A month in Product

It’s been a month since I joined ImpactGuru as Associate Product Strategist so I thought I could take this opportunity to retrospectively share my learnings and what I do day-to-day in product role.

Let me start by a quick introduction, I’m a 2021 engineering undergraduate student from Mumbai University. In my final year of engineering I was working at an AI media startup where I did product and design. Graduated in June ’21 and started exploring opportunities for full-time product roles. And within a couple of months I ended up joining ImpactGuru - social crowdfunding platform.

At ImpactGuru, my priorities are mainly focused around identifying internal process and execution problems, helping PM in there tasks and currently running an experiment which has a direct impact on our GMV.

Here’s what I learnt in my first month -

Curiosity to learn is important

Curiosity will drive you to be keen and help you understand the complete product in depth. In the early days you won’t be assigned much work, so you can understand the product but use this time to explore and understand not just the product but what problems they are facing, information flow across the teams, how teams function with other teams and internally. This curiosity will make you ask certain questions which will help uncover some info which might not be available is PRDs or other repos.

Unlearning is equally important

I needed to have a shift in mindset from a student and an aspiring product manager to being in the product role. Here is how I’m defining that gap - from showing that I can do it to actually executing it. When I was assigned my first project - the experiment I’m running - I got all excited and made a 3-pager doc and shared with my reporting manager with all the details in it but instead what I should have done is done some quick data analysis related to where the experiment and then ask about the next steps.

Data reveals more than you expect

The experiment that I’m in charge of, I had to conduct a deep data analysis to understand the current behavior, form hypotheses and set goals for the experiment. Analyzing the data I found new unexpected insights and behavior, which helped shape the rest of the experiment.

Patience is key

Patience is required to understand the product, roadmap and previous experiments inside out and only then one should give suggestions. It’s natural to find a problem and start giving suggestions that do this, but being will help learn more about certain things that were previously tried but did not work out.

Markets are underserved

There is so much potential for the Indian startups to bring true innovation in the healthcare space. It feels underserved compared to the software industry. Not just the social crowdfunding but the healthcare infrastructure and services associated with it directly or indirectly are waiting for real disruption.

Be open to make mistakes and learn from them

For some reason I wanted to be the right person in the room. Why? I wanted to announce my arrival in the company. I realized that this was not the right approach and I started taking things easy. I changed my approach from being right to making sure that I’m putting my efforts and inputs in the right direction. I had a hard time accepting the fact that I’m prone to making mistakes since I’m early into this but once I made peace with it I’m looking forward to learning from the challenges I face and improving myself.

Learn Excel/google sheets

I just can’t stress enough on how much it helped me with data analysis. I had to google tips and tricks to use excel and google sheets. I know mixpanel, amplitude, segment, tableau, hotjar, google analytics and many more are available in the market but think of excel as marijuana, a gateway into analytics universe.

I’ll end by attaching links to Manas Saloi’s blog where I found some good resources - First 90 days and how to do proper 1:1.

This is it folks. I hope this helps you become a better version of yourself and helps you in some way in your career.