Navigating as a PM in diverse sectors: AMA with Manish Aswani

Manish Aswani is a Senior Product Manager at Cashfree Payments, where he builds cross-border payment systems, and makes cross-border money transfer as seamless as UPI payment.

Before joining Cashfree, he was sitting in the driver's seat building the logistics for instamart(Swiggy).He also had the chance to be in the early stage of Blinkit's(erstwhile Grofers) product teams that built the foundation for current day's hyperlocal systems.

Beyond his diverse experiences, Manish studied engineering from IIIT Allahabad. After graduating he worked as a software engineer for about 3 years and switched on to his PM gears. When not working, Manish likes to travel, explore food joints in Bangalore and watch Netflix series. He also believes to give back to the society by providing mentorship whenever he can.

Let’s take the chance to hear Manish himself on his PM journey, starting his career as an engineer to navigating through diverse categories from Grocery to retail and to Fintech.

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Can you throw some light for our audience on how you landed your first job as a PM, given that you transitioned from an engineer directly to a PM?

The utmost important thing for an engineer is to have a consumer first approach and understand who your users are and why they are hiring your product? Given that I worked for multiple small startups as an engineer, I got the best seat in the house to understand the customer very closely and over a period of time, I was able to move from engineer to product manager.

But again having said that, if you are not working at a startup and want to move to product management you can spend time with your product managers and understand who are the users for whom we are building and why are they hiring our product in the first place.

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How does a B2B and B2C interview process vary? Can you elaborate what type of interview questions one can expect from B2B PM roles and how to prepare for B2B interview?

It mainly varies because there is a difference between the persona of end users and number of users. B2B roles are generally mature and the software moves at a slower pace than that of B2C products.

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What should a candidate keep in mind while making deck for Flipkart APM role?

The most important thing you should

• remember the key user who will use the product,
• define the key customer pain point clearly,
• and then how do you intend to solve it.

Maximum number is given to the point how well you define the customer pain point.

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I work at an early stage company just wanted to understand how a typical day to day at a growth stage company like Cashfree look like?

In short very hectic and eventful. In any growth stage company there is always chaos on the floor and for a PM who wants to grow fast this chaos is your ladder where you can learn a lot of things and experience it first-hand.

Given that you are moving fast at a growth stage company it becomes all the very important that you and the entire team understand Ideal customer persona (ICP) as any misunderstanding can make you or team fast as well.

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Doesn’t it also mean looking at a lot of data, and what is the major metric which is tracked as a North Star. Coming on to it we are building an AI product for filmmakers, does it number of scripts processed make sense to chase as the metric. Might be a little vague but what I want to understand is if you are chasing towards sustainability(Growth and Cashflow) company what are the metrics should we track to be that way?

In my experience data is kind of misunderstood people read it a lot of times as number and number churning whereas data is customer insights and based on how you understand whether the product is sticking or not. North Star depends on a case-to-case basis- In Instamart we used to track the percentage of order delivered within 20 min.

Coming on to it we are building an AI product for filmmakers, does it number of scripts processed make sense to chase as the metric

The ultimate aim for filmmakers if the script that you suggested made it to the final cut, processed is a sub-step to it.

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What were the challenges that you addressed in your initial few months of onboarding? And how much is it different than working in a lean company where only 1 or 2 people are taking care of the entire vertical?

When you are in lean teams, a product manager is expected to do a lot more of general management than when you are, let's say, in a (larger)place like Swiggy, where you are focusing on a particular use case.

Two are very different and different skill sets are required to operate in lean setup or large setup.

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As you know, in current market, it’s extremely difficult to get a role in an established or series A+ company. What do you suggest freshers should than opt for?

If you are a fresher and have no product experience, then of course you will have limited options to choose from and I would say take the risk because once you have the product manager tag it does help cracking further roles. Some experience is better than no experience at all.

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I see that you've worked across different start-ups. What has been your strategy and preparation while applying for jobs and interviewing?

• Research about the role and talk to your connections in those companies to understand about the internal workings of the company. Prepare for why do you think you want to work for this company.
• Set a good rapport with your TA who is coordinating the process
• Try to understand some of the sample questions or skills a interviewer checks
• Also ensure you collect a few points around what are area of improvement and how you have got so far in the process

Last but not the least is you need to be well prepared for the product management interview and case questions that are generally asked.

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Can you advise which works the best: Referral vs Job portal?

As you grow senior in the job role referral becomes more critical. At least, this is what I have seen, in my case.

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For roles such as one at Cashfree, can you elaborate what are the biggest challenges you face navigating country specific rules and regulations?

Wearing my research hat came in very handy at the role at cashfree, given the kind of role that I was playing earlier as this skill was not tested much.

In our case, we partnered with another product provider so that you don't have to navigate the country-wise rules and regulations and once you get the PMF of your product you can go in depth of it.

What we did is similar to what Emirates Airlines did by leasing the planes: Link here

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Can you guide how much domain knowledge is expected when you are switching to payments PM space? Where can I read more about payments space which can help me to build my knowledge in payments?

I would say no domain knowledge required be it payment or any other domain.

For payment specific knowledge here is a link to medium article that can help you a lot : Clicke here for the link

It is very important to keep in mind, the most underrate skill for a product manager is common sense which help you immensely if you interviewing in cross-domain scenario.

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So they dont look for domain knowledge during interviews?

Let's say when I was interviewing for Grofers early in my career, I had no idea how a supply chain worked but, before the interview, I went on YouTube and watched all the videos to understand what goes in when you place the order till the time of delivering the order.
Once you have a high-level idea you can go in for an interview which an understanding of what happens at a 10000ft above and then if there is a domain-specific question just as your interviewer to explain it in detail.

For a data analyst who is currently taking the path of product management and still in training, what would be your advice to me as a newbie in product management?

The only advice that I can give you is becoming a  product manager is a journey and you are always learning.  You are always going to be in "Training" if you have chosen this path.

How do you think the Product Manager as role grow over the next few years and the next decade given the changes with AI and tech (what would the role entail, will there be reduction of PM roles, less generalists and more specialists and everything that you can add)

If AI grows to the potential that we are anticipating, I don't think that just product management is going to change but it is every role you see today is going to change or some of the roles might not even exist in the future.

Look if you happen to revisit this thread 5 years down the lane, I can bet you a lot of deep tech work will be happening in India and probably an e-commerce startup in Africa will be raising money.

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What is your opinion on the problems PMs/start-ups are solving in India when compared to those in the US (as in here - aggregation, digitalizing, marketplace and more opportunities in the US like Palo alto networks, Nvidia, Cisco, Visa, Amazon Robotics, Tesla- more deep technical problems across domains)

Take a look at Phonepe-they have launched their own Play Store.
NPCI is threatening the likes of Visa and MasterCard and don't look at NPCI as a govt company there is more tech to it.
Mahindra X700 has integrated tech which makes is a semi-automated driving experience. These are very few examples on the top of my mind But imagine a future 5 years down the line.

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