Learning about Product Management from India

[Originally posted on desiprodmgr blog in Dec 2012]

You can self learn about product management in a variety of ways. However, if you are working as a product manager, then I strongly recommend that you check out the information provided by one organization, Pragmatic Marketing.

Pragmatic Marketingprovides useful information, course material and training on product management, product marketing and other related subjects, for several years now. They run multiple seminars and workshops. And they also have samples and templates of various documents (MRDs, PRDs) that a Product Manager is expected to create in his work.

Unfortunately, even after so many years, I have yet to see their courses in India.

If you are a PM in India and do not have the opportunity or budget to attend their training programs, you should still imbibe the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. This is a very useful shortcut that summarizes the various activities and initiatives that the product team undertakes during the product lifecycle.

In later posts, I will also explain more about the relevance of the PM framework to a PM in India. I will introduce more links and articles that a PM should go through, for self-learning and competency development. These will also include other popular frameworks and methodologies, books on product management and other related topics.

Welcome to this Blog

This blog is about my experiences as a product manager in the technology industry in India and other countries. 

I first started as a technical product manager, over a dozen years ago. I was a few years out of engineering college, and an opportunity opened in my organization (the former Lucent Technologies) for the role of a technical product manager. I remember being in two minds on whether to take it up, as I had also received my acceptance into IIM Ahmedabad for the two year PGDM. However, my manager graciously allowed me to work in the new role for a few months before leaving for business school.

For my summer internship, I joined Yahoo! for two months in Bangalore, where I saw product managers working on concepts, proposals, specifications and so on. Somehow, even though my project was primary market research, I was fascinated by the breadth of work that product managers seemed to work on. I guess my brief exposure at Lucent and Yahoo! got me attracted to product management.

I returned to Ahmedabad and started reading all technology and silicon valley related books in an attempt to understand this role some more. Given the emerging nature of this role in India, there was a lot of misconception on how product managers should work from India. This did not deter me, and I decided to join CA Inc. in Hyderabad, as a product manager after completing my MBA in 2007.

Since that time, I have worked as a product manager in many organizations as well as on my own startups.

Disclaimer: The views posted on this blog are mine alone, and my employers have nothing to do with this blog or its contents.