Abhishek Gandotra

Who Killed Product Management in India? 🔎 This was the title of of a recent article by Praveen Gopal Krishnan on The Ken, he puts forth some interesting points (link the comments). One key point that stood out was someone saying - 90% of Product Manager roles have become redundant. Engineers, designers, and business professionals can now take on tasks once exclusive to PMs. Harsh? Maybe. True? To some extent. So, what does the future hold for PMs? I believe the future lies in the rise of the Full Stack Product Management and in everyone gaining a strong product sense. Let’s dive into details below. Article Insights: Product Management has shifted from a creative, intuitive role to a bureaucratic, data-driven one. Instead of creating innovative products, PMs are bogged down with frameworks, PRDs, and justifying decisions to stakeholders. AI is also automating many PM tasks, further pushing PMs toward obsolescence. Companies like Airbnb have even removed traditional PM roles, showing how product development can happen without them. Know thy Product: The core issue, in my view, is that we don’t truly understand what their product is. Too often, the "product" is mistaken for the app or the website—the enablers—rather than the value delivered to the customer. -> What’s the Real Product? Flipkart/Amazon: Not the app, but the goods they deliver 📦 Netflix: Not the platform, but the content 🎬 Zomato/Swiggy: It’s the food 🍔 Gmail/WhatsApp: The network effect they create 📱 The actual product is the core value, and whoever is owning it is the one owning the customer too. There are spaces where PMs can own the product, like in B2C tech (Gmail, YouTube) or B2B SaaS Applications; but in industries like e-commerce or D2C, the product isn't the app; it's the actual goods experience or service. Everyone Needs Product Sense: It’s not just PMs who need to get this. Whether you’re in business, ops, engineering, analytics, or business ops, having a product mindset is crucial to understanding the end value delivered to customers. Companies should encourage leaders and ICs alike to gain product exposure. Product sense helps you understand users, business impact, and how to solve real problems. Whats the moat for some wanting to be a PM or who is a PM: Enter the Full Stack Product Manager The future of PMs is Full Stack, blending creativity, data, and technical skills. The Full Stack PM can: Identify customer problems, Conduct discovery, Prototype and build solutions, Collaborate with engineers to build scalable products, Market and sell the product, Iterate based on feedback. AI and no-code tools are enabling this shift, allowing PMs to own the entire product lifecycle. What do you think of this? Share your views in the comments below and follow me (Vellanki Sriharsha) for more such insights. #ProductManagement #FullStackPM #AI #ProductLeadership #FutureOfWork

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Data is the ‘Brahmastra’ of Product Managers and the most effective way to drive Product Development. One of the main task of a Product Managers is Stakeholder Management. Each Stakeholder has an opinion. The superpower PMs can use to get their idea accepted in conflicting situation, is by using relevant data. PMs use data to align stakeholders with roadmaps, explain the benefits of what's been built, and prioritise what to build next. With constant pressure to learn faster and do more with data, PMs need to remain focused and efficient in this arena, with these simple rules: 1. Gather implicit data - There can’t be any excuses to it. There will be other priorities, but PM must find small ways to quantitatively measure user behaviour patterns across the product. Real visibility into how users will react to new features will come with this. Recognising features which hits the bulls eye, one with incremental benefit or a feature which is a backlash feature. Or even results of A/B testing. Look at transactional data, events, heat maps, logs, performance or error rates.  2. Qualitative Data is explicit data which needs to be given highest priority - In order to tell a story, PMs generally lean on implicit data to validate their hypotheses. But the devil is in the details. Whenever a particular data is to be analysed, qualitative feedback shared directly by users needs to be taken. E.g - after the release of a particular feature, the TAT has reduced, but qualitative analysis shows that users have moved to work arounds rather than the intended usage. This sort of analysis leads to protecting the bigger picture. 3. Reiterating:Always go to your customers when a qualitative or quantitaive difference is observed -  If we want to see how people are using your product naturally, questions based on their unique context about using the product in specific situations needs to be asked . For workarounds, special note to be taken. 4. Right users for the questions - While validating a data story, At B2B setup (both internal and external customers), product managers often engage with the C-suite as their customers. Their feedback might be different than the primary users of your product. Getting to the right users and posing the direct questions to them is very important 5. Track the right metrics -.As discussed above, measuring the right things needs to be ensured. Out of the many metrics that we may come across, we need to understand what metric will indicate that the product is succeeding in solving the customer problem in the way that we want.This is what we call as the outcome metrics.Eg-Revenue,NPS,Gross margin,Active users and so on. However when looking at the Outcome metrics we drill down to other metrics [More on this later] Caution : Staying clear of Goodhart's Law. - For example, if a call center employee is compensated for the number of calls made, those call numbers will go up but have potential adverse consequences (lower quality conversations)

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When it comes to instant payments, only two methods settle in seconds with 24/7 uptime: RTP and FedNow. The services are distinct, however, and companies are using both to maximize convenience and availability. See how payments today stack up for mid-size businesses in Citizens 2024 Payment Trends. http://spr.ly/6041dD54H #Payments #DigitalPayments

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