Connecting the dots to product management
A bunch of projects that led me here
I love games. And not just playing them. When I look at games, I want to understand the triggers and motivations that make someone play it. Why is one game better than others?
When I was in class 7th, I made my first game (shown above). It was based on the journey of Ash Ketchum from Pokémon. The game could be played by ‘1 to n’ people and consisted of a board with multiple boxes drawn, representing a path like Snakes and Ladders.
- Each box had an event planned (wild Pokémon attack, battle with a Pokémon trainer, challenge Pokémon gym owner, visit Hospital, Team Rocket trap, etc.) and the way to move forward was by opening a book and looking at the even page number (0/2/4/6 meant you moved that many steps ahead and took the action on the tile where you landed. 8 means open another page).
- Fights too happened by opening a random page on book. The Pokémon who gets higher number, hits his opponent; and each Pokémon could take max 5 hits before they pass out (The player himself opened book again for the opponent in case of 1 player game). As a Pokémon fights more, he evolves, resulting in a higher number of hits being required to defeat him (gym trainers had more evolved Pokémons and wild ones were the least evolved).
- The final stage was reaching the World Pokémon championship, and the aim of every player was to reach with at least 6 healthy Pokémons (as health reduced after every attack and could be replenished by visiting Hospital or picking up free medicine) with as much battle experience per Pokémon as possible (as each victory resulted in experience gain, further leading to increase in total health points on evolution).
Now, I wish I could tell you that was the moment when I decided I wanted to be a Product Manager! But that is just not true.
Actually, I first heard about the term “Product Manager” in 2014, after graduating college, while I was attending a workshop by Product Managers from Google during Innovate Delhi bootcamp (3 weeks long; organised at IIIT Delhi in July 2014). And I understood how important the role of a product manager is while I was doing my own startup, Trustio (in 2016). But more on that later.
In the present knowledge economy, most of us are doing jobs that we never even knew existed when we were in college. In most cases, our parents didn’t know about them either. In such a scenario, planning careers in advance is a waste of energy. And product management is a generalist role anyway. Most of the PMs today stumbled into this role by accident, maybe by first excelling in some other field from which they started their career.
This post is just a summary of a series of projects and incidents that prepared me for the role of a product manager (without actually ever planning for it). It took me 4 years (after graduating from college) to get clarity on what I am doing and where I am going, to a place where it has just started to make a ‘little’ sense. Today it just feels natural; as if my whole life I have been preparing for this (Cheesy? Well my fav book is Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, so you can guess my thought process). I hope this post will help others connect the dots to their own story, and find a profession that they truly love, are good at and can make a career out of.
Read this Medium post about my experience building the product at a fast-growing fintech company in India, as the only PM managing the consumer-facing product on all platforms.
But how do you find this holy trinity?
Try to answer these questions -
- What did you do as a child when nobody was watching you? Something you made great efforts to do even after knowing that there will be no external incentive for making all that effort.
- Have you ever done/created something that people were willing to pay for?
- Imagine you are living in a world where government is paying you basic salary (bare minimum to survive). You don’t have to do a boring job anymore to pay for bills. What will you do with your time now, that can give you maximum satisfaction in life?
- If you had all the money in the world, and you could do anything you wanted to do, what will you?
Before we start, this is my background
As a child, I was curious about everything, but not passionate about any thing in particular. During my school years, I tried to do every single thing that I could — from sketching to debates, from being a member of the school volleyball and football teams to representing the school in science symposiums, from being the school Prefect to writing articles for House newsletters. I was hyper-active throughout school and did everything that I could lay my hands on. And I was better than average in everything but didn’t enjoy any one thing in particular. If money were not an issue, and one could become whatever they wanted to, then I would have pursued a double masters in Philosophy and History, from US or UK. Basically, I love topics that are broad in scope and tackle the ‘why’ more than the ‘how’.
Side geek note: History, for me, is not just the history of last 10,000 years. As John Green explains in his Big History series on CrashCourse Youtube channel, if you keep going before 150,000 years, history actually turns into the study of living organisms (aka biology). As you keep going 1 billion years back, biology turns into the study of substances of which matter itself is composed (aka chemistry). As you go 10 billion years back, chemistry turns into the study of nature of universe itself (aka physics). If you go even further back, all you are left with is Mathematics — the coding language of the universe. When I say I am interested in History, I mean the overall history of Universe itself and not just “who died when”. A layer of philosophy, on top of this “Big History” is super fascinating.
