Product Management in E-commerce and Enterprise workflows: AMA with Arnab Ganguli

Arnab Ganguli is a Group Product Manager at Atlassian, a company whose products are widely used among product and software teams. Atlassian’s wide range of products includes Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom (recent acquisition), and several more. 

At Atlassian, Arnab leads a product team driving the roadmap for Jira Service Management-Data Center - a leading global ITSM solution that connects Dev, IT, and business teams to deliver great service and drive velocity across cross-functional teams. 

Prior to that, he worked at Flipkart, India's e-Commerce giant, where he rose up the career ladder starting as an APM to becoming a Group Product Manager. At Flipkart, he handled Logistics, B2B supplier relationship management, retail inventory planning, private label brand management, and a little bit of travel-tech at Cleartrip. 

For his education, he did his MBA from IIM-Calcutta and studied Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur University. 

Outside work, he likes to travel, play a bit of music, when possible, and help other professionals in his capacity.

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As an icebreaker, while we experienced being consumers of Jira and Flipkart products, how is it on the other side building products for such huge platforms?

That’s a great question. And for the largest part of my career, I was also a consumer of Jira. But yeah, it always gives you an empowering feeling when you know that you are solving problems at the scale of a Flipkart or at the scale of an Atlassian. That’s my short answer. At the end of the day, after going through all the hard work, you get a very satisfying feeling.

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Being in a company that has multiple tools for a PM, there's a high possibility of being exposed to tech of the future for a PM. I am an aspiring PM and looking forward to learning tech / techniques that will help us become much better or learn better. Can you give a glance of these tools or any advice you would like to give us? Any generic advice or suggestions would be great too.

Thank you for your question. As a PM, it is very important to have a high level of interest in tech. Don’t get me wrong, an educational background in tech is not necessary (you saw my UG already), but it's important to be aware of recent tech trends. As far as tools are concerned, there is no one tool. I usually try to read as much as I can from different sources such as medium.com, as an example.

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We just came out of the cricket world cup season. The management of the user traffic by Hotstar was commendable. However, today's match at Jio Cinema is in buffer mode. Can you please identify some server and user management techniques that you might have applied in Flipkart during the festive season to manage the traffic surge.

I think Hotstar is a brilliant case study of managing user path scale. And you are right, during Big Billion Day events, the user traffic in Flipkart used to be crazy. However, your specific question can be better answered by a technical architect. Unfortunately, I was not involved with those systems up close enough to be able to answer those architectural choices. Hope that helps.

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Considering the current market of high uncertainty, what would you recommend for someone who is trying to transition into product management from a non-tech role?

Good to hear that you want to join the PM tribe. I will be honest, at times when hiring is not happening a lot, it is difficult to transition to a PM role from a non-PM role. But it's not impossible; you just need to treat it as a marathon instead of a sprint. I don’t know in which firm/role you are currently, but the easiest step would be to figure out if you can internally transition to a PM role within your firm. If that’s not possible, I would recommend looking for a PM (or even APM) role in a small to medium-sized firm, get some experience going over there, and then try to move on to bigger firms. Another avenue to explore would be start-ups, which is also a very good stepping stone towards getting on the PM journey.

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You (Atlassian) must be getting a huge number of feature requests from customers across the globe. How does your team keep track of all those? How do you guys funnel out the ones which are not feasible, etc.?

Great question, welcome to the bread and butter job of a PM - PRIORITISATION!! So, as a PM (or even as a Project Manager), it is always important to chat with your customers in such a way that when they come up with a bunch of “I want feature XYZ” demands, you are able to identify the underlying “I need a solution to problem ABC”. The moment you are able to do that, you are now able to compare feature requests to identify the following things:

1. Will this feature request solve the underlying need gap?
2. Is there a better feature or some other solution that can solve this need gap?
3. Between two feature asks, which one is solving a bigger need gap?

Once you are able to identify these answers, your job of prioritization just boils down to simple common sense.

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We receive feature requests not all at once. One would come today, another would come a month later. How then would prioritisation work?

You can always maintain a feature backlog. Any new request gets added to the backlog. And then say once a month, you groom the backlog and either bump up a feature request or keep them lower in the stack or just prune them out, depending on your analysis of the feature request.

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From your experience, Can you elaborate a little bit on, let's say, some of the skills, mindset, and approach that you can swear by, which helped you to grow as a GPM?

