First 6 months as a PM

Its been a long time (1.5 years) since I wrote my last blog. So the best thing I thought of sharing with all are the last 6 months as a Product Manager as that would summarise a lot of things that I have been upto in the past (obviously excluding things at personal front)

Well, I was one of the few people (single digit I suppose) from my batch at IIMB who opted for a career in Product Management and thought of returning back to the Software industry. You feel good sometimes that you are out of the rat race but at the same time it give you jitters. You wonder if this is the right move after 2 years of investment in MBA as none of your other batchmates want to board this train. But slowly as you interact with more people you realize that all of us are different in one way or the other with different interests, passions and priorities in life. So, to make a better choice for yourself you need to understand yourself better and need to give some time for things to settle down. You get more confidence on your decision when a leading Business Magazine of the country features you in their cover story for doing things differently.

Anyways, afterall these thinking and introspection, I settled with the Product Management role in a leading storage company. I wanted to start my PM career at a place where I could learn the initial nuances of job and get a good mentoring from some senior people. At the same time, I didn't want a small piece of the pie (read it as PM of part of the product based on location). I wanted to work with a strong Engineering team so that my interest in technology booms further. Haven spoiled by the excellent environment in Google, I wanted to work in a company which can boast of its work culture globally and believes in giving a lot of freedom to its employees. Taking all this into consideration, I found NetApp as the best fit for me amongst the available opportunities at that time.

Its the first time that NetApp hired fresh B School grads as PMs but they did a splendid job in ramping us. I must say it took my couple of months to figure out what is happening around me. This is such a technology centric company that initially meetings were like Greek and Latin to me. But slowly, I started reading more about the technologies that we use and develop. I started talking to more people to understand the various products we deliver and slowly started to master my own product. It would be wrong to say if I never thought that why I needed a MBA degree if I had to work in such hard-core techie product (will answer that later). But my passion for technology and zeal to learn new things helped me ramp up soon enough. Infact within 6 months here I was in Delhi, talking to customers on my own and talking freely about our technology and the future roadmap. I was not only confident in talking about my product but also the complete package that we offer to customers (and definitely my MBA skills were helping me here). I was feeling so happy and getting such a kick out of all this. Finally, I had got what I wanted - a good mix of technology and business. I am now in a position where I understand the market and customer needs, translates them to requirements for my Engineering and deliver great products in the market to kick out the competition. I am part of the complete cycle and can see the big picture now.

At last, I am glad that I picked up something which aligns with my passion and didn't follow the rat race.

Disclaimer: All the views presented are my personal and not endorsed by my current employer in anyways

Google OS on its way!

Finally the much talked about, hyped Google Operating System has been announced and it would be in market in a year's time. I remember numerous times people asked me "Google is launching its OS, right?" and when I you used to give them an amused look they used to feel that I am just keeping it confidential. I used to say that Google is a web based company and will not enter into desktop operating system. Well, I was partly right in saying that.

The new Google Chrome OS is a lightweight OS that would be designed majorly for the notebooks to run the web browser and web based applications. The best thing about it is that it would be open source which will result a huge developer community building applications on top of it which will soon make it popular. Definitely, it would be a great product for the users who just work on internet most of the time and rarely use their desktop for any other purpose. Its going to be fast, more secured, easy to use and obviously damn cheap compared to the existing Operating Systems.

But the question is if this OS would be able to challenge the No.1 in the market. Its definitely a threat for Microsoft but we still need to see how big. To make Chrome OS popular, we need to make internet even more powerful such that users dont need their desktops at all. Hopefully, this OS would provide that platform to create more user friendly web based applications which would make the costlier desktop hardwares and softwares useless. Cloud computing will definitely play a very big role in this.

Congrats Google! Way to go!!