After school, I got selected for the B.Tech program at the Delhi College of Engineering. I never fancied myself as an engineer, but I thought that a career in technology was a way out of the middle class (and I have been proved right). Since I didn’t have any interest in engineering, I stayed away from classes and ignored academics as much as possible, just making sure that I was always in the middle of the pack of my class and not at the lowest rungs of grades.
Instead, I repeated the same pattern I followed in school — doing everything. I was part of the executive body of the major societies and clubs in college, interned at startups run by alums, was an editor at college newspaper, President of Entrepreneurship Cell at college, founding member of NGO college chapters, etc. Once again, I was better than average at almost everything but didn’t enjoy anything in particular. With every passing semester, my batchmates were increasingly getting polarised towards either a career as an engineer or a career as a business analyst (a path leading to MBA and then better business roles). I liked neither. From farming to financial modelling, and from programming to sales, any profession that involves the “how” more than the “why” was not for me. I used to be a generalist and would probably remain one forever.
Below is a list of projects that prepared me for the person I am today.
What did you do as a child when nobody was watching you?
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I started making small board games when I was in school. My interest in boardgames continues till today, but I have started enjoying more complicated ones now 😝.
I loved creating things and this was not a standalone incident from my childhood. I read a lot of books (at least 24 per year) while at school and thought the same thing when I read stories — ‘why did i like this story so much?’ and ‘what makes story A better than story B?’. It was one of those things that I did to geek out on the side.
Side geek note: My favourite short-story writers by far have been O. Henry (originally name William Sydney Porter) and Guy de Maupassant.
I once wrote a story about 5 of my classmates from school, as characters lost in a magical land, where we encountered goblins, dragons and all kinds of mysterious challenge. It was created in the form of a children’s story book where I drew by hand on the left side of the book and wrote the story on the right side. Sketching cartoonish faces of my friends along with fantasy creatures and landscapes took a lot of time, but I guess it was worth it. I never gave these things much thought while growing up, but looking back, I can say that those were very satisfying exercises.
But have you ever made something that people were willing to pay for?
In 2012, ICICI Bank (top 3 banks in India) organised a one of its kind national level competition, called ICICI Trinity, for young engineers to suggest innovative solutions that ICICI could implement in-house.
ICICI was willing to buy the solution and pay INR 5–25 Lakhs to 3 winning teams. I was in 2nd year of college when I participated in the competition with 2 other friends. I was the team lead. Our idea was selected along with 125 other teams across India and we had to spec it out, prepare a release plan, make wireframes and then present it to the directors at ICICI Bank. The project was 1 year long. I have never made so many powerpoint presentations in my life! It took us 70+ iterations of ppt, including content and presentation, to finally get cleared by the ICICI Trinity team to present in front of the directors of the bank, including their then Chairman Mr. KV Kamath. For a 20year old kid, still in college, that was a different level of industry exposure. At that time, I didn’t know the difference between Java and Javascript, had never heard of the word “wireframes”, never heard of a Gantt chart, so on and so forth. After 3 months of hard work (and 0 lines of code until then), we were among the 18 teams who were finally selected to build their respective products. The “Ideate” part was done and we won INR 50k for reaching this stage.
It took us almost 6 months (along with regular college studies) to build the working product — the “prototype” part of the competition. The development part of it was completely handled by my teammate Satya Prakash, while I looked after the specs and getting the approval of the project. Satya built the whole product single handedly! My presentation went smooth as butter (presented 3 times to 3 different jury) and I was commended by Mr. KV Kamath (then Chairman of ICICI Bank, and a legend in banking industry) himself. We won the first prize and got a cheque of INR 1Million to sell the product to ICICI Bank. We gladly took the opportunity. We had no IP on the product and it was included in the ICICI Bank privilege banking section as “Service by Appointment”.
Side note 1:
I participated again in ICICI Trinity 2013. But this time I registered alone. I was confident that I could pull it off all alone as I had learnt a lot about the whole process (and also got a little greedy to not split the prize money). My second idea was a game called BankAce, to be released as an Android App. The game was supposed to introduce ICICI Bank products in a non-intrusive way to the players (as part of the game story). The product was supposed to serve as a prototype to show what can be built on top of this. I repeated the 12 month process at ICICI again, this time with 3 interns — 2 unity devs and 1 designer. I paid them stipend from my own pocket and we again made it to top 10 teams and got INR 50k for clearing “Ideate” round. However, making a game for mobile phone is tougher than I anticipated and making it with college interns when you yourself are not a game developer is almost impossible. My project didn’t make the top 3 next time but we won INR 100k for presenting the final product. ICICI Bank decided to continue the project on their own without our product.
