You Got To Lose To Know How to Win: How I Discovered Product Management
More often than not, life-altering moments present themselves in unexpected ways. That’s exactly how I discovered the world of Product Management.
I was fresh out of college, and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did get an offer from a certain IT giant, but the thought of doing something out of societal pressure and not out of passion made me uncomfortable and to be honest, a little scared.
I’ve always had this ideology of helping people from my childhood and I wanted to implement the same in my work. So for the next six months, I indulged in a lot of volunteer work, but I realized that income is one of the most common indicators for society to understand a person’s value. I knew I had to enter the corporate world. That’s when I got my first job at Digit as an analyst.
My first job
I was working in the Group health actuarial team to analyze customer health claims data and developing pricing for current-year policies. A year and a few months went by, but I was just not feeling the passion that I had talked about.
Sure, the enthusiasm was there like any other “rookie corporate” to always do better and work harder than last time, but the fact was that the work was monotonous, it didn’t have meaning and there weren’t many options to do more. Don’t get me wrong, the people there were really good and supportive but there was hardly any variety in the work.
One fine day, I asked myself the oh-so-common interview question “Where do I see myself in 5 years?” I had no answer. I decided to reduce the timeline and asked “Where do I see myself in a year?” And again, zilch. I realized that I was back to the same situation I was stuck after college, about not knowing what I really wanted to do. That’s when I decided to just call it quits and search for something new.
Failure and self-analysis
I was determined to follow a structured approach this time to find the next step in my career. And so, I set the following vision and mission for myself
Vision: Be an honest and empathetic individual and create a definitive impact on people.
Mission: Build a career where I can solve problems and bring change, no matter how minute they are.
I heard that consulting is a good career choice that revolves around solving problems and challenges for businesses and decided to take a jab at it. I applied for multiple opportunities, prepared for about a month, and interviewed for a leading healthcare consulting firm (ZS). Sadly I didn’t make it past the third round. I applied to a bunch of other firms but the pickle was that what I made up in ambition and passion, I lacked in skills and experience.
The fortuitous discovery
I signed up on Linkedin during that time for my job search and was exploring the platform. I made a couple of connections and I accidentally clicked on a random profile. I was about to click back when I noticed the term “Product Manager” on the headline. My curiosity piqued and I started researching more about the role. I found multiple definitions on the internet and one thing I could tell was that it’s a challenging role for sure.
Based on hours of research I found out that product management requires continuous communication, which is a skill I particularly wanted to improve on a professional level. Continuous communication invokes a true sense of complete ownership, collaboration, and most importantly, product managers are responsible for making an impact on people’s lives. Product management will fit quite nicely with my mission and vision.
I started learning more about the role. I explored a whole lot of product case studies, increased my visibility on LinkedIn and eventually received offers for Product internships at a solar energy firm (Reqip) and later on, at a logistics firm (Shiprocket) after applying to almost 100+ internships. I knew this was a bit of a downgrade after a full-time job, but I had the hunger to learn and the managers who hired me could understand my passion, so they gave me a shot to start from the ground up.
The moment
One thing I must say is that those internships really cemented my beliefs about my career goals and piqued my interest in product management. I learned about multiple facets of the role — understanding problems, meticulous research, extensive documentation, design principles, data analysis and also got to use some really fantastic tools in the process.
After five months of internships, I finally received a full-time offer from a logistics startup (Swift). That’s when I knew, this is it. Unless there’s something else that’s more interesting or if I somehow lose interest in the role, which I knew wasn’t gonna happen anytime soon — this is the big moment for me. This is my calling.
The journey
From looking at excel sheets and creating pivots every day to struggling for multiple months in the hopes of getting an opportunity to work as an intern to eventually receiving a full-time offer, the journey was pretty exhilarating. But it was 100% worth it.
I’m grateful to all the people on LinkedIn who’ve helped me during this process of transition, to the hundreds of rejections and unresponsive applications which had a direct impact on my growth and my will to push through and to the opportunities I got which initiated the start of a new phase in my life.
The takeaway
So to all those aspiring to become a product manager, please know that it's possible. With severe perseverance, commitment and dedication to the process, and sometimes luck plays its part as well — finding a product management career is possible. Just don’t give up.
Believe that you can achieve and you will.
Sometimes I do wish I had discovered this role sooner, which would have saved me those couple of months of “fear of the unknown”. But I’m glad that I got to experience those failures.
In the words of the great Steven Tyler: “You got to lose to know how to win”.
So, dream on folks!
If you liked my journey or if you found any similarities, please give this article as many claps as you can; And comment with your feedback on how can I make my storytelling experiences better. After all, I'm a product manager and feedback is one of my fuel sources.
Do connect on Linkedin as I’m always up for good conversations.
Fin.🙏🏻
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
