Introducing Myself and my Product Management Journey

Hello friends

Every Tuesday at 10am PST I write about my experiences in B2B product management. Topics range from product strategy, prioritization, roadmap, processes and so on. I am close to 100 subscribers in about 3 months.

Thank you so much for tuning in.

This week I am on PTO to Vegas and Grand Canyon and decided to just introduce myself and share my journey with you.

Not the Vegas journey, that will stay in Vegas :-).

It was Feb 2009 at the height of the credit crisis. My boss called for a 1:1. He joined a bit late but there was an HR person already on call. You know how that went. So now I am out of a job. My experience thus far was 16 years in management consulting mostly in Big 5. I briefly dabbled building my own software helping SMBs in India with billing, ERP, CRM etc before moving to the US.

I had no idea what to do next. I read a book that helped a bit. It was called “What should I do with my life?” I highly recommend it.

After the initial shock wore off, I had some clarity. I decided to take a break. For the next 6 months it was a time of reflection and spending time with my 7 year old and take him to his karate/soccer/swimming classes. I had a blast.

A small detail I forgot, I had just graduated with an executive MBA from UC Berkeley. So I was armed with fresh knowledge to apply but nowhere to apply to. My last class was with Steve Blank. That was a game changer class. Please see his lectures on the 4 steps.

A friend of mine and I decided to build something on Enterprise BI. We entered ourself into a business plan competition at UC Berkeley. We got selected in the Top 10 amongst 60 or so companies. The top 3 startups were curing cancer. Fat chance you are going to win anything.

Fast forward to July 2009, I met this founder from Germany who had built a data visualization software - iCharts. It was closer to what my friend and I envisioned. We decide to try work together for 3 months. I was employee #2 in USA. I ended up staying for 6 years. We pivoted 3 times. Went bankrupt a couple of times. We had one large cola drink as an early customer that helped us bootstrap. Our first funding came 4 years in. And finally, we found early product market fit in 2013. And then it was execution. We were closing contracts so fast we were burning out.

In a startup you do a little bit of everything. Product, Engineering, Customer success. I even did sales which was let’s say uncomfortable at first. Heck, I even installed phones for our sales team and connected Vonage to our salesforce and got snacks from Costco. iCharts was an exhilarating journey. You know the kind of job where you wake up monday morning and you are eager to get to work. So I made a promise. Work where you are eager to jump in at 6am.

And that’s how I started my product management journey. I learnt on the job about customer friction, handling objections, ruthless prioritization, positioning, customer pitches and so much more. My biggest lesson learnt was the buying journey of a B2B software. There are so many objections you have to handle.

Let me share a story. We had a prospect who loved our demo and we were in contracts. Legal came in and they wanted to learn about the data movement at the server and database level. And I am explaining how data moves before a visualization is presented to their end user on the browser. So what was the objection.

They are a public company. The data they were reporting on was internal financial ERP data e.g. forecast data. Imagine a scenario where one of our engineers query that data ahead of earnings announcement from the database. The visualization was also cached on our servers. Theoretically they could use this information to trade in their stock. That’s insider trading. We argued that no one has access to production data but that was not true. Their concern was valid and we had no response. These are the messy details you deal with in Enterprise B2B.

I also learnt a lot about how to pitch to different types of customers. I had 50 versions of the deck at that time. An advise to B2B founders. Make your pitch so smooth that at the 20 min market, your prospect wants to discuss pricing. That means they like what they are seeing and are now debating value vs cost. But it will take practice and some trial and error.

I exited in Nov 2016 to join SugarCRM to help build out their reporting systems. I joined and guess what, no team was allocated.

Lesson learnt - when you join ensure you have a team to execute.

At SugarCRM, I launched their first brand new SKU which paved the way for further new products. I implemented GDPR as 50% of customers are in EU. Yes, I read the law 3 times. Lesson learnt - Don’t ask lawyers to give any kind of requirements.

I also launched Sugar Serve, a customer service on the cloud which included integration with Amazon Connect for calls and chat. (This is my proudest launch and it is sooooo much better than Zendesk)

In 2020, I joined Brightedge as VP/GM New Initiatives, who asked me to build a brand new product as a side project. So I built an adjacent product in marketing automation for their SMB customers. It’s currently in Beta.

As I write this, I am transitioning out of Brightedge. Again, I am taking a break to travel and visit my aging parents in New Delhi. I have some ideas to build a SAAS in the content creation space ala ChatGPT. So will give that a try. Or I might go the coaching, consulting route. I don’t know what is in store for me next.

As a side note, I coach at PM Studio program at UC Berkeley where I coach 10 aspiring PMs each quarter. I am also an advisor at UC Berkeley Skydeck accelerator program where I help B2B founders with product market fit and how to optimize for the next milestone.

I have now lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 28 years where I started as a Huron developer (It’s a weird programming language in the Amdahl mainframe). My wife works at Zoom and my son is junior at UCSD studying Biosystems Engineering. He has been sharing pig heart dissection photos from his lab. Yucks.

The title of this newsletter is ProductsOS which is short for Product Operating System, but it sounds like Product SOS. I think I’ll just keep this name for a while. At this stage, I am slowly transitioning to coaching, consulting and advising B2B product teams.

I am offering a free 30 minute consultation for the next few weeks to talk about any topic in B2B product management. I am happy to discuss B2C issues, but I don’t have experience so my inputs will be mostly generic.

or you can simply subscribe to this free newsletter and join on this PM journey with me.

Here is my most popular post - Growth Strategies for Product Manager

Thanks again for subscribing. I will resume writing from next week. Have a great week.