Mohamed Shaahid

Mistakes that I make as a #ProductManagement Mentor/ Leader Mistake #2 Setting the same mentoring/ working model for all the mentees And not taking their strengths, development areas, working style into consideration and not adjusting the mentoring/ working model for each person differently

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What makes great products great is balance Balance between depth of features and breadth of features Balance between how often their PMs say yes and say no to stakeholders Balance between speed of increments and quality of increments Balance between number of problems they solve and the importance of problems they solve Balance between business needs and user needs Balance between successful and failed feature launches Balance between agility and stubborness Great products are like those Grand Slam winners in tennis who know how to win games by understanding the conditions and balancing their games according to what is required Their greatness is inherent in their ability to balance! #ProductManagement #Balance #Products

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🌟 Apparent Problem vs. Real Problem 🌟 Before product management was a buzzword, Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi showed us the essence of solving real problems in the PM world. 🚀 Imagine a startup receiving negative feedback about their product’s usability. It's easy to assume a design flaw, right? But dig deeper, and you might find the real issue lies in inadequate user training or targeting the wrong audience. "The visible problem is often just a symptom of a larger, underlying issue." Consider this simple example: E-commerce Product Returns 📦 Apparent Problem: High rate of product returns. Assumed Solution: Improve product quality or descriptions. Real Issue: Customers are confused about sizing. Reframed Solution: Add a detailed sizing guide, customer reviews with size references, and augmented reality features to visualize product fit. Next time you encounter a problem, look beyond the surface. The real solution might be where you least expect it. #basicsofPM #productmanagement #problemsolving #UXDesign #CustomerExperience

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I cannot share how proud and happy I feel to read such principles and practices of #productmanagement are followed in India. Please find in the comments an essay by the Product Head of an application I loved to use during backpacing in India - redBus. Here are some golden words from the essay - 1. Defining the Product Vision is actually an 'aha-moment'. 2. Right Product Vision makes the purpose crystal clear, which in turn helps to define right scope and what to prioritise - it becomes one thing to refer to for every decision. 3. A roadmap defines what the product will achieve in next 6-12 months. 4. Building together vibe - "We will then discuss the feature among a small group that includes folks from product, analytics, design and engineering. The details of the feature are discussed and debated" 5. Product Management is science - "I’m a big fan of A/B experiments and have many running at the same time" 6. A good PM knows how to do work in parallel processing - "You will notice how each team is working in parallel and not waiting for the other. This saves a lot of time and delivers speed" 7. On documentation - "Once we have everything finalized, the product team will document everything so that everyone is referring to one source of truth." 8. On Launch/UATs - "You’ll always have something that will go wrong at the right time. Factor this in" 9. Measuring what matters - "Dashboards around the feature are formalized and automated" 10. Product-led growth trumps any kind of marketing/sales led growth. "Creating stuff is my biggest joy in life and I think I’ll keep doing this till the day I leave" - Mayank Bidawatka #weeklypmlogs

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The product lifecycle is like a Bollywood movie: Starts with a bang, full of drama in the middle (bugs!), and ends with everyone wondering if there will be a sequel (new version) or if it's just a one-hit wonder. #productmanagerlife #productmanagement #productmanager #agile #productowner #officehumor #worklifebalance #softwareengineeringhumor #uxhumor #customercentric #productlifecycle #productlaunch #bugs #productdevelopment #newversion #bollywood #softwareengineeringhumor #productmanagerlife

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🌟 This is all you need to write the Perfect PRD. The mistake I have seen many Product managers including myself do is in order to move with velocity we jump hops to solution which often leads to low grade solutions. As Anuj Rathi said that, "You have to diverge before you converge" That take room where you dive deep into problems and understand it fully however I don't blame you as we are bombarded by other stakeholders to deliver fast. The following is my go to Mantra which I try to follow. 1. Understand the problem fully 2. Collect evidences of the scale 3. Who is the user of this problem or this is just an internal request 4. Validate with your users 5. Go into an idea space 6. Effort and Impact Analysis 7. Talk with everyone and take their inputs 8. Then give a timeline - I often make mistake on these 9. Co-Work and think end to end for launch 10. LAUNCH and Monitor!! That's it, but it's not that easy. It is scrappy, messy and confusing at the same time. Having a structure is very important. I follow a particular PRD template which helps we be on a path. 👉 Comment "PRD" and I'll share the template with you with an example. Keep building!! #productmanagement #product #productmanagers

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You might get into product management role as an APM or PM. But what next? How do you plan your career growth? How does a PM career ladder look like? Found this good PM career ladder used by Intercom for their #productmanagement folks. May not be relevant for every company but atleast will help you get some perspective. Do you find any similarities or differences?

