A Day in the Life of a Product Manager at Meesho!
By: Amrita Bose
Tags: Product, Problem Solving, Product Management

Can a Product Manager work in isolation? Is his or her work done as soon as a PRD (Product Requirement Document) is written and a feature implemented? If you are looking at a career in Product Management, and want to know more about those burning questions about Product life, then our VP — Product, Discovery and Personalisation, Movin Jain is here to answer some of those below, and to show you how a day in the life of a Product Manager at Meesho looks like.

Read on to learn more!

Pick a routine

10am: As a product manager working on Discovery and Personalisation in Meesho, my day begins usually with alone time — to sit down and think about what is it that I want to achieve today, this week and month. I look at the roadmap, and see if there are any blocks that need to be cleared and how I can remove these hurdles. This is also a time to finish some of the writing work — PRDs, documents, roadmaps and more.

12noon: This is then followed by a quick meeting with engineers on the team, where we take stock of what has been done and not done, and the next steps.

1pm: We often have sync-up meetings weekly, where we review recently-launched features and ongoing projects. Every PM talks about what they are working on, progress of their recent launches, and any roadblocks that are being faced in their ongoing projects. If the product has been shipped and experimented with, but is not showing conclusive results, we brainstorm what we can do next. Or if the results are showing good progress, then can we go ahead all guns blazing to scale the said feature? If it hasn’t worked at all, then we discuss what we have learnt from it, and go back to the whiteboard and start again.

In these meetings there is focus on execution. The OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are already written out, defining what big objectives we want to achieve by the end of the quarter and how to measure progress against them. We discuss whether each of the OKRs and projects are on track, and if we need to make any changes to our approach.

3pm: Spend time with the engineering team to get features built.

4pm: Sit with the Business and Category teams to understand their problems — for instance, some processes in the team that are manual and repetitive, and can be automated. The PM, in this case, will figure out the roadmap for the same. Or even when the business team might have a data requirement based on some insights they may have gathered, in such cases the PM can help review that data and understand those problems. He/she will pull out their own data and do their own analysis, trying to establish a pattern, and accept or reject a hypothesis already in their mind.

5pm: As PMs, we often spend time talking to our users (resellers). We speak to them on the phone or chat on Whatsapp, and try to understand how features are working and are there any problems being faced. This is usually achieved through a combination of unstructured: conversations with resellers or cold calling new resellers, and structured: where we float a survey or call and talk to resellers and do a proper formal user research.

The highs and lows of PM life

When a user tells you randomly over a call (without you even asking for it) that a particular feature that they don’t know you built, is one of their favourite features to use on the Meesho app, and it has made their lives easier, saved their time and also helped them do more business. That’s a definite high for a PM. You spent time working on something, and now you are noticing its impact, and watching it making resellers successful (a core Meesho value). That is always the highest point of the day.

The lows of a PM’s life are more like opportunities to learn and improve. When there are unexpected roadblocks in shipping a feature, you learn how to estimate ETAs better or how to proactively solve for bottlenecks. When something doesn’t work as expected, you learn more about the users’ needs.

When you run an experiment and things either go in the negative direction or don’t move at all, you have an opportunity to change an input, and reach better outcomes.

What might sound like lows, are opportunities when a PM actually learns and can add that learning to hie or her knowledge base.

A success story

One of the most interesting and successful features we have launched in the last few months has been Image Search. The feature was built around anecdotal data from our resellers. While they didn’t have much idea about AI and machine learning, by instinct some of our users knew that a feature like this would be useful for them. We then set out on the path to build Image Search and in one and a half months we had it ready. We applied the Meesho value of Speed over Perfection to launch a basic version of the feature first, and to see if resellers would like it or not.

As soon as we launched, we saw huge, positive feedback. The Image Search feature was contributing significantly to our number of orders and business as well, and it received a lot of praise in the Meesho community too. This was a huge success for the Product and Tech team because it added a new dimension in Discovery, that wasn’t present on the app earlier. Image Search wasn’t just about making an existing feature more efficient, but we ended up creating something completely new and impactful. So now you know the kind of exciting challenges you can take up at Meesho.

What makes a great Product Manager at Meesho

A Problem Solver: The ideal PM should be passionate about problem solving. You look at a problem, and you’re not able to sleep till you’ve solved it. That is the passion great PMs have for problem solving. Empathy for users: Given that users of Meesho belong to a certain demographic, you should be able to understand them, and not think of yourself as the user. Understanding where they come from, their life and socio economic situation, and how their lives work, and having deep empathy for them, is very important. Ability to manage stakeholders: You should be able to manage stakeholders and take decisions in uncertainty. There will be instances where you will just have anecdotal information at your disposal, and you will have to pick out the feature with the most potential and take that decision as to what will be the most useful to build given that you have limited engineering bandwidth. You will have to convince stakeholders about your thinking framework (the Engineering Manager you are working with needs to agree with you and believe in this feature as much as you). You should be able to handle differences of opinion and be able to work with people who might not think like you. Bias for action: You should be someone who gets unsettled when things don’t move. You will have to strike a balance between moving things and moving them in the right direction. Rather than sitting and ruminating on a problem for too long, if you have a bias for action then you go ahead and quickly implement it. That’s the right kind of mindset for a PM.

Make an impact at scale

If you’re a PM, what you do today might not impact a reseller’s life today, but it can potentially change her life two weeks or two months later, once your feature is live and fully scaled. The way you will end up changing the reseller’s life will be much more profound. The impact will be a delta jump, and it is up to the PM to pick up those features that will create that sort of a leap. For instance, when we built Image Search, probably only 0.1 per cent of our users could imagine that something like this should exist, the rest 99.9 per cent may not imagined it, but today that 99 percent are also using Image Search and benefiting from it immensely.

The Meesho Product philosophy

At Meesho, we don’t build many things at one go. We build only a few things, but build them with the right reason and intention. As a Product Manager, you should always pick the right projects to build. If you pick the wrong ones, even if you build 20 things, nothing will happen. I like to compare this with a hypothetical surgeon who believes he did a successful surgery, but the patient’s condition did not improve!

You are here not to build features, but to create impact and move business metrics.

The job of a PM is not just to think of a feature, write a PRD, get it implemented and think that his/her work is done, it is actually an engineer’s job done at that point of time. A PM’s job is done when the business metric moves.

In conclusion, joining Meesho as a Product Manager will be an opportunity for you to work in a fast paced, high pressure but challenging work environment. There will be a steep learning curve, and in that we are looking for folks who are used to that sort of fast paced learning. Meesho will provide a similar paced environment in a different discipline.

Meesho is sitting at the centre of the e-commerce scene in India and if you join us, you will get an opportunity to not only work in the cutting edge Indian e-commerce scene but also of global e-commerce as well. After the Amazons and Ebays, this is the next wave of e-commerce which will go out to hundreds of millions of people who don’t use apps for shopping. Not just in India, but the whole world! So you will be working with some of the best teams in the business and a company backed and trusted by investors. You wouldn’t have to worry about resources and the time and chance to fail, because Meesho is a safe learning environment and yet a steep learning curve.

This is also your opportunity to change millions of lives.

In terms of Tech and Product, we are a young team, so there isn’t much hierarchy at Meesho. You will get to work on important problems rather than a small piece of the pie. Solving big problems means that from day one you will be working against the tide in terms of hope, where you might think, Can I even solve such a big problem. But in some time you will definitely be able to solve problems that you didn’t expect you could.

Want to join The Product team at Meesho and help create 20 million entrepreneurs in 2020? Then we are hiring. Apply here!