Date: 17 January 2021

I worked at a consulting firm for about 3 years, helping clients formulate operational / business strategy by churning insights looking at their data. In short, presenting some cool visuals and insights on a fancy deck revolving around - sales teams restructuring and sizing, models for incentive compensation and so on. You get the gist. Even though India was an offshore office, I got numerous opportunities to be directly involved in discussions with the clients. However, one thing that I consistently missed in such consulting engagements was the visibility on the impact. Did the client even make use of those recommendations or did the deck just get lost in the pile with the others? Did they derive an actual business value from this? If not, where did our assumptions go wrong?

For me, knowing the impact of the work I’ve done goes a long way to derive a sense of fulfillment. That’s where I decided to switch to an in-house analytics team and I joined Gojek. Soon enough, completing a couple of projects did give me that sense of fulfillment. Working on algorithms to auto-detect restaurant operational times and target our customers with personalised discounts had a direct impact on our business metrics. Meanwhile, I got introduced to the product domain - lean product principles, agile and scrum methodologies, worked with engineers and started developing an interest in product development.

Analysing the impact of a certain product change or introducing a new feature always prompted me to think about why a certain feature or functionality was built and designed in a certain way. I thoroughly enjoyed these discussions with the product managers and I decided to make the switch.

I researched about the role and what it entails - what PMs at google / uber / amazon are doing; had 1-1s with some product managers at Gojek who had personally made the move from a different function to the product management function; caught up with my team’s product manager (who is now my manager) who helped me chalk out a 3-month learning roadmap for myself. I was decently good at analysing data and forming business narratives around features, so I didn't focus on this area much. Areas where I needed to upskill myself were:

1. Technology - I had worked with engineers but how do you write stories for the engineering team to consume. Do you understand the underlying systems enough to know how a feature will impact different systems? I learned the basics of backend and frontend development to be able to effectively communicate with these teams.
2. Design - I sucked at design and I didn't know even the basics of UX/UI. It's still a long way to go where I begin to feel satisfied with my designing skills (will publish some work I recently accomplished through Figma later). I picked up my first project which was relatively heavier on the frontend as compared to the backend and worked with the design team. Got myself accustomed to the basics of UX on the side.
3. Research and competitive intelligence- I had never worked with research and didn't how to derive the best value in product from these teams. I started collaborating more actively in research meetings and wrote research briefs for upcoming features.

Thanks to Gojek's fluid culture and my manager, I started picking up these projects on the side while still contributing as a product analyst half-time. It's been an amazing journey and hustle so far. Extremely grateful to everyone who helped me in this journey. Looking forward to some impactful work in the years to come!

Links -

https://productmanagerhq.com/business-analyst-to-product-manager/

For folks interested to venture into the product world, check this out:

PM Starter Kit