Naggappan Ramasamy

⚠️ Common Mistakes Product Managers Should Avoid ⚠️ Podcast - Career in Product Management Product management is a tough but rewarding role, and even the best product managers can stumble along the way. Here are some common mistakes to watch out for—and tips to avoid them: Neglecting Data: Decisions made solely on intuition can be risky. Always back your choices with data to validate hypotheses and track success. Ignoring Customer Feedback: Building a product without real customer insights is a recipe for failure. Stay connected to your users, regularly gather feedback, and iterate based on their needs. Lack of Clear Communication: Poor communication with teams and stakeholders can derail projects. Ensure everyone is on the same page by setting clear expectations and providing regular updates. Not Managing Stakeholder Expectations: Stakeholders may have conflicting goals, and failing to manage their expectations can create friction. Be transparent and set realistic expectations from the start. Being Inflexible: Rigidly sticking to a plan despite new information can harm your product. Stay adaptable and be ready to pivot when necessary. Underestimating the Importance of Team Collaboration: You can’t do it all alone! Successful products require input from engineering, design, marketing, and sales. Foster strong cross-functional collaboration. 🚀 Avoiding these mistakes will help you grow as a product manager and lead to building products that truly succeed in the market! Follow Dushyant Bhatt and Chaitanya Shahare for career guidance. #ProductManagement #CareerGrowth #Leadership #AvoidMistakes #CustomerFeedback #Prioritization #Teamwork #Innovation #StakeholderManagement #ContinuousImprovement

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When you say your product has Product Market Fit, it means your product has achieved PMF for specific segments of users, not everyone which you consider as your potential user. PMF is always segment specific, it is never generic. So next time you want to grow your product, understand which set of customers loved your product initially and find similar customers who have similar needs.

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Product Management is one of the most vaguely defined roles in the Indian startup ecosystem. PMs gain their experience from the companies they work for. Companies take full liberty in how they use and train PMs to get the work done. That’s why you will always find PMs with different areas of strength. Folks could be good at one or more of the following: Data, user experience, design, research, project management, business, content, stakeholder management etc. But the irony is that companies, during interviews, still look for skill sets which they themselves cannot provide PMs once they join. Some of them also continue to have weird 1:10 ratio of PMs to Engineers, with unfinished work on the table, always. When things cannot just function coherently without a PM, why judge them differently? I think it is high time PMs get the credit for their true value, worth and contributions to the growth of the Indian startup space 🙂 #productmanagementirony #startuppms #pmvalue

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8 underrated skills you should nurture as a #product #manager 👇 Some skills you can't learn from books or classes. Either they come naturally or they get enhanced through observation, failure and mentoring. What skills do you think are highly underrated in #productmanagement

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***99% of product managers don’t understand the super effective but non obvious levers for growth. *** Growth is not just paid traffic and writing blogs and good landing pages. Some obvious and non obvious levers - 1. The basic maths says ARPU > CAC so obviously the very first lever to get channel economics work is getting your funnel conversion as high as possible to make this maths work. 2. Now let’s talk about some non obvious levers- the first big one is bundling. Build bundled offerings/build products that increase the basket size in the same transaction. What does bundling do is it increases the ARPU for users which means that you have a better chance of winning the ARPU > CAC equation. 3. Next non obvious lever is to Improve organic/direct traffic %age of your overall traffic. What this does mathematically is brings down your blended CAC across organic + paid traffic and helps you win the ARPU > CAC equation or in other words the organic traffic and orders helps you experiment with higher CAC on your paid channels. How to improve organic/direct %, well build solid products to drive repeats, invest in an SEO engine to drive organic and so forth. 4. Next non obvious lever is help your team identify users on marketing channels who tend to engage with your product more. This means defining key milestone events on your funnel - sign ups, user demonstrating intent eg add to cart etc even before the final purchase and help your team build similar audiences to these users. Relying just on the final milestone will leave you with a much smaller sample to work with and super hard to scale. 5. Finally, a key part of making the economics work is specifically working on a product strategy that heroes high ticket size products. Which means working in tandem your growth team to work out product categories where interest in those categories (either shown by search volume/potential impression volume is high) and the ticket sizes are also reasonably high. Think of a 2x2, you want products with high ticket size and reasonable interest volume. What this does is again improves ARPU while lowering CAC helping you win the equation. Follow me for high quality content, not product philosophy but practical insights https://lnkd.in/gHweK_q7 AND also here https://lnkd.in/ggUKftFq My Playbook - https://lnkd.in/gHzyN-Xc My Channel - https://lnkd.in/gs6qnNUJ