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#ProductMusings: The Importance of #Dogfooding for Product Managers In the realm of product management, there's a crucial practice known as "dogfooding." The term, originating from the concept of "eating your own dog food," refers to the practice of using one's own products to better understand and improve the customer experience. The comic below from the wonderful folks from Work Chronicles, encapsulates the irony and challenges faced by teams who neglect this fundamental practice. Dogfooding is more than just a quirky industry term—it's a pivotal strategy for ensuring that product managers remain deeply connected with their users' needs and challenges. Here’s why product managers who don’t practice dogfooding risk falling behind: 1) Understanding User Experience: By regularly using their own product, product managers can experience the interface and features just as their customers do. This firsthand experience allows them to spot usability issues, confusing workflows, or missing functionalities that may not be obvious through external feedback alone. 2) Keeping Up with Issues: Dogfooding provides an early warning system for detecting bugs and performance issues. Discovering these problems internally before they reach the customer is crucial for maintaining product quality and user satisfaction. When product managers engage with their own software, they can identify glitches from the user's perspective and prioritize resolutions more effectively. 3) Empathy and User Advocacy: Direct interaction with their product cultivates a deeper empathy for the end-users. This understanding empowers product managers to advocate more passionately for improvements and features that truly benefit the user base, fostering a customer-centric development process. 4) Fostering Innovation: Regularly using the product can spark new ideas and innovations. Product managers can leverage their intimate knowledge of the product to ideate enhancements or entirely new features, driving continuous improvement and staying ahead in the competitive landscape. 5) Building Credibility: When product managers can demonstrate that they trust and rely on their own product, it builds credibility both within their team and with their users. It sends a powerful message that they stand by the quality and utility of what they are offering. As highlighted humorously in the comic, neglecting to use your own product means walking a precarious path—one where misunderstandings of user needs and delayed awareness of issues can lead to a disconnect that is hard to bridge. Embrace dogfooding, and transform it into a cornerstone practice for creating products that not only meet but exceed customer expectations. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below. #Dogfooding #ProductManagement #UserExperience #CustomerInsight #Innovation

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Spend more time building a product. Do more problem solving. Talk to more people and understand their pain points. Spend less time watching mock interview. Focus less on frameworks. More on common sense. Target long term career growth. Don't fall for short term gain. #productmanagement

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Can any product be converted into a need based category…. .? As a business owner what stops us… 1) Logistics 2)Scalability 3)profitability There are pros n cons… and some companies are raising the bar and spoiling our customer behaviour… may be forever… . Interesting how Quick commerce is disrupting our lives.. #quickcommerce #blinkit #zepto #digitalbusinesses

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#ProductMusings - 🔧 Balancing Vision and Technical Feasibility in Product Management As product managers, we spend a considerable amount of time defining our 'Why' and 'What' while fleshing out our product vision, but we often forget about the 'How,' which involves the technical feasibility of building the product feature. How do we prioritize effectively amid such complexity? Sharing my thoughts on this: 🧩 Assess Complexity: Understand the technical effort for each feature. Example: Implementing AI-driven analytics is valuable but may require significant infrastructure. 🤝 Conduct Grooming Sessions: While fleshing out the product vision, conduct PRD grooming sessions to gather feedback from technical teams early in the process. ⚡ Prioritize Quick Wins: Maximize impact with minimal development time. Example: Enhancing UI can quickly boost user satisfaction. 🔄 Align Stakeholders: Clearly communicate technical constraints to manage expectations. Example: Regularly update stakeholders on tech limitations. In the world of software development, nothing is impossible, but balancing product vision with technical constraints or complexities is one of the key roles a Product Manager must solve. ❓ Your Thoughts? Share your insights below! #ProductManagement #TechnicalFeasibility #RoadmapStrategy #Leadership Image credit for laughs: Dilbert

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I spent a part of the last weekend talking to some PM aspirants and conducting a few mock interviews. Several folks are worried about what to read and how to prep for PM interviews. Every day there seems to be a new question and a new framework on the internet - it can be tough to play catch up. IMHO, you need only the below resources to crack 99.9% of the toughest PM interviews. The rest 0.1% can sometimes be influenced by factors outside of your control and even Dettol does well to not worry too much about that. #productmanagement #productmanagementinterviews

