Tech leader, Amit Phadnis, currently vice president, Network Operating System Technology Group (NOSTG), at Cisco Development Organisation shared that a successful tech product manager needs to be a failure-tolerant risk-taker with strong problem solving skills, armed with the conviction to question every stage of product development
India has undoubtedly emerged as a hub of IT services company. However, we still don’t have as many success stories of tech product companies that have been conceived and built completely out of India. This, inspite of having a talented pool of techies.
Dearth of experienced product managers who can lead the entire product development lifecycle – starting from conceptualising a product, building a prototype, testing it and finally launching it – is the primary reason. This was highlighted in a recent Techgig Expert Speak webinar by Amit Phadnis, a technology leader with more than 22 years of hands-on industry experience in both IT product and service companies and with about 20 patents in his name from the US Patent and Trademark Office.
“Currently, there are more than a million engineers in India who are probably developing hardware and software. But the fact that we haven’t been able to pull off a billion dollar plus product speaks volumes about the gap that we need to bridge as an ecosystem from a product leadership perspective,” said Phadnis, who currently works as vice president, Network Operating System Technology Group (NOSTG), at the Cisco Development Organisation (Cisco’s R&D Organisation).
Qualities a tech product manager must possess
A product manager is typically a tech product developer with 10-12 years experience in tech product development, with a strong understanding of customer needs and the market. Not every techie can take over this demanding job role. There are some skill-sets that one needs to possess to change tracks from a pure tech implementer to a product manager. These are:
Conceptual clarity: The depth of domain knowledge and hands-on skills about involved tools and processes is fundamental for this role. “You may be working on cloud computing, SDN, storage as a technology or networking or telecommunications, but to be a successful product leader you need to develop a significant amount of knowledge in that domain, both, from a technology perspective and also from the client specification perspective,” shared Phadnis.
Such conceptual understanding of the product’s technology backbone is important so that the product manager can ask the critical ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions during the product development life-cycle and strategise methods that would lead to a better end product.
Strong problem solving skills: A key skill-set a techie should have to move into product management role is the ability to think out of the box to find solutions to challenging problems that might emerge every other day, especially during prototyping of the product.
Amit shared that the process of prototyping requires product managers to play around with the available tools and techniques within the small set-up and create a good prototype. Then show case this to the end user, get live feedback from them, absorb relevant feedback and feed it back into the product development cycle and keep evolving the product till it is ready to be launched.
At each of these steps there are bound to be hitches which should be addressed by the product manager in the minimum possible time. This calls for a product manager who is a quick thinker and can logically deconstruct a problem and resolve it within the limited time frame.
Conviction to question: In a successful product company, product leaders are really good at active questioning to keep a check on how the product is shaping up and it does not digress from the problem it was originally meant to solve.
On why this is important, Phadnis said, “In a successful tech product company, product leaders need to regularly ask questions to obtain answers that could lead them to very specific in-depth insights into what the product is trying to solve and what is the best mechanism to power it.”
Failure-tolerant and risk-taker: A product manager needs to constantly be ready to experiment, take risks and create prototypes which best fits the customer’s requirement. In this process he/she should be ready to accept that in the entire product life-cycle development, failures are imminent. What is important is to quickly learn from it and improve the product.
Phadnis highlighted that traditionally in India, we are not failure-tolerant. “We are not good at delivering bad news and we are not good at saying ‘no’ upfront. This is a very subtle thing that we need to develop as a product ecosystem. The product manager should inculcate in the product team that rather than the prototype failing or the product failing very late in the product cycle, failing earlier in the product life-cycle is far better.”
Influencer: Communicating and influencing are two of the most important soft skills that a product manager must have. “When a product team develops a product, the ultimate aim is to make the product a global success. This calls for a product manager to have the ability to influence a global ecosystem by effectively communicating cross culturally,” shared Phadnis.
Apart from being the tech master brain behind the product, the product manager needs to be a persuasive spokesperson for the product who aggressively broadcasts the benefits of the product to the larger ecosystem
0 comments:
Post a Comment