Rahul Jain

Mistakes that I make as a #ProductManagement mentor/ leader Mistake 4: Focussing to mentor only on the hard skills- problem structuring, product discovery and prioritisation. And not mentoring on the soft skills like relationship building, proactive communication and messaging for different stakeholders to build trust and credibility in the system.

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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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Many times in my PM career, my teams were executing at full capacity, as per the aligned product startegy and also building backwards from customer needs found during user research convos. But the products failed to deliver the impact in first go and required few iterations to hit expected success metrics. Reflecting back, the success was not denied due to execution, but due to lack of understanding of all parameters which lead to success in any complex initiative. Navigating such complex situations requires understanding the issue and then communicating the same with others in team to create a shared understanding of what's wrong. In such cases Dr. Mary Lippitt's Model helps understand what's really happening in an initiative. The model essentially says, there are 5 inputs to manage any complex change and if any of the 5 inputs is missing the team will struggle. Go through the screenshot to identify individual scenarios and the corresponding team reality. Once you understand the parameter absent in your relevant context, fix it proactively to increase your odds of success. From experience, defining right “ Incentives” for teams with conflicting priorities is the toughest and "Vision" and "Skills" are most difficult to change in short term and hence Product Managers typically tweak the other 3 parameters to achieve success. #productmanagement

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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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Few truths on career success as a Product Manager: 1. Your career's growth is a function of impact you create 2. Your impact is a function of your competence  3. Your competence is a function of your knowledge and actions Hence in order to grow PMs need to consistently show high agency, do a lot of hard work and have a consistent learning routine for up-skilling. #productmanagement

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Are you prioritizing retention as much as acquisition? Retention separates good products from great ones. It’s about creating indispensable value that keeps customers coming back. Key insights: 🔍 Measure the right metrics: Focus on customer retention rate, churn rate, and net revenue retention to gauge your product’s health. 🧠 Understand customer motivations: Use frameworks like Self-Determination Theory and VALS to align your strategies with what truly drives your users. 📊 Leverage data effectively: Utilize cohort analysis, gather customer feedback, and implement predictive modeling to develop targeted retention strategies. 🔧 Implement product-led tactics: Ensure effective onboarding, personalize the user experience, use in-app messaging wisely, encourage feature adoption, and reduce friction to enhance user satisfaction. 🤝 Foster a retention-focused culture: Align all teams around the goal of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Encourage cross-functional collaboration and celebrate retention wins. Companies like Twilio, Slack, and Netflix exemplify the power of strong retention strategies. By focusing on these areas, you can drive sustainable growth and increase customer lifetime value. Want to dive deeper? Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gGGU64E5 #productmanagement #customerretention #growthstrategy #saas #productled ---- Need help breaking into Product Management or accelerating your PM career? Schedule a free 1-on-1 session with me and let's chat about your goals. Link on my profile. If you enjoyed this post: 1. Follow me for more PM & career content 2. Repost to share with your network

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I was going through resources & looked at Shreyas Doshi's framework on better product decisions. 🤌 The framework was amazing, but it left me thinking how a lot of these learnings can be applied in an Indian context for PMs. Read through my detailed guide on making better product decisions as a PM in India. 🇮🇳 PS: I run a program that helps folks get better at product management and crack product roles, both in India and abroad. If you want to apply for the program, check out the links in comments. 🚀

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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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For a lot of product work, good Product Strategies withstand test of time and remain valid for atleast 18-24 months. Good Product Managers are able to simulate various future scenarios well in advance to decent degree of confidence for future proofing the work. If you have to change your direction, redoing your strategy every 6-12 months as a team then perhaps your didn't put enough rigorous thinking to it in the first place. Am not saying we don't update our strategy baking in the latest tech/competition/user insights in that 18-24 months, but the changes should be less the 20-30% to the overall plan. #productmanagement #productstrategy

