Influence without authority This is how I describe what day-to-day product management is like. I wish the whole “CEO of the product” thing was accurate, but mostly you’re just the “serf of product”. What this effectively means is that out of all the folks in an organization at a given point in time, PMs haveContinue reading “Influencing without authority”
Category Archives: Product
Do you need an MBA to transition into product management?
Do I need an MBA to transition into product management? I get this question a lot and my answer really depends on who’s asking. There’s two parts of the question if you really want to unpack it Do you need an MBA (period) Do you need an MBA for product management I don’t want to conflate theContinue reading “Do you need an MBA to transition into product management?”
My top 5 PM tips
I apologize in advance for the Buzzfeed-style title but I promise this is not clickbait. My last few posts have been long and ramble-y so I figured I’d make this one short and actionable. Five somewhat pragmatic product management (PM) tips Never go into a meeting without a shared page Put everything into JIRA KeepContinue reading “My top 5 PM tips”
B2B versus B2C product management
I’ve made a lot of swerves and tried a bunch of things throughout my career. My first job was a software engineering role at a product development startup, and this was my first role at a B2B company. Then I switched to product management at a travel startup (think Tripadvisor) and this was as B2CContinue reading “B2B versus B2C product management”
There is no great UX without great CX
[UX: user experience, CX: customer experience, PM: product management] I gave what turned out to be a really fun talk organized by Hello Meets and this blog is a more succinct, written version of that presentation. The topic came to me when I realized how much of my PM role was happening at the peripheriesContinue reading “There is no great UX without great CX”
Technical skills to break into product management
You don’t need a background in engineering to be a product manager. You also don’t need to know how to code to be a product manager. But there are certain technical skills that can help you succeed as a product manager. Fortunately, these are easy enough to learn. I was a product manager before IContinue reading “Technical skills to break into product management”
The product manager’s work diary
When I started working at VMware right out of business school, I was determined to learn from my career mistakes in the past and use my newfound knowledge to do things the right way. As a 21-year old fresh out of undergrad, I threw myself into the wild, wild west of tech startups in India.Continue reading “The product manager’s work diary”
Day 1 at KubeCon!
2019 was a big conference year for me. I kicked things off with VMworld US in San Francisco and followed up with VMworld EU in Barcelona. Both of these conferences were monumental because we announced Project Pacific at the keynote in San Francisco and did several deep-dive sessions in Barcelona. I spoke to over aContinue reading “Day 1 at KubeCon!”
The learning curve
One of the hardest parts about moving to the enterprise space, particularly one as complex as virtualization, was that I knew nothing about it. The farthest I had ever gotten was a class called Computer Organization and Architecture that was a pre-requisite in my sophomore year of college. I vaguely remember learning about instruction setsContinue reading “The learning curve”
ELI5 Project Pacific
I recently published a post on the official VMware vSphere blog that describes the architecture of the product (Project Pacific) my team has been working on for several years now, much before I even joined the company. I shared the link to the article on Twitter, Linkedin and other social media, and surprisingly enough, myContinue reading “ELI5 Project Pacific”