Product Manager - A mini-CEO?

This was the cliche doing the rounds when I had just joined as a PM in a leading e-commerce venture. Obviously, being a newbie I was proud and excited. I took that to mean the following,

1. Power to do whatever I wanted to with the product
2. Ability to give shape to my own thoughts
3. Can take the risk required to roll out a product, which is not agreeable to the vast majority
4. Get away with whatever s*#t you may have done with the product
5. You are your own master

and I was completely wrong!

What that meant, was actually the following :

1. Your customers are your masters
2. You will be questioned even if you have done the right thing. You almost always have to explain your decisions to  the stakeholders.
3. You will be at the mercy of the engineers to get things done for you
4. You will need to face failures and learn to live with it
5. Be the universal punching bag. If things go well, the engineers and customers will take credit. If things go bad, YOU will be blamed.

The saying( a PM being the CEO of his product ) is actually true though. Just that I had always got the job description of a CEO wrong(Any aspiring CEOs?). The following two points were the most important takeaways from a lesson learned the hard way.

1. You will always be judged by the way you deal with failures.
2. You are a leader, but one who will only have to lead by influence and participation, never by authority.

Lets take each point on its own.

All of us hate to fail. But if you are a PM and you think you have not failed, then you are either the worst PM on the planet or you are not one at all(your organization has been deceiving you). You need to understand that failure is not bad at all. The problem with failure however is that, it has a tendency to cloud the mind with negative emotions. I had this huge mental thing that, after a failure I would just do a LOT of reflection and question my abilities as a PM, that I have in the past, missed the essence of the lesson learned by virtue of the failure. Every failure needs a response and PMs who respond strongly to failures are the ones that tend to succeed in this thankless role.

Analyse every failure. Take it for granted that you will fail and since that is a given, a few positives will help you learn your lesson in the least painful way. Some of the positives are :

1. Being surrounded by great people. Get around people who will support you when required and reiterate the trust they have in your ability. It helps.
2. Question your decision making process and spot the gaps. Treat every failure separately and invest time to learn from the mistakes.
3. Accept the fact that you have failed, humbly.

I have lost count of my failures. It has become a way of life and I have made my peace with it.

Just remember one thing though, every failure need not be published beyond your manager. Affects your peer reviews and bonus. 

Now that I think about the second point more,I feel it deserves a whole post by itself. 

How did I become a PM?

My journey till now has been very interesting.  Weird ,but interesting . Just when you have a plan, God decides to have a little fun and screws it all up. Well, being the theist that I am, I go with the flow or I have till now. Most of my decisions till date have come from the heart, just a gut feel. Be it choosing higher studies over a job with a  leading automaker in India or deciding to move back to India when I had a well paying job in the US of A.

A similar such gut based decision landed me a job with, say, A.com. A poster boy now for the Indian e-commerce industry, A had just about set shop when I joined them in 2010. I was happy to be chosen as an Operations Manager and was 'expected' to turn around the supply chain(Or at least I expected that out of myself). I still remember my first conversation with the then AVP and COO. I was giving them all the cool Georgia Tech fundas(come on I had to show off somewhere) on how to do optimization and improve efficiency and blah. The COO calmed me down, took me aside and told me "Rahul we do not even have a functional ERP, why don't you build one first?' And then you can do any kind of optimization that you want to, on top of that." That was an eye opener. All I had done or learned in my life till now, was to tweak existing processes and systems. Now I had been asked to define and build them.Massive. Challenge and opportunity presented themselves together, just that I was not sure if I would be able to stand up to the task. 

What was this role that I had landed myself? Well after a good two months(my extended training period) of understanding the different processes and systems that existed in A, I got to ask the same question to a bunch of people.My AVP called me an internal consultant. The COO told me "Call yourself anything it does not matter, just get the s**t done(in a nicer way)". I would only later come to know, that this is exactly the kind of s**t a Product Manager does, apart from a LOT of other stuff, which is probably another blog post all together. 

I, still an Operations Manager, and a confused one at that, assumed responsibility of the new role, which also entailed interacting with a new breed of engineers, who during college times, were the ones we used to go to, if our laptops had any issues.Software engineers. I always got the shivers when I was asked to tell the computer what and how to do things at college. I managed a tragic C+(irony) at computers. For some reason though, the software engineers always looked cooler than the other folks that were around and used to talk in a language extremely difficult to understand(believe me because I have spoken and understood Chennai Tamil and Delhi Hindi, and they are absolute tongue twisters). But this new language, though a version of English was replete with cool jargons, that I had not even the slightest hint of what they meant.  

The first ever meeting I had with a person known as a Tech Lead(I now know what it means! Yaayyy!!) for my team was a revelation. He kept asking me what were the "use cases". I had no idea what he meant by them. I was however candid and asked what it was(slightly sheepishly). He was slightly exasperated(probably thinking how I even got hired) but he was humble enough to explain what it was to me. The term,would then become one of my most used terms, in the near 2 year stint with A and probably my career. That was an eventful day, when the COO also decided that I would be heading the efforts to automate another of our now flagship products. I was not sure whether to be excited or to actually own up that I seemed to lack whatever was required to do this role.

At that point my AVP asked me a question which probably instigated me to prove myself, to myself first and than to the others. The question was "How do you know you are not good enough to do it? Have you done it yet?" That set the ball rolling to my career as a PM. 2 weeks later was when I actually came to know what my designation is. An email was floating around saying " ... as a PM, we expect a PRD(another frequently used term during my stint) and blah blah". I was actually brave enough to ask what a PM was to which I got a reply that it was a Product Manager and I was one(not without a smirk). Has it ever happened to you that you had to be told what your designation was? Well it has happened to me. And from that day onward I have never taken a step backward. It has been a great journey till now and I hope that it takes me further. I had always prayed to God to make me a PM(I had prime minister in mind) and he made me one now(Lesson learned : Be specific to God just like how you should be with engineers). Like I said, just when you think you know what you want in life, God takes it away and gives you what you need!