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PMing for a mature product with half a million+ MAU & 200+ enterprise customers, is a lot of responsibility. Any miss can impact the 6 Lakh daily rosters. I need to get it right and there is a very little room for error. Fortunately, MoveInSync enables this by keeping PMs grounded with product support while also ensuring PMs drive product adoption & innovation together with customers. This "back to basics" approach ensures only the right problems get solved. Akash Maheshwari Nitin Awasthi #B2BProductManagement #SaaS

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BK, I need guidance on Product Management and how to crack into it. WHY? oh! WHY? (secretly, I think alot of PMs want to get out of it and I think largely those are India based ;P) I mentor and guide folks but not in Product Management. I believe there are much better Product Gurus on LinkedIn and otherwise (who have written books and have podcasts) from whom you can learn. I mentor and guide on how you can find your mojo back? What puts you in the flow of work and therefore, what roles and Organizations are best suited for you? Should you continue this path or that and why? Do you know what you are awesomely amazing at and whether you are leveraging a 100% of that? Are you playing to your strengths? Can you breakdown a success event to clearly identify your strengths and how they secretly (almost unconciously) played out leading to that success? Speak to me about "finding your north star" and I am happy to mentor. For Product Management though - there are many more qualified folks with deep expertise and experience with Organizations that actually practice a good form of Product Management. Please contact them for better guidance!

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Every Product Manager wants to create memorable products, but end up creating complex versions of their original vision which don't get user love. Reason - ignoring fundamental user expectations. Next time if you are in similar situation, evaluate your product on the below 6 core user expectations to avoid getting into this trap: 1. Product Benefit ↳ Is your product solving an important and painful problem for the user? 2. Trust ↳ Is your product reliable and trustworthy in doing what it is supposed to do? 3. Simplicity ↳ Is your product easy to use and understand by the user group it is built for? 4. Delight ↳ Is your product making users feel moments of delight and surprise? 5. Belonging ↳ Does the usage of the product foster a sense of belonging with the product in users' minds? 6. Consistent Experience ↳ Do all the touch-points of user interaction with the product and the company offer the same level of care, trust, and delight? A memorable product does a good job in meeting user expectations for all 6 parameters thus becoming a preferred choice for users. Do share in comments what else you have seen working well for products which you love. #productmanagement

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ShareChat PM interview questions [1] How would you improve Swiggy revenue? [2] What metrics would you, as a PM, track for WhatsApp? [3] Estimate the number of airplanes in the Indian sky at noon? [4] How could you use hashtags on Sharechat to drive engagement? [5] Design a camera for the elderly. [6] How would you design Uber for blind? [7] Assume that the page views on Flipkart’s product pages have declined over the last 3 weeks. How would you go about investigating this? [8] What metrics and goals would you focus on for Instagram stories? Liked this? Follow Vishal Bagla for more. #ProductManagement #ProductManagers #InterviewPrep #Jobs

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You are a PM and you love building new products/features. But most of your past launches looked promising on paper, had early beta users lined up but the product never really took off beyond early beta users. You iterate and you spend months agonising over why your product failed. Still you don’t see a clear answer. 😥 If you want to debug your scenario, sharing top 4 dysfunctions of early stage product teams(as experienced first hand across startups/Meta), which often lead to product failure: 1. Ship early/Fail fast: Your team focussed on the mantra ship-early and iterate, fail fast and other intelligent sounding jargons, rather than doing rigorous product thinking required in finding key underserved customer needs, which your team is uniquely positioned to build. 2. Let’s build for who we can reach: Your team focused on building for every customer you can reach easily, not for customers who really need something differentiated from you. 3. Lack of user segmentation:Your team had no in-depth understanding of who precisely you should build for and which needs you can address for them. 4. Falling in love with the solution, not the problem: If your team doesn’t obsess over solving real user pain points, the product will flop—no matter how cool the tech is. So next time, spend more time thinking about who you should really build for and why. And then think some more, as PMF is always attained for specific segments of customers having unmet needs not for everyone. #productmanagement #producteams

