being
up to date with all the latest happening in the tech space
helped me a lot and allowed me to drive the interview
How does an average day in the life of a product
management intern look like?
How important do you think is having a relevant
background necessary for Product Management?
Having a tech background helps to a certain extent but is
not at all mandatory, and definitely, coding or the
knowledge of it isn’t expected in the majority of PM
roles. Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and
identifying the problems and solution is what PM is all
about. Apart from these, keeping yourself abreast with
the latest happening in the tech world would help to a
great extent

One of the best parts about my internship was the level of

freedom provided to me in terms of ownership of the
project. With complete ownership of the project, it
became pretty easy to structure the project flow to my
comfort level. A significant chunk of the time was spent
interacting with customers and CX ( customer experience
) teams to better understand the customer needs pain
points and requirements. It also involved a good amount
of secondary research like journals to identify the right
technology stack needed for the idea, benchmarking
competitors’ offerings, etc. Apart from this, there were
regular interactions with senior PMs to collect feedback
about various ideas. Ultimately as Satya Nadella puts it
"Everyday at Microsoft you strive to make others cool"

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 EL5: EXPLAIN LIKE
I AM A FIVE YEAR OLD
Cloud Computing
Imagine you are writing an assignment (Processing data) while
in the classroom, and you run out of sheets (Storage), and you
don’t have enough time (Slow computation) or money (High
Capex for new on-premise infra) to buy a whole new set of
papers. So, you borrow a few sheets(economic) from your
wealthy friend (Cloud), who has infinite sheets. Not only do you
borrow sheets (increased storage), but you also ask him to
write some pages for you (Computation power). Now let us say
you borrowed only two and started writing, only to realize you
need more, so you ask for more and keep asking (On-Demand
Service) till your requirement is met and your friend too keeps
writing till your assignment is complete (Scalability). As a
payback, you give your friend chocolate (Pay as you go and
Measured service) for all the help so far. Not only will the
friend not tell others that he helped you (Security), he will
always be there for you (High availability)
Internet of Things
Ever happened that you were 5 mins out of the house and
realized you might have forgotten to switch off the AC/TV.
Imagine using your watch or phone to check if the AC is on and
turn it off in case. How did this happen? We watch YouTube on
the phone because the phone is connected to the internet. With
IoT, all appliances can be connected to the internet. Until now
internet helped us connect and interact with each other. With
IoT, inanimate objects can sense the surroundings to interact
with other devices part of the network. Think of it this way;
your alarm wakes you up, so IoT can make windows open the
blinds automatically, turn on the milk heater for you, start
filling in hot water into the tub. You ask, how would the devices
know?
5
By Nishant Wasad
PGP 2021-23
Well, they have senses (Sensors) just like us humans and can
receive communication signals. Their senses can detect,
calculate, and are much faster at work. But not all devices that
we have right now can do this. We need to buy IoT-enabled
devices to make this communication happen. We can seamlessly
control the devices through Phones or let them function on
their own based on the automation and sensory inputs.
Blockchain
Think of Blockchain as five separate drawing sheets between 5
students (Nodes) where everyone has a permanent marker
(immutable transactions) for drawing, and the sheets are
connected through the internet (peer to peer). So, if one
student draws on a particular sheet, it appears on all the other
sheets as well. Once anything is scribbled by anyone (Block
created), it is visible to all and becomes unchangeable. If I want
to make a new drawing, I will have to make a separate drawing
and cannot correct the earlier one. And even if somehow, I find
a way to change the first drawing (Try to create a fork) and
make any changes, others will be able to verify that this was
not the original drawing and hence remove me from the sheet
group. Now scale this to millions of people with millions of
sheets. Everyone on the sheet (Blockchain) knows what has
happened (all transactions) till now, even if joined late to the
sheet. Although, Is it 100% scribble correction (Immutable)
proof? Well, not if >50% of the sheet owners say that the
change is legitimate (BFT problem) and not a deliberate
attempt to modify. It works on a majority basis (Consensus)
between the sheet users.
References
Image 1 source: http://voicehub.blogspot.com/2012/06/cloud-
computing-with-cartoons.html
Image 2 Source: https://whatsthebigdata.com/2017/02/24/cloud-
computing-cartoons/