Sure. Let me give it a shot. I think for any PM to grow, some of the fundamental skill sets remain the same, and IMO they are as follows:

1. Customer obsession - you can’t replace this skill set with anything else. Your success as a PM is directly proportional to the extent of your understanding of your customers and their needs and wants.
2. Product craft - Next most important. Product management is as much a science as an art. You can stand out as a PM if you are able to bring your creativity out on the table. I always encourage young PMs to take up some hobby that helps you exercise your right brain - music, arts, dance, etc.
3. Problem-solving and decision-making skills - as you grow as PM, the problems that will face you will keep on getting bigger, and the time you have to take decisions will get smaller. So it's always helpful to get better at decision-making skills, based on limited data, in order to get better at unblocking self and other teams.
4. Stakeholder management - last but not the least, very important to be able to work with people, influence people without any authority because, at the end of the day, the software you build will not be coded by you :)

I can keep going on, but these are my top skill sets that need constant sharpening.

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In the beginning of your professional career when you took up the role of an APM at Flipkart, what were your responsibilities like and did taking up leadership over a part of the Flipkart product so early in your career make you nervous?

Great question. My first year or so was very nervous. I knew nothing about PMing beyond textbook knowledge (back in 2015, even that was very scarce). But I got exposed to very good managers and mentors over there, who made my life manageable (I won't say easy because that was not the case 😄) and helped me learn my way through things. As any APM in Flipkart at that time, I started with one problem area (for me my first problem area was how to reduce the trucking time for long haul transportation of customer orders). But very soon, I got involved in several problem statements and my multi-tasking started which continues till date!!

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Can you please help us with some topics/resources/processes that are essential to start with in the learning journey for a Product manager? There's a lack of having a structured way in self-learning. Would taking up courses (online) be a good way to start? Considering at the moment there are a lot of courses but not really too affordable for a working professional in the Starting phase.

Nowadays there are too many online resources to learn from. I would recommend you keep things simple and follow one or two channels only. For me, I have always found Shreyas Doshi and Lenny Rachitsky to be great product thinkers. If you follow them on Twitter, you would be on a great start.

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As someone not able to find Internships despite a course from a top B school, what measures do you suggest a fresher should take to land an APM role?

There is no easy fail-safe answer to this question brother. I would recommend you keep hunting on LinkedIn (I have always found LinkedIn to be a great source for job listings). Also, use your B-school alumni network to figure out APM/product intern opportunities.

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Also like we brainstorm about the real pain points that are hidden in the PS and the probable solutions, how does this thinking phase look like in a corporate setup, is it mostly individual for an APM or a collaborative effort, and what fraction of time do we give to defining the problem compared to its execution?

The real-life scenario in a corporate world is much demanding. I can guarantee you will never find an occasion where you have nothing else to do, other than think about the solution to a problem. There will be 10 projects in the ideation phase, there will be another 10 in the execution phase, plus all the weekly review meetings, plus all the customer connects, plus all the daily scrum meetings, and 50 other different types of meetings. Solution: the bread and butter job of PM - PRIORITISATION! As a PM, you have to master the art of prioritising which work you should do when, and at that point in time, only focus on that work and ruthlessly ignore other stuff. Please refer to something called as LNO framework by Shreyas Doshi. He has already given all the answers.

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Would you want to share some of the things APMS/PMs have in their resumes that stood out while shortlisting or interviewing them? 

I think the trick is to be able to call out the impact of your work. Any hiring manager may not be able to comprehend the means you took to the end. But any hiring manager should be able to comprehend the end that you reached. Which means, in your resume, even if a lay person reads it, he/she should be able to understand the impact you created. So don’t just write that you drove the execution of a product, but write what was the dollar impact or user adoption impact your product created. Hope this helps.

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Maybe you have a better view of it, so how does the product landscape look for India? 

Short answer is: you are safe; the long answer is very long, won't be able to type it out! India has only started to learn the benefits of having PMs, post the Flipkart era, and the subsequent Flipkart mafia giving rise to unicorn after unicorn. Things have just started, so don’t worry. Please make your customer your best friend; everything else will fall in place, as long as you are an expert in predicting what your customer needs (and not what he wants). That’s my final and only advice.

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For someone who has a Groww interview next week for the APM role as a part of my campus placements (I got shortlisted after the case submission round), any parting advice you would like to give, asking as a junior? 

Just stick to the basics - problem-solving, product thinking, customer obsession, metric-driven decision making. All the best for Groww. It’s run by some of my smartest ex-colleagues.

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