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Real-life example

Framework Used:

Goal of TikTok

Competitor evaluation

Current market

Market gap

As a TikTok PM…Hypothesis for TikTok

Realtime solution

How does it work

Launch

Market competitor

Conclusion

Goal of TikTok:

Creators capture the moment and present the world with short-form mobile videos.

TikTok’s competition is Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Let’s evaluate each of these apart from Youtube as it's not a social media.

Competitor Evaluation

Tiktok

shows videos to the users as per the algorithm.

watch your friends’ content with all filters and other music applied. they are not REAL and not right at the moment.

Continue The Reading Of As a TikTok PM, how would you improve it

Real life story

“Disputes like these become emotional sometimes and they can’t be resolved right away !”

This can be an interview question for a lot of job roles, especially in PM interviews. Or this can also be asked as - how do you resolve the conflict between stakeholders?

This is how I would answer it. (STAR format is followed).

There can be 2 types of disputes:

long disputes: this is something that’s related to an error in the process and there’s a misunderstanding in doing things a certain way. Because of this misunderstanding, the conflict brews over a period of time and bubbles up slowly. As this happen over a period of time, its easier to resolve such issues.

short disputes: things like this happens in a single meeting, and they start surfacing momentarily. As its short lived, its tougher to settle. Usually in these type of conflicts, the emotions run high.

Usually short disputes are never logical. So you cannot really settle the dispute/debate. Its all about emotions, and its tough to take sides. So giving it more time, helps !

Continue The Reading Of As a PM, how did you settle the dispute between 2 tech leads?

5 soft powers + 13 takeaway tips to effectively lead teams

As a Product manager or in many other roles you will be required to lead the team without authority. How do you exert your soft power on the team to lead the team towards the goal or success?

Lead with authority

When you have direct reports, then you’re a leader, with authority. You’re not really an “authority”, but as a manager your employees wait for your annual reviews, bonuses, performance reviews etc.

What is leading without authority?

Leading without authority is a situation where you don’t have any direct reporting team, yet you have made a commitment to the customers that you will deliver something. As a PM, you have to lead a team towards a goal because you promised something to the clients.

As a PM you don’t have a team to drive towards that goal. Because —

Continue The Reading Of Complete 5 Soft Powers that Product Managers have, to lead without authority

6 real solutions implemented by Instagram

This can be a Product management strategy question. But this is also a real incident.

Product management is a fine balancing act, and it’s about testing and learning.

Structure followed:

Context/Instagram’s new features

Instagram Users

Instagram — Competitor & Market trends

Instagram’s Hypothesis

What is the backlash?

How did Instagram react?

Conclusion

Instagram’s new features:

Instagram recently launched a new feature — that shows more videos posted by random content creators than the photos/videos posted by friends.

This is obviously more in line with what Tiktok is doing — showing videos that a user would like, in the feed.

Read Complete Case Study Releated to As an Instagram PM, how would you face the recent backlash from Kylie Jenner, and beat TikTok?

Real-time scenario

Why is this worth a read?

This could be one of the questions that can be asked in the PM interviews. And this can be asked in different ways such as:

tell me a time you had a conflict with a stakeholder, how did you resolve it

tell me a time when your developers or stakeholders said NO to you, how did you deal with it

and a lot of other ways…

This answer may help you recollect a similar experience from your past, and helps you answer it better.

Since this world is obsessed with STAR let’s go with that.

For beginners: STAR is Situation, Task, Action, Result.

Continue The Reading Of As a PM, how do you react when your developer sets the scope?

Google’s real-time answer

Usually, in interviews, these types of questions are not very common but can be asked. You may classify this as a Product strategy question.

One famous example question is: Should Uber Eats and Uber Rides be 2 separate apps?

Framework:

Question clarification

Background about both the apps

Goals & Users

Competitors

What does Google think? (maintenance cost, app features, other google apps, competitors)

What do users think? (Business users, Personal users)

My judgment

What actually happened at Google

Conclusion

Let’s begin with …

Can you clarify this question?

