What is PM 101?

NASSCOM Product Skill Dev has been ruminating over the last few weeks about creating an open stack content for product management enthusiasts. We literally had hours of brainstorming over multiple calls to decide what kind of content should be created for an audience interested in building a career in products. I must give a lot of credit to Nitin Varshney and his team at Optum who have done an exceedingly fine job at creating a structure for the content that needs to be produced. Nitin and his wonderful team went through hours and hours of video content to create a structure for what the content should be. Nitin created different structures based on different types of product management roles, learning pathways and domain/industry specific product management roles. It was a hard question to create an ontological tree that could be used to produce and disseminate knowledge related to product management.

After weeks of endless calls and deliberations, we finally arrived at something. In other words the semantics of what we were trying to achieve became clear to us. It was indeed a moment of Nirvana for all of us at Skill Dev Curriculum track. We went the other way and decided to use dogfooding. Dogfooding is a familiar concept in the SF Bay Area where tech companies before releasing a feature or a product ensure that they have tried it out internally. We started discussing on the nature of the audience we were targeting. It became clear to us that the audience can be broadly categorised as people who want to get into product management, people who are already in product management in junior roles and senior product leaders. After this realisation dawned on us, we decided to create three different branches in our ontological tree of content namely PM 101, PM 201 and PM 301.

Let’s talk about PM 101. Over the last one decade product management has become one of the most sought after professions in tech. It’s become popular because it doesn’t require one to be a core techie and that is the singular reason it has attracted the likes of people from different fields namely sales, business, humanities etc. having said that a large number of people are seemingly clueless about how they could get into product management. Although Gayle Laakmann McDowell has written an amazing book on how to crack product manager interviews, it still doesn’t help many people who have not been in the technology industry and most of them seem to hail from college. So in other words the largest number of interested enthusiasts don’t seem to have any clue about how to crack product management interviews. After brainstorming for weeks, we figured that because of the information explosion on the internet, there is lack of quality curated content on the internet. That creates epic amount of confusion for the diaspora.

To hack this problem we decided to create a track called PM 101. PM 101 would be dedicated to teaching the basics of product management to people who are anew to the field. This would give outsiders a sneak peak of what really happens in product management. In fact one of our brilliant product leaders Malthi Suresh did a session recently on how aspirants can crack into product management. To start with we started defining the content into different categories and to our surprise we created four basic categories of content that basically covered everything that people new to product management need to know to avert unnecessary complexity. Take a look

I.Product Management Overview

• Product Management Career Path
• What is product management?
• What does a typical day for a product manager look like?
• Assessment of Personality traits that fits for Product Management Role
• 3 A’s of Marketing ( Awareness, Adoptability and Availability)
• Growth opportunities in product management careers
• Role of analytics in product management
• Types of product managers in the industry & knowing industry trends and KPIs

II. Product Management Process

• Agile product management
• Strategic product management
• GTM strategy building
• Segmentation, Target and Positioning- Who is Customer?
• Understanding of Corporate Strategy link to Product/Market Strategy
• What is the macro and micro economic factors driving the growth for Product Managers
• Putting customer at the centre
• Customer feedback loop for refinement of product
• Design thinking (How to generate ideas / Idea Generation & Idea Screening)
• Business case fundamentals
• Innovation at the core of product management
• Concept Development- MRD (Minimum Requirement Definition)

III. Product Management Skillset

• Building strong business case
• Stakeholder management in product management
• Innovation management process
• Importance of storytelling in product management
• Making sense of data — driving analysis and insight
• 90–360–3 Rule( First 90 Days, 360 Degree View and 3 Measurable Outcomes)
• Traits and skills for becoming PM — Intrapreneurship

IV. Preparing for first job in Product Management

• How to create resumes and cover letters for product management positions?
• How to crack product management interviews?

Now that the PM 101 track is clear to us, we have jumpstarted content creation. The content would predominantly be in the form of an eBook that would be uploaded to NASSCOM product connect website. In addition to the eBook, webinars on the aforementioned topic would happen over the next few months that would give product management enthusiasts enough meat on the intricacies of product management. It would also help standardise content on a national level for product management aspirants especially students from B-Schools and technology schools who are enamoured by the profession. Post PM 101, we expect to see a surge in product management enthusiasts in India. With SaaS companies vying to touchbase 400B$ and many technology companies trying to shift their centers from China to India post the COVID pandemic, we might see a lot of product management positions opening up in a year’s time. PM 101 would thus be able to single handedly enable ample supply of product professionals to meet the coping demand in the next couple of years.

We are all excited to be be part of this endeavour since it would bring about a systemic change in the ecosystem. More so because its difficult to drive change since human beings always follow the path to least resistance, which is what makes the job more interesting. So far we have been able to do a decent job but we look forward to more eyeballs over the next few weeks or months to make it a national movement. If you think you could help us with this initiative do connect with me or Ankita to hep you be a part of NASSCOM Skill Dev. To conclude I’d love to leave you with this Frank Underwood quote. Adios.