Product Management as Life Skill

You might have heard about people learning variety of stuff for fun, for show off or as a life-skill. Let's skip the middle one and talk about the other two motivations.

Have fun, Learn a Life skill! Sounds like a good mantra. In the age where an average user unlocks the phone with 100+ apps to check one or the other app, would you really contest that Product Thinking is not a Life Skill? :-)

(To those still denying, you deserve Aarogya Setu app. :-@ Also, Modiji has a personal app for a reason. And why is the government launching its own apps? Rest of the debate, one on one.)

This was for you to look at it as a person! Now, let’s look at the product management as a professional. Enlisting some points below which happened for me.

1) Good Product is central to our success. And all team members are central to product’s success. Rather than passively participating by giving feedback or feature ideas, an active participation by understanding the sprint, priorities, roadmap & getting your simplest doubts cleared by our Product Team makes a big difference.
2) Being in the meeting helps you ideate and analyse better before making new recommendations.
3) You can make effective recommendations for your department’s growth by hearing how other teams are using the meeting space. Collective Intelligence comes into action and your distant colleague might suggest what you missed.
4) Hearing QnA during the meeting helps you understand the processes and strategy better. You can optimise your efforts and time better instead of being an enthu cutlet who accidentally finds a feature in Instagram or YouTube and considers it eureka moment.
5) These meetings also help you to empathize with the product meeting’s hardwork since you get a glimpse of the projects in their hand and the number of cards in the backlog list on Trello.
6) You get empowered to assess the apps that you use for personal things and can make a better choice amongst the options. And bring useful ideas from there in an informed manner for our product’s growth.
7) If you are the middle crowd ( :-) only those who came here from the beginning will get this), then you can use the learnings in parties, meet-ups and dates by throwing insights and trivia which most people don’t know. Like being aware of songs and films has been cool, apps are the new sexy!

Still not convinced? Let’s definitely have a one on one.