Beyond IIT

I have started BeyondIIT.com to help students build successful careers without prestigious degrees.

I want to help students discover that there are many paths to success. I also want to acknowledge that the Indian higher education system is stifling innovation and creativity.

The goals to get into an IIT is completely unreal. Less than 1% of students who apply get into an IIT and small fraction of them actually get the stream they wanted to study. This is because we do not have enough good engineering colleges

These are the problems. I’ll share solutions in future posts.

–Anubhav

Naval Ravikant’s Wisdom

I have been listening intently to Naval Ravikant’s podcast. It is titled Naval.

I will be listening to it again and will be listening to it with my kids who are 13 and 15 this weekend.

I strongly recommend it for these reasons:

  1. It is pithy
  2. The clarity of thought is amazing
  3. The presentation is clean
  4. It comes from the heart and is honest

Take a listen. Let me know what you liked the most about it.

https://overcast.fm/itunes1454097755/naval

–Anubhav

Product Management 101 at IIM A

I presented the following lecture to the Product Management and technology club at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in September 2018. Hope you enjoy it. 

Product Management 101 – Understand what product managers do and how they do their work.

In this talk you will learn 

  1. How to get hired as a product manager
  2. How not to get fired
  3. What are the skills needed to succeed as a PM
  4. How the job of a PM is different from company to company
  5. Which PM job is right for you

The audio is a bit distant so listen to this over headphones or in a quiet room.

–Anubhav

Essential Tools for Product Managers

Tools don’t guarantee your success as a PM but you should know what tools to use to be productive as a PM.

Paper and a Pen
First things first – write and draw out for idea and product flow. Super helpful to do this on paper before you get fancy in a design tool.

Work tracking
Just use outlook or Gmail if you do not want to get fancy. Work often comes to you via email and is delegated via email so master your email tools. Learn how to set reminders and schedule your work. 
Track your own work using Google keep or Trello

Both Outlook and Gmail have plugins for Trello.
https://blog.trello.com/tame-your-inbox-new-trello-add-on-for-gmail
https://help.trello.com/article/1075-outlook-add-in

You can also use Airtable. It is a modern version of excel with useful widget and better collaboration

Collaborating on documents
Use Google docs. Their collaboration capabilities are great. 
https://docs.google.com

Product roadmap planning
Use Trello and Excel.

Presentations
A key part of your work is telling stories. Use Keynote to make your presentation look good. You can also use powerpoint. If you are collaborating on a presentation with someone – drop all other presentation tools and use google slides

Design skills
Its important that you have a basic understanding of graphic design and UX design. This will help you build better presentations and have better conversations with Designers if you work on products that need design. That’s a trick question. All products need design. Play around with Adobe XD. Its free for individuals and great tool for Product Managers. 

Tracking team’s work
Software teams use JIRA or some other tool like that to track feature work. Use it. Trello is fine for small teams <10 in size 

Email me. I’d love to know what you are struggling with and how I can help. 

Warm regards,

–Anubhav
anubhav.rohatgi@gmail.com

Must have free resources for Product Managers

Product managers need to read a lot. Reading gives you better context for your decisions. It also helps you argue for your idea and sell it. 

If you read only one book on product management, read four steps to an epiphany. If you don’t the money to buy this book read this free PDF:

Click to access Four_Steps.pdf

Four steps to an epiphany PDF hosted by Stanford university.

Steve Blank has posted many videos on youtube to help you learn skills like:

  1. How to interview customers
  2. How not to interview customers
  3. How to find customers BEFORE building a product
  4. etc
Steve blank’s playlist on Youtube

Here are the next set of free resources for Product Managers

  1. Good product Manager / Bad Product Manager https://www.khoslaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/Good_Product_Manager_Bad_Product_Manager_KV.pdf
  2. What does google look for in a Product Manager  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntzB9pGsD3E
  3. Good product strategy : https://medium.com/@melissaperri/what-is-good-product-strategy-8d5587cb7429
  4. Sachin Rekhi on art of Product Management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huTSPanUlQM

If you read only one book on negotiation, read Getting More by Dr. Stuart Diamond

Here are the free blogs to follow on product mangement

  1. https://melissaperri.com/blog/
  2. Google Ventures YouTube channel
  3. Foundation with Kevin Rose including interviews with Ben Horowitz, Elon Musk, Om Malik, etc 

There are so many skills a PM needs to master including digital marketing, especially if you work in a small company where you do both product and customer acquisition. I love:

  1. Neil Patel and Eric Siu’s daily podcast at marketingschool.io
  2. Smartpassiveincome.com podcast by Patt Flynn

How to become a Product Manager

First of all, you are aiming too low. If you do everything I ask you to do below, I’ll be surprised if you still want to be a product manager.

Secondly, I get asked this question a lot so I’ve decided to come up a course for this over a long term but here is an actionable outline in the interim. If you want to transition to a PM role in your company or otherwise, you need to excel in these skills to get noticed.

  1. Customer empathy or Domain skills
  2. Business skills
  3. Strategic thinking skills
  4. Communication skills
  5. Educational qualifications
  6. It is always better to be great in one of these skills than being mediocre in all of them.

So, how do you build these skills?

Domain skills

Immerse yourself in the world of your customer. Seek time from your manager to spend a day or two with each segment of your users so that you can represent them in meetings in the office. Empathetic customer representation will get you noticed at the office.

Start building your network of users that are open to taking your calls respond to your emails to discuss your product. Get to 10 such users within 30 days. Make sure these 10 folks are not all from the same segment.

What’s the sign of success

You have a healthy network of users and you can list a day in their life as a user of your product. You can list their problems. You can quote their response to, why they like your product. You can draw a flow chart describing their workflow. You can list the folks they work with day to day and their titles. You can list other product that users tried before using your product.