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8 MUST TRY case studies for every PM aspirant: [1] Case study 1 - Product design and thinking https://lnkd.in/d8amWb_5 [2] Case study 2 - Performance Analysis https://lnkd.in/dhymU9ut [3] Case study 3 - Root Cause Analysis https://lnkd.in/dQFe-tfr [4] Case study 4 - Product-led growth https://lnkd.in/dU2axMbY [5] Case study 5 - Analytical ability (building a logic) https://lnkd.in/dnmB3qR2 [6] Case study 6 - How would you improve user experience using data? https://lnkd.in/dkKtchQC [7] Case study 7 - Product design https://lnkd.in/detfZ8id [8] Case study 8 - Performance analysis https://lnkd.in/dJZbYHXd If you want to practice such case studies, check out: https://lnkd.in/dhQz8937 #CaseStudies #ProductManagers #ProductManagement #InterviewPrep  

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Nephew to my brother: I have a Product Related Question Brother: Ask her (me)..she is a Product Manager... Me: Okk ...tell me Nephew: What is the Product of smallest 1 digit and largest 4 digit number.... Bas yehi hona Baaki tha..... #ProductManagement #humoronly

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2017: Joined Juspay before India's fintech boom 2020: Tried everything PM at Razorpay 2023: Now, Building for scale at Paytm Navigating the world of product management has been a journey filled with learning and growth. From honing my tech, system thinking & abstraction skills at Juspay. To laying the foundation for product thinking, execution & GTM at Razorpay. To leading a high-performance team at Paytm. Each step has been an integral part of my career progression. While my path has seen its share of challenges, I have received the necessary support at each stage of my career and have not shied away from asking for help whenever required. On similar lines, when I wanted to upskill myself, I joined GrowthX®, and the learning has been invaluable. Putting effort is in your hands, so focus only on that with discipline. Key lessons? As Dhoni said, "Focus on the controllable." Huge thanks to the GrowthX community for their relentless support and knowledge sharing. It truly embodies the spirit of community-driven learning without expectations of monetary return. PS: the deadline to apply for the 4 Week Growth Program is Nov 30th. Join me at GrowthX with my link in the comments. 🌱

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Product and A/B Testing A/B testing is tool used for the validation of the changes to the user experience and the impact achieved . Talking to users is best way to get the feedback about product / feature but as users scale - it becomes difficult to speak to all or most users. A/B testing as a tool - helps gather data driven performance of the options, and further can be used to arrive insights to be validated in user discussions. A/B testing usually done to validate - UI design and its impact on the conversion/engagement - the marketing content / CTAs for acceptance - the different pricing options - the impact on output metric with feature on / off - if identified solution is providing intended impact The main objective of the A/B testing is to gather data at scale to validate if solution is providing impact in the expected direction. This tool helps in two ways, first to validate the solution if it works and second, to generate insights on the larger set of users. Some thoughts on ponder on - Do every feature/UI change needs to be run through A/B tests? - What is minimum percent of users needed to conclude A/B test results? - Can there be A/B/C test or A/B/C/D? - Can one run multiple A/B tests at same time? What could be benefits / disadvantages doing so? What are the conditions when tests can be run at the same time? - Does any external factors affect results of A/B tests? - What is ideal duration of the A/B test before conclusion is reached? - Does user segmentation have impact on the A/B test results? How to co-relate the two? #product #experiment #abtesting #productstrategy #execution #productdevelopment #product101 #startup

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Writing PRD's is an art. Read this awesome article from Planio on writing lean product requirement document for #productmanagement and #software professionals. Follow ProductHood School and Lokesh Gupta for more such resources.

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It is 2024 and I am yet to find any Product Management Certification in Indian landscape which gives good ROI. For instance spending 50k- 2 Lakh just for the Product managemt basics, case studies and "exposure" still does not make sense to me. It is all available Free today. I am looking for inputs or suggestions from people who have participated in such certifications who have gained value, feel free to comment and let me know your experience. DMs are also fine if you think you do not want to comment publicly. P.S: I am okay with the hate I get for writing this, I am a PM have too thick skin for all this. Sankalpa Sarkar (PSPO) Tannishk Sharma #productmanagement #aspiringpms #productmanagers

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Product Managers, if you're seeking career growth insights, Lenny Rachitsky's recent podcast featuring Vikrama Dhiman is an absolute must-listen. Vikrama shares a valuable PM skill development framework, and immense wisdom and specificity on how to sharpen skills at every stage. While avoiding generational stereotypes, he definitely addresses what, I'd hazard, other leaders have noticed as a rising trend of young professionals seeking rapid career progression ahead of skill enhancement - and he does it with gracious & empathetic advice that is right on the money. For leaders aiming to mentor product managers effectively, this discussion is a goldmine too. Thanks Lenny and Vikrama for the thought-provoking dialogue #ProductManagement #CareerGrowth #LeadershipDevelopment

