The document provides career management advice. It recommends applying a product management framework to yourself as your own "product" by learning from competitors, leveraging your strengths, satisfying expectations, forming opinions on trends, and dreaming big. Growing your career can help by enabling senior roles, higher pay, cutting expenses, maintaining your position, and achieving long-term goals like becoming a CEO. The document stresses taking control of your career to lead it where you want, not letting it progress passively.
2. About me
• Seasoned product management and product marketing executive
– Chief Product Officer of IndiaHomes.com
– Director of Product Management at Coupons.com
– Executive at MSN/Microsoft
• Experience
– across domains (email, content, coupons, retail, e-commerce, real estate and
maps & traffic)
– across product types (consumer, enterprise, mobile, social & platform)
– across functions (engineering, product management and online marketing)
– across levels (individual contributor, manager, director & VP/CXO).
• Angel Investor and Mentor at 500 Startups
• MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
3. How to grow in your career?
Apply the product management 101 framework to
the product i.e. YOU. Essentially, you have to do one
or more of the following -
• Learn from competition
– What do product managers (or whatever your role is)
at other companies do? Am I better than them or am I
worse than them? What can I learn from them?
• Leverage core competence and/or differentiation
– What am I good at? How do I leverage my strengths in
my current role?
4. How to grow in your career?
Apply the product management 101 framework to the
product i.e. YOU. Essentially, you have to do one or more of
the following -
• Satisfy demands of existing customers (internal and
external)
– What are my expectations from myself?
– What does my manager expect from me?
• Form strong opinion about various market trends
– Where do I want to take my career? Where will it go if I do
nothing? Where could it go if I work on it?
– What will people expect from me if I decide to take a new job at
another company?
• DREAM BIG
5. How could growing in career help?
• Bigger share of the wallet
– Will it help me to take senior roles within the current group?
– Will it enable me to earn more money?
• Bigger market share
– Will it help me to take senior roles with another company?
• Cut expenses
– Will it allow me to stop doing that I hate doing?
• Defend existing revenue
– Will it help me maintain my current position?
• Strategic importance
– Will it allow me to achieve my long-term goal (think CEO )?
6. Final Words
• When a stock starts falling rapidly, people are very afraid of
selling it and cutting losses. Their mind leads them to
believe that if they don’t act (i.e. don’t sell), it is not really
their fault if the stock falls further. They think that they
didn’t do anything consciously to worsen the situation.
What they don’t realize is that by not selling the stock, they
are consciously making a choice every single day i.e. to
keep the stock.
• You may want to read “Predictably Irrational” to
understand why we behave, the way we behave.
• Take control of your career and lead it to where you want it
to go, not where it is going on its own.