Focus Areas: 1. What are the responsibilities of a Product Manager 2. PMs 6th sense: Building products that customers love & not your boss 3. DO NOT fall in the trap of launching feature after feature 4. Product Development Cycle: Test > Fail > Learn > Test again 5. Growing your product from 0 to 1 About the Speaker: Saurabh Pareek, Senior Product Manager at PayPal. Currently, he leads Consumer Financial Services products & experiences at PayPal based in the SF Bay Area. He was part of initial product team of Paytm during its journey from 10M to 200M and had the opportunity to work on various products including building the immensely discussed Rewards & Cashback management platform. Prior to that, he worked at Careers360, a reputed ed-tech and media startup managing various products and business streams About PayPal: PayPal is a global payments leader operating in 200+ countries.

1. Mindful product management: PM 101
Saurabh Pareek

2. Hello! I am Saurabh
Here’s another typical story.
Dropped out of a college.
Joined Engineering.
Startup.
Product Manager.
Studied Public Policy & Law.
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Current: PM @ PayPal
Past:
PM @ Paytm
PM @ Careers360
Startups

3. 3
• Responsibilities of a Product Manager
• PMs 6th sense: Building products that customers love & not your boss
• The feature loop: DO NOT fall in the trap of launching feature after
feature
• Product Development Cycle: Test > Fail > Learn > Test again
• Growing your product from 0 to 1 vs 1 to N
Focus Areas for today
And a do-it-yourself exercise to absorb these concepts

4. 4
The quality or state of being conscious or
aware about something.
mindfulness

5. Responsibilities of a PM

6. 6

7. 7

8. 8

9. 9
• First Principle: Be humble. Be the true representative of users
• Build simple, secure, fast, easy to use ethical products
• Be aware and understand the market, competitors and
external/internal factors very well
• Ideate, collaborate, partner, prioritize for features &
capabilities that the user needs
• Define and continuously invest on evolving the product
strategy & roadmap using various levers
Responsibilities of a PM

10. PM’s 6th Sense: Customer Focus

11. 11
• There is no full stop in product
development.
• As a PM, you should continuously work
with the customers to listen to their needs,
learn and validate prototypes, test as you
launch with them
• Invest into listening to customer feedback
from various sources of user behavior data
funnels you are capturing
Product Development is a continuous cycle

12. User feedback can come from a variety of sources
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Social Media/Internet
Sentiment Analysis
Usability Tests
Predictive Data Analytics
Qualitative Research
Quantitative Research

13. Don’t just become a feature factory:
Build a good product Plan

14. 14

15. 15
• Invest time in knowing the market well
and building a solid product vision &
strategy
• Continuously work on improvements in
product strategy based on changing
market needs, factors and customer
feedback & behavioral inputs
• DO NOT fall into the trap of shipping
features on features that no one would
use. Ideate well to abstract out
customer needs & build the right thing
Your goal is to have 1 feature used by millions,
not million features used by 1 user each

16. Product Strategy & Market
Understanding

17. 17
• Use consumer insights to build a healthy
backlog of improvements as well as new
feature requirements
• Document, review, update and prioritize
your backlog often. Discuss in detail with
your key partners like Sales, User
Research, Design, Engineering,
Marketing, Go-to-Market.
• Using right frameworks can help you
prioritize your backlog better, though
they are only enabling functions and not a
necessity
Know your market very well Especially THE influencing factors

18. 18
Focus a lot during
this stage on
iterating your
product regularly
based on feedbacks
to ensure it reaches
majority mass
adoption

19. Lack of innovation
Companies that have failed to acknowledge
changes in technology repeatedly have vanished
from the world
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20. A generation ago, a “Kodak moment” meant
something that was worth saving and savoring.
Today, the term increasingly serves as a corporate
bogeyman that warns executives of the need to
stand up and respond when disruptive
developments encroach on their market.
In 2012, when Facebook was buying Instagram,
Kodak was filing for Bankruptcy.
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The Death of “Kodak Moment”

21. Product Prioritization &
Continuous Iteration

22. 22

23. 23
• Use consumer insights to build a healthy
backlog of improvements as well as new
feature requirements
• Document, review, update and prioritize
your backlog often. Discuss in detail with
your key partners like Sales, User
Research, Design, Engineering,
Marketing, Go-to-Market.
• Using right frameworks can help you
prioritize you’re your backlog better,
though they are only enabling functions
not a necessity
Knowing what to build is backbone of your role

24. 24
RVCE Model: Risk, Value, Cost, Effort

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RICE Model: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort

26. Changing PM Role:
Startups vs enterprises

27. 27
• Focus on learning breadth at beginning
• Most product managers would play a
generic PM role
• Develop 1-3 specialization areas as you
progress in your career
• Learn [at-least] 1 new skill every year
A PM Role would change based on The industry you operate
in and the growth stage your company is in

28. Implicit Asks/Ethics
Ethics in Product Management are not talked
about much but probably are the most important,
beyond legal & compliance frameworks
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29. Security,
Privacy,
Accessibility,
Inclusiveness,
Non-Discriminatory.
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30. 30
Just another day
in life of a PM

31. Pay close attention to
market trends as well as
evolving user psychology.
You cannot innovate from
your desk. Go out & meet
your real users. Know
them & their day to day
life well.
Do not act on every data
point available. Think,
process & act
responsibly.
In Summary
Pay attention
Talk to the users
Think.

32. Design of Everyday
Things by Don Norman
1
Thinking, Fast &
Slow by Daniel
Kahneman
2
Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
3
The Power of
Habit by Charles
Duhigg
4
Hooked by Nir
Eyal
5
Zero to One by
Peter Thiel
6
My top 6 books for Aspiring/current PMs

33. If you are already bored, here is a cute puppy to cheer you up.
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34. Questions?
You can reach me at:
@_saurabhpareek | saurabhrspareek@gmail.com
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