3 insights on how being a PM at a large company is different.

There’s no dearth of content out there about what being a product manager is like, or even about how being a PM at a large company is different from being a PM at a startup. A lot of it focuses on the differences between the two in terms of pace, structure, and resourcing: great advice if you’re seeking to make a switch between the two either way. But how different are these roles over long time spans?

I’ve spent over 12 years now as a PM at…

A few years ago, one of my mentors handed me Peter Thiel’s book “Zero-to-one”. If you’ve read it (or even if you haven’t), you’ve probably come across his famous contrarian thought experiment: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

Truth is a very loaded word, but I do have three opinions that I think go against the grain of conventional wisdom, be it product design, monetization or teamwork. I’d be curious to see what you think of the below. I’d be even more curious to learn your contrarian ideas.

Let’s get to it.

#1 — First run app walkthroughs are rather useless

If you’ve built…

Looking for what to get hooked on next?

One of the things I enjoy most about science fiction is the opportunity for world-building the medium affords. There’s only a few story structures that have worked across millennia, so what’s great about sci-fi is that you can gawk at the newness of the world in the background, and picture what things would be like living in that world.

To indulge this sense of novelty, particularly at a time when we’re mostly grounded to our home and its surrounds, I spend a lot of time trawling streaming platforms for shows in whose…

I learnt it’s not what they do, but how they do it.

Life as a PM is mostly an orchestra of frenzy. There’s always the next spec to create, status reports to send, open issues to chase down, issues to clarify, research to synthesize, data to collate….you get the idea. If this sounds frantic, it is. This sort of orchestrated chaos is actually one of my favourite aspects of the job.

And yet, once in a blue moon (aka August), time grounds to a standstill. Key partners from whom you need inputs are blissfully off on vacation. The engineers are…

One of my most vivid memories from college is from an Advanced Math class wrangling with Markov chains in the third semester of my Computer Science major. Circumstances had moved this class to a sunny Saturday morning, ruining a delightful day off for most of the 19-year olds in the class, and as the probabilistic formulae became increasingly arcane and incomprehensible, I remember my friend turning to me with pained exasperation and exclaiming “When are we ever going to use any of this?”

He wasn’t wrong. While data scientists may lap up advanced probability theory with breakfast, I‘ve barely used…

Has working remotely made it harder to be a close-knit team?

“So, what do you think is going well with the team?…”

Thursday mornings are usually when I have my 1:1's with my manager. It’s a great weekly opportunity to take a step back from the day-to-day hustle of our small intrapreneurship, and reflect on how we’re working together as a team, and how I could grow in my career and have greater impact. …

These frameworks continue to guide me in moments of ambiguity.

Being a product manager can often feel like piloting a ship in uncharted waters. As a PM, you’re often called upon to influence decisions and set the team’s course, with inconclusive data and unclear user insights as your only inputs and guides.

Over the course of a decade as PM, I’ve encountered several situations where making key decisions or charting a path forward seemed particularly tricky. The frameworks below helped me overcome these challenges, and I hope they can be useful in moments of ambiguity.

The 3 critical mental models…

As the pandemic continues to rage, many of us have been forced to change the way we work and adapt to collaborating remotely with our teams all the time. Microsoft Teams can be a great tool for remote workers, and offers many features beyond chats/ calls to dramatically improve your productivity.

I was lucky to be a part of the team at Microsoft building out some of the cool features of the product and learning a lot about the best ways to use Teams. Here’s a list of my favourite tips & tricks for using Teams like a pro:

#1 — Set expectations with a status message

Working…