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Learn Silicon Valley antidotes to product challenges faced by Startups

Successful products are not an accident, even if they may look like it from the outside. Successful products are the end result of a series of challenges tackled well.

While each business is unique, many of these product challenges are not.

As Indian startups are working towards building market-winning products, wouldn’t it be great if we could learn from some of Silicon Valley’s best and avoid costly mistakes?

With this goal, Confianzys is getting Rich Mironov, a product management coach/mentor to Bangalore in February.

As part of the event, Rich will be conducting an interactive seminar for startups on identifying key challenges for product firms, and how these can be tackled.

Rich Mironov coaches product executives, product management teams and agile development organizations. He is a seasoned tech executive and serial entrepreneur: the “product guy” at six Silicon Valley start-ups including as CEO and VP Products/Marketing.

Rich combines “what-we-can-build” with “what-markets-will-pay-for” viewpoints. Since 2001, Rich also has been an interim executive, consultant or adviser to dozens of early-stage companies and larger technology firms including Yahoo, Cisco, Wealthfront, WhiteHat Security, Varian and VeriSign.

Rich has seen the ups and downs of the product industry in Silicon Valley. He has seen the product industry in the US also turn out turkeys by not focusing on basics. If the idea is not validated, development methodology like Agile can only take you twice as fast down the wrong path.

The seminar covers topics like:

  •  What makes good ideas turn to valued products
  •  How to crack your product challenges before the market cracks you
  •  The market only pays for what it really needs. How should you build this right?

As Rich says, “The really successful start-ups are those that believe that they are half right, and half wrong, and quickly figure out which half is wrong– not that the ones that believe they are doing everything right.”

Here’s an opportunity to learn from Rich directly. The seminar Silicon Valley antidotes to product challenges faced by entrepreneurs is scheduled for 25 February 2015 between 3-6PM at My Fortune hotel, Richmond Road, Bangalore.

You can register here for the seminar or read more at The Secret Sauce webpage. iSPIRT members can use the code iSPIRTMEMBERS to get a 25% off on the entry price.

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3 questions to expect at your Product Marketing interview

Perhaps you are an Engineer considering a lateral move into Product Marketing and watching out for opportunities within your company. Perhaps you’ve gone through an MBA and are anxiously awaiting interviews on campus.

Whatever the situation, your first interview for a Product Marketing role can be an intense experience, especially if your past interviews have been all about technology.

While each interview can spring some surprises, here are some often asked questions at Product Marketing interviews that you should prepare for.

What product in the recent past do you think was marketed well/poorly?

This question is not meant to check your knowledge of revenues or market share in a particular industry. Interviewers ask this question to see if you have a good grasp of product marketing strategies and how they work in practice. There is no one right or wrong answer here, but you need to be able to discuss a specific strategy that a product adopted, and explain why you believe it worked/did not work.

If your product faced Problem X, what would you do?

Case-style questions like these are popular at Product Marketing interviews because it gives interviewers an opportunity to test two things; one, it tells them how you approach a problem – whether you are good at asking the right questions and understand the root cause of the problem. Two, you can also show them how you would work towards a solution without complete data – and in real life, most problems need to be solved using an incomplete amount of information.

Some examples of case-style questions are:

  • “Product sales are low in the last 6 months. What problems should Marketing seek to fix?”
  • “If your product could use any of these 5 potential channels, which ones would you use?”
  • “Lead quality from our current website is poor. What would you change?”

Mike Volpe, the CEO of Hubspot mentions in a blog post that he uses these extensively, and gives some more examples.

Case-style questions involve using marketing principles but thinking on your feet. It is a good idea to get some practice doing this!

Give us an example of how you would think of a new product idea.

Relax – the interviewer is not expecting you to come up with the next billion dollar idea right away! Since being the voice of the customer lies at the heart of the Product Manager/Marketing role, this question is meant to help the interviewer gauge your customer awareness.

Are you excited about learning from the market and customers? Can you draw the linkages between what customers need and what a new product should deliver? Do you have an understanding of how to learn what customers need?

This question is really meant for the interviewer to find out of you are a Marketer at heart – whether you are passionate about creating products that will delight customers and make them reach for their wallets.