Homework 1: Use powerpoint to document your activities in this area.

Business skills

Start your own business online.
Get an audience of 2000 people interested in your opinion before you build anything.

If not, learn about software businesses by listening to podcasts or reading blogs. Pay attention to numbers being shared on these blogs. For example: In June 2016 ConvertKit had a monthly recurring revenue of USD 100,000 and a margin of 50%.

How are software product sold?
What is the role of marketing? How do they do it?
What is the role of sales? How do they do it?

Learn how to validate ideas in the shortest amount of time.
• Create a kickstarter campaign for your idea
• Build a landing page for your idea and drive customers to it.
• Build a video for your idea
• Learn how to create wireframes to explain your idea
What’s the difference between a B2B business or a B2C software business? Why does the GTM difference drive different behaviors for the product team? How do the normal business metrics differ?

Homework 2: Create a presentation on what you learnt. What surprised you. Present to your friends and let them critique it.

What’s the sign of success

You can quote specific numbers and metrics in meetings. Instead of saying, “A lot of users want this feature” you say, “Between 10-20% of our users in segment “A” will find this feature useful based on conversations I’ve had with users”

  • Try to sell something. Start with smaller commitments:
  • Get people to buy your idea
  • Get people to give them your email address
  • Get people to give you < $5 for something you sell on gumroad or amazon or ebay.

You will get noticed at the office.

Strategic skills

Get reading.

Learn about the business world and how software businesses compete. Its much better to read about small businesses than large businesses. Buy and read HBR case studies in your domain.

Know that all business have to worry about Customer acquisition, engagement and retention. So, what are the most common tools that help business owners in these areas?

Understand normal what numbers for:
1. Click through rates on emails
2. Click through rates on web CTAs
3. Typical retention and conversion numbers of different software businesses
4. Software business models that work and why
a. Freemium
b. SaaS
What pricing strategies have been tried and work in your industry?

Homework 3: Create a presentation on what you’ve learnt. 10 slides only.

What’s the sign of success?

You have a point of view on product strategy and roadmap that you can defend. Since this is the highest value add activity in a business, its hard for a new person to claim mastery here, however, having a point of view on the world and is based on more than opinion helps get you noticed.

Communication skills

Do lack of writing and language skills coming in your way?
Most people are not going to call you out for bad grammar, wrong choice of words, and for rambling on and on unless you are really bad. So, if you are being called out already, you have a lot of word to do.

Few other questions to answer:

  • Do you look forward to communicating your point of view?
  • What would be your preferred communication channel – writing, drawing, speaking?
  • Do you have people around you that are great at writing, speaking? Why is that? What do they do that you don’t? Can they evaluate your skills in writing and speaking?

Most normal Indian folks like to speak fast in English. For a long time, speed of delivery was the only measure of language competence in our country. This has led to bad behavior. Slow down and be careful about the words you choose. Ensure people understand what you are saying before you rattle off another sentence.

Tips on writing

  1. First things first. Write! Write every day. Start a blog, even if its private. Stick to a schedule.
  2. Write everything twice. The first draft is never the final draft
  3. Write in short sentences
  4. Use spellcheck and grammar check
  5. Don’t use words that can be misconstrued misunderstood
  6. Remove every extraneous extra word and sentence
  7. Read other people’s work.

Tips on speaking

  1. Record yourself presenting on a topic for 5 minutes and play it back.
  2. Watch ted talks and youtube videos on presentation.
  3. Learn Graphic Design
    1. This deserves a long post. Let me know if you want it.
    2. Start with Canva.com or Spark.adobe.com for free

Homework 4: Go back and fix the design for each of the presentations you made in the past three homework assignments.

What’s the sign of success?

How often are you misunderstood? Are you able to influence the outcome of a meeting? Do you feel good about what you write?How consistent were you on your blog. Did you publish at least 80% of the dates you said you would?

Educational qualifications

This is a big blocker in India. I’ve always said that educational qualifications are the new caste system in India. It’s a bit harsh to say this but in a country with a large workforce, people are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. Educational qualifications are a good, quantifiable, defensible in a large company.

So, get an education that matters. If you don’t have a bachelor’s degree from a Tier 1 college, get a Masters from a tier 1 college. If you can’t get a master’s from a tier 1 college, get a part time masters, if you can’t get a master’s degree even then, then get a degree in the US. Its easier to get in US universities and it can really broaden your horizons.

If you can’t solve for education, get a mentor that believes in you and move groups, companies with her so that you can get the opportunities you want.

Sign of success

In career conversations, people do not quote your educational qualifications as a blocking issue. Or, doors that were closed yesterday are open today.

If you do all the above then chances are that you would get more interested in starting your business than becoming a product manager. That is a good thing. If you still want to be a product manager, then know this. It’s a lot of communication and selling your vision internally and monitoring metrics.

Working on new product ideas

Most product managers dream of working on a 1.0 project. They are unencumbered, new and yours. I am working on two 1.0 projects and the going has been slow and frustrating. If you do a good job as a product manager, you should constantly question your assumption before you put any resources

I was sharing my frustration with an influencer over a long walk in Hamburg when an interesting thing happened. I told him how I was confused about the path forward. I told him that I was getting conflicting messages from different stakeholders and customers. I told him that I wish I can really see these projects through and that I was worried.

People are normally happy commiserating. He did not. He heard me and then at the end of my rant, he reminded me what a luxury it is to be able to think big about your industry without any personal risk. He reminded me that I should enjoy the process of product discovery and not link it to an outcome. He reminded me that there is joy in doing what I was doing regardless of whether it was successful or not.

This was so refreshing and so needed. I had forgotten what it meant to be in the present.

Thank you Christian Glanzmann

–Anubhav