How I started off in LambdaTest to Becoming a Product Manager
“How do I become a Product Manager? “
“What are the traits required to be a Product Manager?”
“What are the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager?”
“Is Product Management a good fit for me ?”
These are the questions which many people have answered in their own ways, and to be honest, in many ways everyone is right as there are no right answers to these questions. In fact these were some of the questions I answered for myself as well when I started my product journey. My journey so far in working in a high growth startup like LambdaTest has been exciting. Tiring yes, exhausting sometimes yes, yet exciting definitely !!!
In this post, I wanted to share my personal journey of how I transitioned from a college girl to a Product Manager in charge of one of the fastest growing Software-as-a-Service startups by taking multiple roles in between, and hopefully my learnings can help you in your career path as well 😄 .
What made me think to be a Product Manager?
I always wanted to be able to make a change, be able to create something, solve some bigger challenges and be a part of something bigger. This all started when I was in college. I was so excited to be a part of every exciting thing going, be it a cultural festival, technical festival, entrepreneurship summits, or college elections. This is where I learned that I have the trait of becoming the one introducing a change, solving the problems. So, when I was given this opportunity of becoming a Product Manager at LambdaTest, I didn’t even ask for a chance to think. I said outright YES!
So, if you find yourself relating to the following skills, you might think of going for Product Management.
- Problem Solving Ability
- Communication skills
- Empathy
- Leadership and Charisma
- Curiosity
- Passion
- Ability to accept the failures
- Sympathy to customers and their pain points
- Metrics and Data driven approach
My transition to a Product Manager- Learnings and Experiences
Some of you might be surprised to know, when I joined LambdaTest, I started as a fresher. I had absolutely zero knowledge of what testing is, what a market is, how does business work, and almost all questions required to be answered to be a good Product Manager. I was starting my professional journey with a brand new startup. We were a team of just 8 people. But the one thing that me and LambdaTest had is some great leaders(which we still do 😜) . So, by trusting my instinct, having faith in me and my leaders, I started this journey. I was appointed as a content writer, who had gathered some writing skills from the college learnings but was in no space for professional writing. Thanks to Mudit, after hundreds and thousands of edits my articles started publishing on LambdaTest Blog page. It took me some time but I guess over a few months I was able to decrease those edits to some tens. 🥳
That in turn started the process of growing up and I started taking more and more responsibilities as they came. I started working on strategy discussions, market research, customer support, sales demos, website, documentation, product launch, partnerships, even technical support as required, I worked on everything. In other words I worked on all possible aspects of product marketing. From building up new channels to working on scaling them up, I entered a new phase of this journey. Product Marketing.
We were a small team but a very ambitious one. I, along with my great team and great leaders, took on the challenge of building up an awesome product and in my humble words we turned out to be pretty good in what we did (that’s what I think). We were doing multiple things, working overnights, with lots of coffee but we were rocking it. Marketing and sales took off and so did we. We then had a full on team for engineering, sales, marketing, customer support. However till then we had a very solid vision for the POC product that we had built and launched. However, the devil was in the details. We need to add more and more features. We need to polish the product as per customer feedback and take it to the next level. That’s when we started to feel the need of having someone dedicated to Product Management.
I was there from the beginning.I saw the journey from launch of the first feature on dev environment all the way till getting top 3 position on Product Hunt launch. The product had been embedded in my DNA. The customers were always my first priority (which they are today as well). I always treated the product like my baby, and no doubt, I had the traits which I mentioned above. So, when I was offered this opportunity to take on the role of Product Management, it was something that I could have never said “No” to.
Hence began the journey of a “Product Manager at LambdaTest”.
I could actually go on and on how we worked at that time, how we grew, but that’s definitely a story for another time. Drop me in comments if you’d like to read about it sometime. I’m keeping a tab on it 😉.
So, moving on, how did I take on this role and how it worked out for me.
What roles and responsibilities I took on after becoming a Product Manager?
So, one of the questions I mentioned in the beginning, “What are the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager?” it’s time to move to that.
In my experience, a product manager does not have a very clear distinction when it comes to the actual role. It goes especially true for a lean team startup. As I mentioned I worked as a Product Marketer before, so growth and strategy has been my strong point. But this is not the only thing that you can go with in the field of Product Management, you need to have tech understanding too, along with business, finance and other fields.
By tech understanding, I don’t mean to be a hardcore coder or complete solution architect. That knowledge is definitely a plus but not the only requirement. However even then, I feel that to be successful in this field, you need to have an in-depth understanding of how the technology and engineering works in a company.It becomes more important when the company is a deep tech startup in the field of testing, devtools, and SaaS domain. I was truthfully, far from the tech domain :P, so, it was another challenge, accepted. I started a deep dive into tech concepts which I didn’t even hear of before. I learned about basic stuff like development lifecycles, sprints, agile approach, etc, all the way till topics like DevOps cycles, docker, containers, Kubernetes, virtual infrastructure, product roadmap planning and many more.
You can add in a training montage scene in between 😉
After a rigorous bootcamp that lasted a few months, with again the help and support provided from the team, the tech expertise mission was accomplished.
Business was one field I already was learning so the knowledge was in place. Now, it was time to learn more and use it more for the company’s growth.
While these milestones were being achieved, I was constantly talking to customers, understanding their pain points. Making features with the engineering team, working with designers for UI, working on UX, wire-framing, learning more tools, planning sprints, trying to stick to launch dates (which is the least we try to do as Product Managers), helping with sales and support, helping strategy team in decisions, collaborating with QA, doing market research, keeping up to date with competitors, working on churn retention, and collaborating with marketing for new launches. Sounds too much??? Well, this is what comes under the roles and responsibilities of a Product manager. Exciting enough?
Here’s what the roles and responsibilities of a Product Manager look like:
- Setting a Product Vision and Strategy
- Prioritising and planning releases and features
- Developing a creative approach towards generating, developing, and curating new ideas
- Understanding the domain like an expert
- Researching on every nitty-gritty idea coming from all spaces
- Communicating strategy, plans, features across the organisation
- Boosting the enthusiasm of the team and keep them focused
- Roadmap planning
- Taking on responsibility for all failures
- Helping the sales, marketing, support, and engineering team to succeed
- Capability to say “no” where ever needed
- Data analysis and taking actions on it
- Market analysis on a regular basis
- Competitive analysis
- Giving the voice and shape to customer needs and requirements
- Product Requirements Documentations
- Product Positioning
and the list goes on….
Taking these multiple roles and responsibilities I am working even today and this is one of the best things that has happened to me. Today, we work on all the things as a startup and are in better shape than we thought. It is still a long way to go but with this team, nothing is impossible. I am always glad to have been a part of LambdaTest from the beginning and I trust my instinct “there is nothing we can’t achieve as a team”.
So, my advice for you, if you have the passion of working towards something bigger, be a person who can take responsibility for every failure, have a flexible attitude towards learning and implementation, learn to listen to customer’s pain points and strive towards solving them. It’s more of a change in mindset then actual certification and let me assure you this change in way of thinking is something which will bring out the very best in you!
Well, this was most about my journey of how I turned out to be a product manager but if you have any questions about product management or if there is something you’d like me to write on, drop me in the comments. I’ll surely be happy to connect and work on the ideas or you can connect with me on LinkedIn and shoot your queries.
If you like the post, please show some love by 👏.
