Gurpreet

Why Product Management by Gurpreet

PM Fellow | Cohort I
Product Management is an amalgamation of real-life skills and is much more than any regular unidimensional profile.

It provides the opportunity to grow cross-functionally as it requires to work with diverse teams, ranging from engineering and marketing to operations, finance, and design etc., with the goal to build cutting edge solutions for end user. An ideal PM has the following traits / qualities:

  • Empathy towards the needs of the users.
  • The ability to get all teams working with influence and without any authoritative power overthem.
  • Technical competency to communicate effectively with the Engineering team.
  • Business Knowledge to build products which are scalable and profitable for the organization.
  • Analytical thinking to identify potential pain points of customers and rectify them.
  • Strategic thinking to ensure smooth roll out and acceptance of the product in the market, with the aim to maximize the market share.
  • The ability to prioritize features to be built from a given list
  • The skill to say ‘No’ to teams or clients if required in a certain situation (communication skills).

How am I a good fit?

I’ve been working in a technical role (currently a Java Developer) from the last few years, so I have the firsthand experience of building & deploying products for customers, fulfilling their needs. In the next step of my career, I’d like to work as a Product Manager, to explore the business side of the tech industry. I possess the required leadership experiences from my job where I led my team to deliver the desired results, and college where I led 2000+ students by being the General Secretary of the IEEE student branch. I’ve organized large scale events & worked on various team projects, where I learnt and enhanced the skills of teamwork, prioritization, effective communication etc. much needed for PMs.

Majority of the Product Management skills are highly practical in nature, which means that those can be expanded and implemented in our regular day to day life as well. Rightly said, Product Management is a lifestyle. For example, taking our own career as a product and being its Product Manager, we can prioritize and pick few learning and development assignments, side hustles, office projects etc. out of many to fulfill the larger need of gaining expertise in a certain field. This exercise will require analytical and strategic thinking and domain knowledge etc. to take an informed decision. Having gone through all these steps, I feel ready for my next leap, of becoming a PM.

My aim

Through this role, I can develop an entrepreneurial mindset by being the CEO of my product. It will be an exponential learning curve for me to experience the complete product life cycle, from ideation to roll out. With the rapid expansion of automation practices across all fields, the need of digital products, and hence Product Managers has sky-rocketed and the trend is expected to continue for the next few decades. I’m super interested to build AI-ML based products which are redefining our lifestyles these days. This also implies that there are ample growth opportunities for professionals in this area.
Created with