In the last week of December 2019, I created a spreadsheet to track my personal learnings growth in the form of OKRs for the year 2020. Again, thanks to manassaloi.com for sharing how he does this. I’m making this public now to keep myself accountable, learn where I’m slipping and get better in the process. Here’s a snapshot: My biggest risk item now is - reading. ...

Sometime in mid 2016, I wanted to publish a small book on product management 101. A friend on mine ran a print magazine for engineering students and was ready to help this mini guide published. Though this print project never took off, I have the topics mind mapped. Found it recently while I was looking to clean up some space on my 126GB Air during OS upgrade ...

Freemium & Subscription 3 or 4 different pricing plans with a free plan with limited set of features or limit on usage - explained below. Anyone can signup for the product without a credit card and can upgrade once the limits are reached. Automated mails are sent to users based on the usage, nudging them to upgrade to a paid subscription plan. Products experiment with their pricing frequently and see what sticks with them. Like having no credit card requirement for the trial period, charging $1 for the first month so you have customer’s cc on file and regular monthly subscription later on. ...

Sketch app doesn’t have an iPad app. Twitter doesn’t have DM search or edit tweets functionality. It’s been years since these products exist and have millions of users. It’s easy to ideate and brainstorm new ideas. Easier to write a PRD and get an MVP built. What’s hard is saying “no” to requests and features you think the market needs. Harder is to get the last 10% of a feature right. And get that feature out in the market. Being able to stay focused. With one mission. ...

The last time I wrote a blog post with a PRD template (Writing a good PRD - Download Template), I felt it’s incomplete without a real world use case prod spec. A week ago, I sat down to write a product spec for a feature, interview scheduler for any existing HRMS platform. HR platforms are complex, huge and contains multiple feature modules. Say if one is about to build a new feature module, this is how it goes. ...

During 2011-13, while I was a PM at a helpdesk startup, competitor analysis was going through the product websites, their PR, google alerts and twitter to see what’s going on with a company and send some notes email to the CEO with the findings. Very soon I learnt about the SWOT analysis but never put effort in framing the findings into a template. Fast forward 2020, I wanted to do SWOT analysis as a fun exercise. What better domain to pick up than the good old helpdesk and customer service management enterprise products? A lot changed over these past few years. For a moment, Zendesk, Salesforce and Freshdesk offerings are unrecognizable from how they were during 2013. ...

Last time I got asked this question, I took a brief pause to think about it to answer a friend. One of my friends was trying to understand what a PM does and what should be the #1 skill for anyone to transition into a PM role from engineering. I answered, communication and in the back of my mind was thinking this should be a blogpost instead of a one word answer. ...

If you are from a non CS background, but are venturing into technical product management you might find it overwhelming to communicate with your engineers. Here’s a quick list of tech jargon that makes it easy to get an undetstanding of how the tech side of things work. API - Application Programming Interface. All modern apps backend is created using APIs so it’s easy for one or more applications to talk with each other. All actions a user does on an app invokes multiple APIs and their response determine how the frontend UI has to render and show results accordingly. ...

I maintain Google docs for ideas and jot down random ideas as I come across some problems or existing products. For most of these I end of after discussing the idea for an hr or two and some go until the coding stage but die down. I have few 10s of such ideas lying around for the last few years. Most of these will be good revenue making side projects or startups. This is an attempt to make these ideas public for any one to pick up, read through the idea process or go ahead and build them. ...