‘congratulations on becoming a permanent employee’

pov — i am 6 months and a week into working as an associate product manager at a startup and i find this email resting (rather) peacefully in my inbox.

it is a rather (and i must say, ruthless) cold January morning and i am set on brushing through my inbox to search for any important emails i must have received when this particular email catches my attention. and suddenly in a very filmy way i see the past six months pass through my eyes — from the utter helplessness i felt in the first two to three months after joining here to feeling (somewhat) settled in doing what i am doing right now. from being so coy (i now really don’t understand the reason i was so then) to putting my foot down in meetings because well, as a woman in a male dominated meeting, you need to speak loud haha. from giving in to whatever the person in front of me is saying to fearlessly standing by something i said in front of my team members.

if i think about one word i would use to describe the last six months, it would be — uncanny. well firstly because, it is kinda hard to believe how far i have come in terms of being a human and then being an employee. from not knowing even the ‘p’ in product management to being a critical memeber in the zero to one journey of two products, other than successfully creating and managing a functional and efficient project management system to track product development progress.

and while what i might say now about the job is completely opposite to what i had felt a few months back into the job, i think one thing that i did right was just getting through it. no matter what. essentially, not giving up. can really see that it paid off in more ways than one.

what i learnt (in a little more detail)

there is this statement that i read in a brilliantly written piece by Praveen Gopal Krishnan in The Ken —

“Reality does not care about your PM frameworks and deep consumer insights.”

really-the story of my life over the last six months. the different frameworks that i went through while preparing for my placements, the different kinds of documentation techniques that i read through and through before joining my current company all just occupied a pretty secondary place in my mind because all of them just failed when i tried to implement them in a real scenario. and yes, while this can be attributed to the fact that i work in a (mostly) B2B start-up, re-inventing most of these frameworks was where i feel the work started for me. and, as always, i did not realize that there was a need for these frameworks at first.

and well, let me tell you one thing that you might not even be really surprised about — creating a product from scratch with your involvement in literally everything except actually coding the product is very exhausting. extremely rewarding for my learning curve about product management, but really exhausting. and one thing about this whole experience was that i registered this newly found respect for the people who are a part of similar processes. and i am not at all counting an involvement from any interpersonal relationships in the company while saying this. i was lucky enough that i was able to gel well enough with my manager in due time and wholly take part in creating any new processes and improving the present ones here. the whole process alone is very raw. very meticulous. very unnerving.

product management here was not only about making really elaborate documentations and project management (something i very frequently encountered in my different readings about a product job), but also about being conscious of what wireframes i am preparing from i’d say around 40% (maybe?) developer’s perspective, while also being able to fluently collaborate with different teams, even though the team size is relatively lower as compared to larger companies. and, i guess, more importantly, it was about (in a cliche way) believing in the product i am building and the informed decisions i am making in the process.

not that anyone is asking, but -

if i am asked what i love and hate about product management, this would probably be my answer —

i love the fact that i get to be a part of the whole ‘behind the scenes’ processes. strangely enough, it brings about a weird kind of superiority complex in me. like — yes, i played an important role in creating this thing. in a rather cliche way, my baby (ew, i cringed real hard). even though the whole road to successfully launching a product is riddled with endless obstacles and ups and downs, it constantly feels like i am being a part of the bigger picture. i am making important, informed decisions, keeping in mind the bigger picture. its like acting like a 15-year old adult (read: 35 years old) when you are just a 4-year old adult (read: 24 yrs old).

apart from the fact that it is so over-consuming (and conveniently forgetting all the documentations), i hate the fact that it involves a lot of meetings. like A LOT. maybe its about the whole process of meeting people. it takes apart a sizeable chunk of all the things i have (desperately, might i add) tried to romanticise in the previous paragraph.

anyways, ig i will be back in a few months to talk about this 💁🏻‍♀️