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🚀 Sachin Rekhi: The Inputs to a Great Product Roadmap 🚀 Today, we’re diving into the wisdom of Sachin Rekhi, a serial entrepreneur and product management guru who's now a Founder& CEO at Notejoy. So, how does Sachin think about crafting a killer product roadmap? Let’s break it down: 1️⃣ Usage Metrics Analysis: First, dive deep into how people are using your current product. Identify which features are loved (invest more there) and which ones are ignored (maybe they need a makeover or the boot). It’s like peeking into the minds of your users to see what’s clicking and what’s not. 2️⃣ User Interviews: Great products solve great problems. Sachin’s go-to is user interviews to really get to the heart of user frustrations and motivations. It’s all about understanding their daily grind and what really bugs them. 3️⃣ Customer Feedback & Support Requests: Listen to your users! Aggregating feedback from support tickets and feature requests can highlight common pain points and areas ripe for improvement. Think of it as reading a treasure map of insights directly from your users. 4️⃣ Competitive Analysis: Spy on the competition (in a good way!). Use their products, read reviews, and see what’s working for them. It’s not about copying but about learning and leveraging those insights to craft your unique strategy. 5️⃣ Internal Innovation: Look within your company for innovation. Sometimes the best ideas are already brewing in other departments. Borrow those brilliant ideas and see how they can be applied to your product. 6️⃣ Audience Surveys: Once you’ve got a list of potential features, survey your audience to prioritize them. Tools like conjoint analysis can help you figure out what your users really want. It’s like hosting a mini-vote among your users to shape the future of your product. The takeaway? Creating a product roadmap is part art, part science. It’s about blending data-driven insights with creative thinking to craft a strategy that really hits the mark. Link to original read: https://buff.ly/4eFSRiK Join my WhatsApp community for exclusive product management discussions and tips! Find the link in the comments below. #productmanagement #productinterview #productlearning #productjobs #mentormalay

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🚀 PM Hiring post with some busting the myth that you can only learn about building products in product orgs! 🚀 At Shuru, we’re looking for Product Managers who are passionate about solving product problems (Both zero-to-one and scaling) and are eager to learn by executing projects across a range of countries, industries and scales. 💡 What You’ll Get to Work On: • Zero-to-One Ideas: Be involved in the early stages of product development, from ideation to execution, turning concepts into impactful products. • Collaboration with Designers and Engineers: You’ll work alongside talented designers to create seamless user experiences and engineers to bring those designs to life. • Complex Stakeholder Management: Engage with diverse stakeholders, managing expectations, and ensuring alignment to product goals across different industries. • Learning Directly from Founders: You’ll have the opportunity to work closely with Shuru’s co-founders, learning from their years of experience and gaining invaluable insights. Meet my cofounders Kshitij Bhardwaj and Akashdeep Singh Kahlon • Global Exposure: Shuru Tech works on products for clients from multiple countries, giving you a broad, international perspective on product management challenges. We have worked for companies in Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, India, France, UAE and Italy. 🚫 What You Won’t Be Doing: • Owning Business Metrics or P&L: Your focus will be on product execution, not managing profit and loss or business outcomes. • Long-Term Ownership of One Product: At Shuru, you won’t be tied down to one product for years. Instead, you’ll get exposure to a variety of products and industries, keeping the work dynamic and engaging. 🌍 Why Shuru Tech? At Shuru, we believe in first principles thinking and encourage openness in all our work. We offer a unique environment where you learn by doing, supported by a culture that values growth, experimentation, and innovation. Here’s what makes us stand out: • Remote-First Culture: We embrace remote work, and our team operates from all over the world, using Gather and Slack to stay connected and collaborative in a virtual workspace. • Learning-Focused: We provide a hands-on learning environment where you’ll get real ownership and experience across different sectors and products. • Work-Life Balance: Every 100 days, we take a no-work team outing to recharge and connect, ensuring that our team stays energized and motivated. Goa trip coming in November! • First Principles Approach: We encourage solving problems from the ground up, using logical, evidence-based reasoning to address challenges. If you want to work on a variety of exciting projects and contribute to products that impact different markets, apply at https://lnkd.in/gpaiFqti

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