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#ProductMusings: Facing Failure: A Product Manager's Challenge 🚀🤔 In product development, not every experiment goes as planned. Failed or inconclusive experiments can be discouraging, but they are crucial for growth. The key is understanding why an experiment didn't succeed—whether due to hypothesis errors, technical glitches, or market misalignment. 🤔 Here’s how to turn setbacks into opportunities: 🔹 Explore with Curiosity: When outcomes are unclear, dive into user feedback to uncover missed insights. For instance, after an A/B test doesn't provide clear results, teams might find value in identifying overlooked user pain points through feedback analysis. 🔹 Refine and Simplify: Use what you learn to tweak and improve the product. Some teams have discovered that simplifying features based on feedback can better meet user needs. 🔹 Transparent Communication: Share learnings openly to align the team and build trust. Regularly updating teams on experimental outcomes encourages a culture where failure is seen as a stepping stone to innovation. 🔹 Learning from Others: Study how other teams resolve setbacks. For example, after launching a new feature and receiving poor feedback, some teams have transformed critiques into enhancements, demonstrating effective iteration. 🔹 Record and Reflect: Keep track of what went wrong and what was learned to prevent future mistakes. This practice ensures valuable lessons aren't lost and guides future projects. Each failure is a chance to innovate! What lessons have you learned from a failed experiment? Share your thoughts👇💬 #ProductManagement #LearningFromFailure #Innovation #GrowthMindset

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Who Killed Product Management in India? 🔎 This was the title of of a recent article by Praveen Gopal Krishnan on The Ken, he puts forth some interesting points (link the comments). One key point that stood out was someone saying - 90% of Product Manager roles have become redundant. Engineers, designers, and business professionals can now take on tasks once exclusive to PMs. Harsh? Maybe. True? To some extent. So, what does the future hold for PMs? I believe the future lies in the rise of the Full Stack Product Management and in everyone gaining a strong product sense. Let’s dive into details below. Article Insights: Product Management has shifted from a creative, intuitive role to a bureaucratic, data-driven one. Instead of creating innovative products, PMs are bogged down with frameworks, PRDs, and justifying decisions to stakeholders. AI is also automating many PM tasks, further pushing PMs toward obsolescence. Companies like Airbnb have even removed traditional PM roles, showing how product development can happen without them. Know thy Product: The core issue, in my view, is that we don’t truly understand what their product is. Too often, the "product" is mistaken for the app or the website—the enablers—rather than the value delivered to the customer. -> What’s the Real Product? Flipkart/Amazon: Not the app, but the goods they deliver 📦 Netflix: Not the platform, but the content 🎬 Zomato/Swiggy: It’s the food 🍔 Gmail/WhatsApp: The network effect they create 📱 The actual product is the core value, and whoever is owning it is the one owning the customer too. There are spaces where PMs can own the product, like in B2C tech (Gmail, YouTube) or B2B SaaS Applications; but in industries like e-commerce or D2C, the product isn't the app; it's the actual goods experience or service. Everyone Needs Product Sense: It’s not just PMs who need to get this. Whether you’re in business, ops, engineering, analytics, or business ops, having a product mindset is crucial to understanding the end value delivered to customers. Companies should encourage leaders and ICs alike to gain product exposure. Product sense helps you understand users, business impact, and how to solve real problems. Whats the moat for some wanting to be a PM or who is a PM: Enter the Full Stack Product Manager The future of PMs is Full Stack, blending creativity, data, and technical skills. The Full Stack PM can: Identify customer problems, Conduct discovery, Prototype and build solutions, Collaborate with engineers to build scalable products, Market and sell the product, Iterate based on feedback. AI and no-code tools are enabling this shift, allowing PMs to own the entire product lifecycle. What do you think of this? Share your views in the comments below and follow me (Vellanki Sriharsha) for more such insights. #ProductManagement #FullStackPM #AI #ProductLeadership #FutureOfWork

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Product Management Quiz Answer is... C. Defining the Product Vision and Strategy https://lnkd.in/gb2Y47nb #PMQuiz #ProductManager #ProductManagement #Quiz #TwiceTheImpactPM #CPO #Leadership #DecisionMaking #AspiringPM

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Converging to a well articulated, measurable and actionable problem statement for a product team to focus on a quarter or two is one of the highest leverage activities for a PM. Easier said than done and separates the best PMs from average ones! #productmanagement #leverage #buildandsolvewhatmatters