Google currently has 2 communication apps — Meets and Duo, should they be together or separate, if so, why ?

Background:

Google Meets was launched around 2017. Google Duo was launched around 2016.

Continue The Reading Of As a Google Meets PM, what do you think Google should do with these 2 apps

Google’s real-time solutions

In an interview, if someone asks this question, don’t worry Google has the answer. Let’s see in real-life how Google addresses it. I will give you the answer in a good PM framework.

Google constantly keeps rolling out features to its star performer: Google Maps. Let’s see what it rolled out in recent times.

Let’s begin with …

4 reasons why Google wants these new features?

attract more categories of users to Maps

increase user engagement time in Maps

keep competition at bay (apple maps, Instagram, tik-tok)

and hold its dominance in the internet space

These are pretty self-explanatory. But there’s one striking thing in point 3.

But, how does Google Maps compete with Instagram and Tik-Tok ?

I will explain that later in the blog.

Continue The Reading Of As a Google Maps PM, how can you improve it, and can you beat Instagram?

Netflix’s real-time solutions

It’s been all over the news that Netflix has been gradually losing its subscribers over a constant period of time.

In the last 3month period ending June 30...

Netflix reported a loss of 970,000 subscribers

970,000 … It is a staggering figure that I

read on TechCrunch, and I was surprised to see that happen. So I wondered about two things:

why is this happening?

how will Netflix deal with this?

I want to add a 3rd perspective here… a PM interview perspective…

As a PM…

It’s quite common in PM interviews to ask a Product strategy question:

As a Netflix PM, how would you deal with losing 1M subscribers?

You may brainstorm and come up with solutions. But why put so much thinking?

Netflix gave you the solutions… 😆

Continue The Reading Of As a Netflix PM, how would you deal with losing 1M subscribers?

This is one of the questions in Product manager or Technical product manager or Technical program manager interviews.

Answers may vary depending on the situation, those in PM roles may talk about product strategy, launch strategy, etc. During my startup days, these sorts of discussions used to take place.

Example for product strategy: I would want the product to go in a certain direction and cater to certain customers. But my teammates can have different ideas about it. So in these scenarios I had challenged my teammate’s opinions.

However, I will explain what happened on my team recently. This example is more from a TPM perspective.

Continue The Reading Of TPM or PM interview question

What books don't teach

I had about 2 years of stint as a Project Lead/Engineering manager managing a handful of devs, marketing, and sales teams across startups and a mid-sized organisation. I must admit I had a successful and content stint throughout.

Thanks to Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people” ! It helped me learn how to manage people in a “human” way. I strongly recommend it to everyone reading this blog.

I faced multiple types of issues or challenges during this time. They are:

uninterested employees

not able to trust my leadership capabilities

not able to gel with my working style

company/team vision is not employee’s vision

selling my vision or ideas to my leaders

conflict with leaders of other teams

am I doing it right or not

and many more, Read More About 4 life skills for a new project lead or a new engineering manager?

Many of us here would be wondering how to launch a website, how to make a sale, how to earn money. That’s a valid concern and I was in the same boat as others a few years ago. But before all that, the main thing to do is to acquire users. Users eventually become customers and they’re the ones who will end up buying from you.

This blog does not apply to social media use-cases. This only applies for e-commerce type startups. User acquisition for social media involves network effects and its a different ball-game.

First, let me explain the full funnel of an e-commerce sale before diving into the main problem.

How we got our 1st sale in our startup

We launched an online fashion-store for our travel startup. During covid, when the travel was down, we launched a fashion store to get the revenue going. These are the list of steps we did to get our sale

Continue The Reading of Product Marketing Management In Startups

Chilling fight show by the Japanese

It’s April .. 1945. It's the fag end of the World War-2 and the Axis powers are neutralized by the Allies. But there’s one country that’s not ready to let go of it…that’s the small island nation

… Japan

The US are entering and capturing the Japanese territories one after the other, and the Japanese are trying every strategy available to restrict the US Marines.

