How I got into "Product Management"?

Introduction

Product Management is one of the most challenging professions that one can go for (or get sucked into). Over the years PM community has matured and is better that what it was 10 years back. This has created entry barriers and we see recreation of the age where a SAP certification was the golden ticket to success.

Entry barrier to get into SAP consulting was certification. People got the certification, some of them got pulled into the industry due to very high demand (Industry was going through the ERP transformation). Rest ended up spending on certification and struggling to find jobs. 

Today the industry is going through "digital transformation" and there is very high demand for product managers. But PMing is not a job that can be taught via a structured curriculum.

You have to earn your medals by going through the grunt, on this blog I will talk about how you can breakthrough into a PM role. 

In this post I will focus on how I got into Product Management.

My Engineering debacle

Random guy working on lathe

I did my graduation with mechanical engineering as a major subject. I jumped into the job market when the world was in recession (2008) add my average acads to this mix!

With my credentials I managed to get into a Marine Design Consultancy, I left my first job in 45 days. I just could not imagine myself working on the loadicator software. A loadicator is used on ship and as the name suggests it would indicate in which section the ship must be loaded for the best stability.

This really did not give me the kick and I switched to another job, this time it was about reading engineering drawings of vessels and converting them into production drawings. As time passed by I felt that design in 80% of cases is just extrapolating a tried and tested design and tweaking it basis the new requirement.

Example: A screw jack is a screw jack it will lift vehicles, there can be a mechanical or a hydraulic operated but that's about it. You throw the load numbers, tradeoff on material cost vs design vs usability and there you have design of a screw jack. 

The same was case with ship design (or even worse). The practice was to take basic design of the required type of vessel and extrapolate it basis the application, load carrying capacity and size of ship. There you have the hull design.

The "Trigger" to get out of the comfort zone

All this looked bounded by theories formulated over the years. At this point I took a call that I need to explore more, getting into a business role seemed to be attractive as it gives you an opportunity to do so much more than making designs / doing Maths. Hence an MBA degree was the go to option in order to be able to move into different role.

The not so glorious MBA journey

An MBA can help you realign your career!

It was 2010 when I was done with all the CATs, XATs, SET and MH-CET. I managed to score 94% ile in the MH CET, apparently that was not enough to get into the best b-school. This gave me time to read a lot and grasp a lot of new business concepts. One of our professors suggested to analyze the Assets, Liabilities, Operating Cost, PAT and Revenue.

I compared M&M, Tata Motors, TCS, Infosys. There it struck me that all companies that are into production / manufacturing and deal with real assets are high on Assets, Revenue and Operating cost.

Which means the IT counter parts give a better ROI. I carried forward this learning / analogy till date.

Breakthrough into "Product Management"

Yes, PMs get screwed from all angles :D

Post MBA (2012) I got placed on campus and got to work with a product company and this was my first interaction with IT / tech. 

Having said that this was far from the kind of "product management" what was happening lets say at Flipkart in 2012. I intend to write another blog to talk about my post MBA journey in detail.