BEEN THERE. DONE THAT.
KNOW YOUR ALUMNI
What was the rationale behind you choosing
Product Management as a career?
Product Management (PM) as a career was right at the
sweet spot of my areas of interest: Business, technology
and design. Pre-MBA, I worked in a technology role with
an MNC called NetApp. While I enjoyed that role due to
the deep tech knowledge required, I was not fully aware
and in control of the business impact of what I was doing.
Hence, I wanted a role which not just let me stay
connected to the technology behind the product but also
allow me to shape up the product based on my vision and
drive growth for the company. I found out about Product
management as a role from a close friend who had just
joined Flipkart as an Associate PM. When he described
what he did on a day-to-day basis, I knew that is what I
wanted to do. I was naturally good at numbers and
analysis and had a creative bent of mind as well in terms
of design and aesthetics. Hence, Product management
was a natural fit for me and preparing for it is what I
focused on throughout my MBA journey
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HARSH GUPTA
PM @ Amazon Pay Smart Stores
PGP 2014-2016
PGP 2009-11
Could you please describe what the role of a
product manager is
In the words of Marty Cagan from his book “Inspired”,
the job of a Product Manager (PM) is “to discover a
product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. He further
says that “product management is the intersection
between technology, business and UX and a good PM must
be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three
and conversant with practitioners in all”. Simply put, a
PM owns the product development process end-to-end;
from problem identification to ideation to research to
prioritization to execution and finally, driving adoption
in the market. That does not mean that the PM will do
each of these tasks individually. In fact, a PM does not
have any direct authority over most of the things needed
to make their product successful, but they are still
responsible for bringing everything together by speaking
in the language understood by each stakeholder, building
the product and making it successful

What does a typical day in your life look like
My typical day as a Product Manager is spent on the
following activities:
Deep-dives (20%): This involves looking at business and
customer data from various sources to develop insights.
The data sources may be daily reports which track
various business metrics at different cuts to see if
metrics are moving in the right direction or the feedback
we receive from customers, sellers and salespeople at the
offline stores on the issues they are facing or the
improvements they are suggesting. Deep-dives may also
need to be done on any escalations which we receive
from sellers/customers to check if the issue is a one-off
one or a widespread one.
New ideas (20%): This involves interacting with various
internal and external stakeholders to brainstorm on new
ideas which the team can work on to improve the metrics
or test out some hypothesis. For some of the ideas where
we want leadership support to get additional resources
or funding to pilot it out, I write PR-FAQs to detail out
the idea in terms of customer problem and our approach
to solve it along with detailed benchmarking and
financial/operational groundwork.
Detailing out and discussing product requirements with
tech (40%): For the ideas which have been prioritized, I
need to gather the business requirements from various
stakeholders and detail out the product requirements to
be handed over to tech. This involves working with the
User Research team to gather customer/seller insights,
working with the Design team to design the end-to-end
user journey and detail out the CX (customer experience)
mock-ups and align the technical requirements with the
Tech team. After the project has been picked up, there
might be some complications/blockers which come up
along the way leading to delays, so I then need to jointly
brainstorm with tech and business teams on possible
simplifications to unblock the project and launch faster.
Project tracking & updates (10%): For ongoing projects,
there are progress tracking mechanisms like program
updates, bi-weekly reviews which we run. There are also
email updates which need to be sent out to various
internal and external stakeholders for keeping them
updated on the progress.
Miscellaneous tasks (10%): These might involve ad-hoc
tasks like helping out team members with
troubleshooting, operational tasks or even official tasks
but not related to regular work.
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What typical journey does a product go through
to take shape
At Amazon, the product lifecycle is broken down into the
following stages:
Ideation: We follow a “Working backwards” process at
Amazon which essentially means working backwards from
the customer’s needs. It involves writing a Press release
(PR) and Frequently asked questions (FAQs) document
which is commonly called PR-FAQ. The PR is an idealized
press release that would get published when the product
launches in the future. It tries to articulate the customer
problem being solved and the approach to the solution.
Some of the questions which the PR tries to address are:
Who is the customer? What is the biggest customer
problem/opportunity area? What is your approach to the
solution? How do you know what customers want? How
will you define success for your product? The FAQs try to
detail out the aspects which cannot be covered fully in
the PR. The PR-FAQ document is a good gating function.
If you can’t create a PR that is clear to all your
stakeholders, then it is probably a bad product idea:
maybe you are cramming too many things into one
product, or the impact of the product is not addressing a
real pain-point. If stakeholders are asking questions that
you can’t answer in your FAQs, then you haven’t put
enough thought into the product yet to start building it.
For example, while launching Amazon Pay Smart Stores,
we recognized that customers prefer shopping offline as
they want to experience the product first-hand but the
experience at the store was sub-optimal. Hence, we were
looking to improve the offline shopping experience by
bringing the goodness built for online shopping like the
transparency of information (ratings, reviews, rich
product detail pages etc., high-res images, videos),
affordability levers like cashback, instant discounts, no-
cost EMI and a best-in-class payment experience.
Research: As part of the PR-FAQ process itself, a lot of
research is done to understand customers pain points
and what they actually want. This can be done in various
forms: (i) Primary interviews with various customer
personas (ii) Focus group discussions (iii) quantitative
surveys to understand relative importance of various pain
points (iv) Competitive benchmarking to see what
solutions exist in the market. For example, while
launching Amazon Pay Smart Stores, we interviewed
stakeholders from brands like Samsung, large organized
sellers like Croma, smaller single-stores and 50+ end
customers as well in order to understand their pain
points w.r.t. offline shopping. That research was a key
input into writing the PR-FAQ for this program and
defining the customer and seller problems we wanted to
focus on.