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AI IS EATING PRODUCT MANAGER ROLES! Okay. That's a shameless clickbait. But it's also partially true. Read on to know more. I tried ChatPRD today. It's a service to assist PMs in writing product requirement documents. And to be honest, it's surprisingly effective. The service takes minimal input about the product and chucks out a fairly detailed PRD. I gave a one liner about an idea/product and the service threw a 200 word document. The document ticks many points for a PRD checklist. It was detailed and had most sections required for a PRD like problem narration, user scenarios, goals, success metrics, etc. It uses a fairly professional language that most PMs are used to. Although the output is probably generalized, I can tweak individual sections by giving additional prompts. When I asked it to expand on the user stories, it listed out more stories covering much more spectrum on the scenarios. If it doesn't eat our jobs immediately, it will help us to be more productive by detailing out the PRD text, automating the mundane writing (rather typing) part. What I wonder is typing PRD is not just a mundane routine. It involves hard thinking on the PM part to think in the user shoes, empathize with them and cover their scenarios. In that view, a PM is more of a wingman for a user, a bestie within the context of the problem the product is solving. Imagine a PM recognizing every pain point in every instance of usage of the product and address the important ones in a never ending cycle. I'm not sure how much of the user empathy part the service will be able to replicate. To this part the PM is not losing his job, at least for the foreseeable future. So my click bait statement is not fully true but this also raises one pertinent question. How many of us do real product management? How many of us work with users to discover problems? It's a known fact that many or most companies operate feature factories where a stakeholder, mostly a large client or a revenue center partner like sales or marketing prioritizes and hands down enterprise level problems. Individual product teams break that big problem down to smaller constituents that their products deal with and work towards solving those sub parts. In this parlance, AI product management services may end up eating PM roles. Peripheral functions like program, design and development can use these services to list down requirements without a PM and develop functionalities. There is some potential to a threat here. To summarize, AI PM services may end up eating the routine mundane parts of PM role. This may impact feature factory PM roles more than discovery PM roles. But these services will not take away the hard PM role for products involving human interaction, involving empathy. The future looks interesting. Do try ChatPRD if you're into or interested in product management. It's a good tool to improve your PRD productivity. 

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What should book PM do, although in real life it’s usually has a lot of aberrations Starting from combining project and delivery manager roles and diving deeper into translation difficulties what is actual difference between PM and PO roles and finishing with that each company just puts it’s own list of duties under PM/PO job title

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What can product managers learn from the world's most popular cricketer? Here's the latest surprising lesson "All the need to do is to put on our spinners. He will slow down." For those of you who don't know cricket, this statement might as well be in a foreign language that you don't speak. So, let me take a step back. Virat Kohli is the world's third most followed athlete on Instagram, behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. He is also by far the most popular cricketer. He is 35, which many people consider to be the latter half of his career. They expect him to retire in 2-3 years. People have accused him of being slow to bat against spinners (i.e., he scores runs slowly against a particular kind of bowler). But he proved them all wrong in this year's India Premier League. He scored 30% faster than before. And above all, he addressed this glaring weakness in a way you can only expect from him. Virat Kohli, a true icon, demonstrated a hallmark of greats - re-inventing himself when he had many years of success behind him. His story is a testament to the power of career transformation. And that's exactly what some of our best students do. Getting another job is probably doable all by yourself. It's not about a job. Consider the success stories of our students. They have transitioned from various roles and industries, proving that with the right guidance, you can achieve your career goals. They have gone from senior product managers to directors, from non-AI roles to AI/ML roles, and from small companies to the top names in the world. This could be your success story, too. What's holding you back from re-inventing yourself and addressing your glaring weaknesses? If you partner with us, you might still face obstacles, but a lack of coaching and advice will never be the reason why you can't reach the next level. If you want to reinvent yourself, here's a chance - book a call with us. If you're ready to embrace change and take your career to new heights, we're here to help. DM me for a link to book a call with us

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Agile is great! We can change the roadmap as often as the weather in Delhi... which is to say, very frequently and sometimes unexpectedly. #productlifecycle #productlaunch #bugs #productdevelopment #newversion #bollywood #softwareengineeringhumor #productmanagerlife #productmanagerlife #productmanagement #productmanager #agile #productowner #officehumor #worklifebalance #softwareengineeringhumor #uxhumor #customercentric

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