Hi, so here is a bit about my career and journey so far.
👆🏻 I started my career with Tata Power in business and strategy. Most of the work here was of analytics and pilot implementation. Being a graduate engineer, I had started my career in the power sector; however, electrical engineering was not inclined to my interest.
I was already doing design freelance work now and then. Then I quit my job to startup with a friend. We were working on Freefolk, a community of travellers where you can connect with others and travel together. This did not last long, as my co-founder left to pursue his masters.
Freefolk was a lesson in many things, from market validation, team dynamics, co-founders working together to how to build an MVP.
About freefolk: https://prezi.com/view/XHb5wwatwgJizDCoroOv/
After Freefolk, I joined a friend and a couple of chefs to start a food business - Bluepine foods. I worked on it for two years. Scaling this business helped me understand people, their motivation and most importantly - Sales. Selling door-to-door and facing daily rejections brings out a positive change in you.
But, I soon realised that the food industry is not for me - it's too dependent on operations and not connected to technology and design. Nevertheless, the business is going strong as I write this. When I left, we were making annual sales of ~ Rs. 90 lakhs. We had just started to break even, and I quit.
After I left my second startup, I took a few months off to figure out what I wanted to do. Of course, the easiest option was to join a design studio. I even did that for a month or so. Then, after doing some research, I came across product management and realise this is what I want to do.
I moved to Bangalore and joined ClearTax. ClearTax was a big learning opportunity for me, working with engineers, business, and building software. Learnings on working with stakeholders, leading with influence, ambiguity, culture and people skills. Leading a small team of engineers right away was challenging but fun. I primarily worked with the Marketing team on acquisition and internal tools.
I joined Kristal as a first product manager. We did not have a single designer when I joined. I set up the design team and hired the first two product designers. My area of focus at Kristal was strategy and mostly feature work.
Kristal has helped me understand how a business works. Working closely with the founders and business leads, I now understand the role product and strategy plays in achieving better business outcomes. We have expanded to a couple of successful products, and currently, I lead one of them at Kristal.
Working with many departments and horizontally across the product, I realised how hard stakeholder management is. Working with people and leading teams in the most difficult skill a product manager can learn.
The journey so far has been great fun. Product management is still exciting, and building products is what I look forward to every day.