Pilot: With the PR-FAQ, everyone gets aligned on the
long-term vision for the product. However, to get started,
small scale pilots need to be planned to actually validate
if the hypotheses mentioned in the PR are true or not.
These pilots might be non-tech or tech-driven in nature
based on the hypothesis being validated. Each pilot has a
sharply defined objective, metrics to track and success
criteria. For example, the very first pilot we ran for
Smart Stores was in our company cafeteria where we
partnered with a 3P seller to sell Amazon devices like
Kindle, Echo etc. It was a light-weight tech solution
whereby we placed QR codes in front of all products. The
customer would need to scan the QR code using their
Amazon app to land on a product detail page (like
Amazon.in) where the product details, images, videos,
specifications etc. were provided to browse through and
make an objective purchase decision. We also ran an
exclusive cashback offer of 5% back for this pilot where
we manually credited cashback to customers’ account by
next day. The objective of this pilot was to get feedback
from customers on the usability of this experience and
assess which aspects they find valuable. The success
criteria was an 80%+ satisfaction score (we actually
ended up achieving 90%+).
Launch & continuous improvement: After multiple pilots
to get defined validations, we launch an MVP (minimum
viable product) version of the product which we believe
will address the major pain points for the customer.
Through this MVP, we continuously monitor how
customers are using our product and what are the key
friction points they are encountering. We also define a
set of metrics which we track on an ongoing basis. This
too feeds into how the product is performing. Based on
this feedback loop, we continuously iterate and improve
the product to achieve the MLP status (minimum lovable
product) from MVP.
What do you think are some of the skills that
students at IIMA can hone to become good product
managers?
In my opinion, there are 5 key skills which a Product
Manager needs in order to succeed in his/her role:
Empathy: This will help PMs put themselves in their
customers’ shoes and go through the same pain they go
through. This is essentially the starting point to identify
customer pain points to solve for. One of the best ways
for students to develop their empathy is to talk to as
many potential customers as possible on the problems
they face and be an active listener in the conversation
without any judgement or bias.
Curiosity: While empathy helps PMs identify pain points,
curiosity will help them go deeper by asking the right
probing questions, looking at the right data points and
arriving at the root causes of those pain points. At
Amazon, we follow a “5-whys” process to arrive at root
causes i.e. you should not stop asking “why?” till you
reach at least the fifth level of your deep-dive.
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·Prioritization: Using empathy and curiosity, PMs will
have a laundry list of pain points their customers are
going through and the potential solutions they may build
to solve them. The next step is to identify and focus on
the right set of problems to solve, given that bandwidth
will always be a constraint. This is where prioritization
comes in. I typically define a prioritization framework in
terms of severity/urgency of the problem, size of the
opportunity, cost of the solution, ease of taking it to
market, etc. against which we weigh all of my projects
and choose to prioritize a set of them. The more objective
and transparent your prioritization framework is, the
easier it is to align everyone to it.
Stakeholder management: Once the PM has their own
priorities clear, the next step is to align all stakeholders
to their thought process. PMs usually do not have any
direct authority over their stakeholders like business,
tech, design, hence this is a particularly important skill
to have as different stakeholders might have conflicting
priorities. This is where the PM’s storytelling skills,
relationship management, negotiation, and conflict
management skills come to play for aligning everyone to
a common goal and inspiring them to deliver.
Diligence: The last but very important skill for a PM to
have is the diligence to keep iterating, learning and
exercising all of the above skills on a continuous basis to
keep understanding their customers’ problems and
refining their product to solve them in the best manner
possible.
As a thought leader at one of the best product
companies in the world, what do you think is the
future of this industry? Can we expect a massive
boom in some particular sector? If so, then, how
can we prepare to leverage the opportunity?
E-commerce is in a very nascent stage right now. It
accounts for <5% of the overall retail market in India.
>95% of customers still prefer shopping offline. Hence,
the potential to scale up is huge. Companies are trying to
be where their customers are i.e. both online and offline.
The future lies in an emerging strategy called O2O
(online to offline) where the thought process is that
online and offline channels complement each other
instead of competing. The purpose of O2O commerce is
to create awareness for products and services online,
then make them visit the store to make a purchase. This
gives customers a chance to visit brick and mortar stores,
chat with salespeople, experience the product in store
and combine that with an online way to analyse and
evaluate products, get the best in-store offers and use
their saved cards, credit line etc. for payment. In my
opinion, this is going to be the future of commerce
 What do firms look for in an intern? How much do
they weigh relevant work experience against
problem-solving and technical expertise/awareness?