At the same time, it also gives you a chance to showcase your communication skills, since the interviewer sets you free to talk about an idea of your choice. With communication skills being an essential asset for a Product Marketer, that’s something interviewers watch out for as well.

What were some of the questions you faced in your first Product Marketing interview? Do share in the comments below.

This article first appeared on www.confianzys.com/blog. Confianzys is India’s leading product business consulting firm.

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Do You Need An MBA To Be A Product Manager?

An extremely polarizing topic, the question, ‘Do You Need An MBA To Be A Product Manager?’ is an often asked one on popular forums; the answers range from “No, an MBA won’t help you in any way, and you are better off not spending the money” to “Yes, it’s a must if you want to get hired by large corporations.”

Like most big decisions that individuals need to take as part of their career growth journeys, the answer is really:

It Depends.

Now that may seem like taking the easy way out, but there really is no one single decision that would make sense for every aspiring Product Manager. So, instead of asking if an MBA is essential to become a Product Manager, a better question would be:

What do I lack in my quest to become a Product Manager, and how do I acquire the skills I lack?

When you frame the question this way, you can make a decision that fits your career goals and skill levels, rather than following a generic guideline that may be right for someone else.

A few years ago, getting an MBA was the best way to gain exposure to various business functions and learn skills needed to be an effective product manager. However, there are multiple alternatives available today – working in a startup where every member gets exposed to different aspects, taking online courses, taking specific training programs to build key skills or learn methods, and more.

So, with that in mind, let’s look at some of the skills and qualities you would need as a Product Manager and how you can gain them with/out an MBA.

Joining the dots between Market-Customer-Product-Technology

A good PM needs to map market opportunities, understand customer behavior in the context of that market, visualize the opportunity in the form of the right product – and finally, ensure that the available technology can deliver the product in the form visualized.

An MBA doesn’t teach you to do all of this. However, it can help you learn the tools you need for the first half of the equation, i.e. understanding markets and customers.

Of course, successful managers who do this without an MBA exist, but an MBA can reduce your learning time at work.

The rest of it is a skill acquired over time, learning on the job and supplemented by Product Management training that you can practice at your role.

Communication & other soft skills

PMs necessarily have to work with Sales, Marketing, and Engineering; to do this successfully, PMs need communication skillsbeyond talking – they need to listen, negotiate, harness the power of teams and often, influence using their credibility rather than authority.

Do you need an MBA to acquire these skills? If your communication skills are poor, an MBA can help you polish certain aspects such as presenting ideas well; on the other hand, if you have excellent communication skills, an MBA may not help you much in this area. (And don’t take your own word for it – get an objective person you know to rate your skills).

Product Marketing

Depending on how your company structures its teams, PMs may or may not be hands-on when it comes to Product Marketing. In the Indian context however, most PMs will be deeply involved in some or all aspects of Product Marketing.

This is one area where an MBA can add to your learning, with courses on consumer behaviour, brand management, and marketing communications. Many engineers lack exposure to these aspects of the job, and having some training in them is an asset.

Today, you could also gain some exposure to these using online courses from Coursera or others.

Networking

Till a few years ago, colleges were the best areas to form strong networks. Most of the leading B-schools have strong alumni networks that allow exchange of information about new jobs, and often give visibility into what friends in other industries are up to.

However, today there are a multitude of forums to network within the technology industry like startup events, LinkedIn forums, expert networks and more. While these do not replace the traditional B-school networks, they definitely give a leg up to candidates looking to build their own identity and explore work in other domains.

Graduating from any of the top B-schools could give an edge in getting selected for roles, but a lot then depends on the candidate, his/her domain and functional expertise to clinch the job.

With many startups trying to make their mark in the product space, demonstrating expertise in your known area of work through blogs/forums or by interacting with others in events often throws up job opportunities that you may not be aware of.

The key skills of being a good product manager – intense curiosity to understand how things work, an ability to appreciate context and its effect, the ability to observe keenly, spot opportunities and work to tap them – are not skills that a B-school can teach you.

While a B-school might hone some of your skills, you should take a cost-benefit approach to this and rightly ask – is an MBA worth the money?

Without a huge education loan to pay off, you may decide to take the risk of picking a relatively lower paying job as a product manager for the experience, or maybe start your own firm based on an idea you have.

That would be the first step along thinking like a product manager.