Side note 2:
Back in 2014, when I was just out of college (and before I joined the workforce), I attended a 3 week bootcamp by Stanford professors at IIIT Delhi — Innovate Delhi Bootcamp. There I met 2 product managers from Google, Mountain View HQ, and some other amazing product people. In those 3 weeks we learnt about some basic steps to generate ideas for product and then give it a shape so that you can communicate it to others and discuss. This was what we came up with in Week 2 there.
You can see glimpses of “Trustio” (the startup I will go on to start in 2017) in this project we did in 2014. As Reid Hoffman and Ev Williams say, “Never underestimate your first idea”. Read this post by Reid Hoffman on Medium — Never underestimate your first idea.
College projects are for kids. Make a product for the real world.
While I had been associated with Zostel since Jan 2014, I joined their team full-time in Dec 2014. The team had recently raised $1Mn seed money and was preparing to enter the standardised hotel room space as well under the brand name of ZO Rooms. From Dec 2014 to April 2015, I worked in the new initiatives team, aka the launch team of ZO Rooms.
The complete story deserves a post of its own so I am not going into the details here. But around May 2015, I was handed over a new product, named Ozonet — a B2B product for travel agents from which they could book ZO Rooms directly. The project was supposed to be our secret weapon against Oyo Rooms (a competitor then, today the #1 company in that space in India). The idea was to create a strong network of agents on the ground, that was not only tough to crack later but also would become a cost effective customer acquisitions channel.
From the website and app to offline pamphlets, from pricing model to first cities to launch, from hiring the team to PnL, everything was to be handled by me — a recent graduate with 1 year of work experience. I was given 3 developers (1 iOS + Android dev, 1 web frontend dev and 1 backend dev) and 1 designer, plus I could hire as many people as I wanted for operations, as long as PnL worked out. It turned out to be a setting up ground for my entrepreneurship journey later.
Ozonet was shutdown in November 2015 because of fund crunch and the Oyo acquisition deal (that went notoriously sideways later as everybody knows). I left Zostel on 31st December 2015.
Doing it from scratch. Without salary.
I started Trustio sometime in March 2016. Once again, it would not be possible to write about everything that happened in Trustio in this post, so I will plug a post about that here later.
You can read why we started Trustio here — https://medium.com/@Pranay_Bhardwaj/why-we-built-trustio-91931b8ed790
As a founder, building a completely new product, in a completely unfamiliar market (none of us came from financial background and understood the lending market) and a very young team, it was a roller coaster ride of emotions for all of us. I learnt a lot of things that I did wrong about product decisions. And that is when I came to know what Product Management actually meant. I realised that if I ever wanted to have a real crack at building a scalable company in my life, I should first get a handle on the art of product management.
I should have worked as Product Manager Zero for Trustio. But I ended up working as an impetuous founder who had too many ideas but no process to convert them into a market ready product. However, I still think, if Trustio was executed by a more experienced Pranay Bhardwaj, it would have been a great product — maybe something like Product Hunt or Angel List — a product not meant for everybody (like an Amazon, Uber or Spotify), but for a strong core of loyal fans who would swear by it.
Fighting in the pits. Learning hand-to-hand combat and other survival tricks.
I joined SlicePay in January 2017 as a Product Manager and worked as the sole PM for the consumer-facing product (across Android, iOS and Web) up till September 2018. It was the first time I was being paid to build products and the learnings I had there demand a separate post altogether.
You can read more about my learnings at SlicePay in a different post here — https://medium.com/between-startups/building-product-at-slicepay-dce3a04b7a4e
To work optimally at SlicePay as a Product Manager, I kept learning extensively in my personal time at home. I remember spending 10–20 hours per week, after office hours, to learn everything from UX to tech stack, analytics to project management, market research to product launch. I will share my learnings and learning process later in another post to help others prepare.
I left SlicePay in September 2018.
The dream of every PM — building a global product
There is not much to divulge here at the moment. But do stay tuned for more.
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