The primary thing which product companies look for

while hiring is the candidate’s approach to problem
solving. Generally, the problem statements you will
encounter in product companies are fairly open-ended
and ambiguous. For example, in my Amazon internship
interview, I was asked “If you wanted to launch Google
Maps in Uganda, what would be your go-to-market plan
for it?”. Interviewers try to evaluate how candidates
handle such problem statements, the kind of probing
questions asked to dissect the problem, ability to break
down ambiguous problem statements into manageable,
logical chunks etc. For developing this critical thinking
skill, the closest preparation material which can be used
is consulting case books. Though the industry examples
in those case studies might not be relevant for product
management, the thought process definitely is.
Candidates should also keep themselves abreast of the
latest happenings in the world of technology by reading
tech blogs like TechCrunch, reading business/tech
articles, critically evaluating the various
products/services/apps available in the market,
understanding the problem they’re trying to solve and
how their approach can be improved. These 2 things will
help develop critical thinking required to ace the field of
product management.

9
 RESOURCES TO GET STARTED WITH

Books and other prep materials

Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management - Lewis C. Lin
Cracking the PM Interview - Gayle Laakmann
ProdMan placement REM sessions

Futuristic Outlook to Product Management

https://store.pothi.com/book/ebook-prodman-club-iim-ahmedabad-
futuristic-outlook-product-management/

PM Blogs
Product Folks - https://www.theproductfolks.com/
StellarPeers - https://stellarpeers.com/
PMExercises - https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/

Youtube Channels
Exponent

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