Strategies by the Japanese include:

Ambush and surprise attacks on the islands,

Naval attacks,

Air attacks,

Planting spies in local village folk.

Encouraging local village folk to suicide

KAMIKAZE attacks.

I watched all this on Netflix. Irrespective of who’s right and who’s wrong, I was surprised at the conviction of the warriors and the bad leadership strategies of some military heads. I observed a few things that could be applied to contemporary business or startup scenarios. Let’s look at them:

Continue Of Reading What are 5 startup lessons from Japanese in WW2

Product management interview question

I would like to discuss with you about a real life situation, where decisions were made very limited information. And how the end result turned out to be.

These are the types of questions are usually asked in PM interviews. So I thought of listing a high level example here that helps as a starting point for the readers while they’re interviewing.

Here there can be 2 categories:

Decisions made when data is limited

Decision made when data is not present at all

In this blog, let’s explore first one with context and example.

Continue The Reading Of Real life PM example where a Decision is made with limited data?

Life Jacket skills for a Product manager

There are a lot of skills that are important for a Product Manager. But some skills are non-negotiable.

Some skills such as analytical, UI/UX, tech skills, business skills and marketing basics can be developed over a period of time from reading and learning. But these skills that are listed below are tougher to develop as they’re related to our personality. They require a major shift in our thinking.

These 4 skills require a major shift in our thinking or basic personality. As they require a shift in our personality, they’re therefore harder to develop. Let’s look at those 4 skills which are non-negotiable.

Let’s look at those 4 skills

1. Interpersonal skills: As a PM, dealing with people is one of the basic traits. You need not be an extrovert to do this, introverts can also be good PMs. But what are interpersonal skills?

Example1: Sometimes your requirements are rejected by your developers. Would you be angry, and would your ego get hurt because a developer can only work on requirements, and not reject them?

Continue The Reading Of Top 4 Skills for a Product Manager

Know 10 items in a product backlog

For a PM or a TPM a product backlog is the Bible. He or she is responsible for owning, maintaining, prioritizing and productionalizing the backlog.

But backlog is not an easy thing. A product backlog can be as complex as an Indian pickle :

A product backlog can be as complex as a cocktail:

A Backlog is no less than a complex cocktail , and a PM is no less than an expert chef or a star bartender

What makes a Product Backlog Cocktail

The backlog for a product consists of a variety of items. They are:

product features for the current release: simple and straight forward. what features should you release for this version. as a PM, what is enough for the MVP or this release?

bugs raised by QA: QA tests the build released by the devs and raises bugs. as a PM, will you fix all these?

bugs raised by the UAT: user acceptance lead of your team will raise more bugs after testing the build released by the QA. as a PM, will you fix all these?

Continue The Reading Of

Product backlog = Margarita or Cocktail or Mojito ?

Fermi’s problems + Prod Mgmt Estimation questions

If you’re a Product management aspirant or took Product management interviews, it’s quite common for you to come across questions such as:

Estimate the number of flights that land in San Francisco per hour

Estimate the number of restaurants in London, UK

How many search queries per second in Google

I was reading (rather listening, on Audible) this book called Range. I came across something called Fermi’s problems.

Who’s Fermi?

Fermi is a Physicist, who’s known for his research on the “atomic bomb”. While testing the Atom bomb before World War II in 1945, he wanted to estimate the power of the atom bomb.

How do you estimate the power (yield) of the Atom bomb?

Continue The Reading Of How Product Management took Questions from Atom Bomb ?

Body massage booking through an App ?!!

While I was in India, I would say I was there in the golden phase — primarily because of the tech adoption in our daily lives. And the golden phase for tech in India, I believe, will continue for decades to come.

Tech adoption in daily lives makes our mundane routines much easier. And this increases the efficiency by multiple folds.

Here I will explain the top 5 apps that I loved there.

Criteria to select my top 5:

how much impact do these apps have on daily life

how much time saving

how much freedom

how much peace of mind

Continue The Reading Of

5 Mobile Apps that helped me in India and that Canada lacks