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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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***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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KANO Framework for prioritization - 2 minute primer for understanding Understanding what truly delights customers versus what merely satisfies them is a crucial aspect of product management. And, this is where the KANO Framework comes in handy. KANO framework helps product managers categorize customer preferences into 5 buckets, which helps PMs prioritize features in a better way. 5 categories of the KANO Framework: 1️⃣ Basic features - These are the essential features that customers expect by default. - Absence of these features could lead to dissatisfaction among customers. Example: Reliable battery life in a smartphone. 2️⃣ Performance features - These features improve satisfaction proportionally to their performance. - More you improve, better the experience will be but not in exponential way. Example: Faster loading speeds on a website. 3️⃣ Excitement features - Features that customers don't expect but delight them when present. - These features could be unique value proposition for companies. - These features provide disproportionate increase in customer delight when offered to customers. Example: Facial recognition in smartphones. 4️⃣ Indifferent features - Features that don't significantly impact customer satisfaction. - Customers don't care about these features. Example: Color options of internal components. 5️⃣ Reverse features - Features that some customers dislike if they are present. - Presence of these features lead to dissatisfaction among customers. Example: Too many notifications from an app. ✅ Pros of the KANO Framework: [1] Clear categorization of features: Helps differentiate between essential and delighting features. [2] Improved customer satisfaction: Focuses on features that can create a competitive advantage and build moat for a company. [3] Prioritization of resources: Helps in efficient allocation of resources to the most impactful features. [4] Improved product planning: Links customer satisfaction directly to product development priorities. ❌ Cons of the KANO Framework: [1] Complexity in implementation: Need to conduct customer surveys and then interpret results to understand their feature expectations. [2] Subjectivity in responses: Customer feedback can be subjective and influenced by various factors, potentially leading to biased or inconsistent results. [3] Evolving customer expectations: What delights customers today may become a basic need tomorrow. Needs to keep revisiting the feature set frequently for reprioritization. [4] Overemphasis on delight: Focusing too much on Excitement features can sometimes lead to neglecting essential Basic and Performance features, which are fundamental for customer satisfaction. Example of the KANO Framework from Smartphone Industry: Basic features - Battery life - Call quality - Responsive touchscreen Excitement features - Facial recognition - Foldable screens - Advanced camera capabilities #ProductManagers #ProductManagement #Frameworks #Jobs

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Who Killed the Art of Product Management ? How do we save them. Product management is at a crossroads, and it’s time we address the fundamental issues plaguing the role today. After reading The Ken's thought-provoking article “Who Killed the Art of Product Management ?”, it’s clear that the problem isn't just about a lack of talent—it’s about a cultural and organizational misunderstanding of what a product manager should truly be. The Misconception of Product Management as 'Project Management' One of the biggest challenges we face in the ecosystem is the widespread confusion between product management and project management. Far too often, companies treat product managers (PMs) as glorified project coordinators, focused solely on deadlines, feature releases, and task lists. The strategic side of product management—customer-centricity, product vision, and market differentiation—is often lost in the noise of daily firefighting. A true product manager should not just be someone who delivers features. They should be the custodian of the product's vision, ensuring it solves real customer problems, aligns with business goals, and evolves based on user feedback and market shifts. The role is about balancing short-term execution with long-term product strategy, but in India, we’ve largely forgotten this balance. The Backlog Trap: Losing Sight of the Bigger Picture Many PMs are trapped in what the article calls the “backlog mindset.” Instead of being encouraged to think ahead and make critical decisions, they are burdened with managing an ever-growing list of feature requests and technical debt. This doesn’t allow room for creativity, experimentationf, or strategic planning. As a result, product innovation stagnates, and the product manager's role becomes reactive rather than proactive. We need to shift our focus from merely shipping features to delivering value. Prioritization should be driven by the value we provide to users and the business, not just the completion of tasks on a list. PMs must be empowered to say "no" when necessary and ensure that every decision contributes to the long-term success of the product. Ownership: A Missing Link in Product Management Another critical takeaway from the article is the lack of ownership that product managers are given. In Silicon Valley and other global tech hubs, PMs are often the “mini-CEOs” of their products. They have the autonomy to make decisions, experiment, and take risks. However, PMs often lack this ownership. Decision-making is centralized with senior leadership or engineering teams, leaving PMs with little control over the product's direction. For product management to thrive, companies must trust their PMs to lead. They must encourage them to deeply understand customer pain points, study the market, and make decisions that will shape the product's future. A successful PM is someone who not only manages day-to-day tasks but also drives the product’s vision, strategy, and success.#product

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Product marketing is an underrated cornerstone of product management. 🗿 Without product marketing, it is incredibly hard for PMs to take their products to the right audience and convert their features into success! Read through this detailed post on product marketing in India to get a hands on approach on product marketing and super charge your contribution as a PM. PS: I run a program that can help you take your product management skills to the next level! If you are looking to upskill in PM and crack PM roles, apply for my program through the link on comments. ❤️

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