This week, Product Faculty hosted Sandhya Ganesh, Sr. Product Supervisor at Tinder, for a particular #AskMeAnything session. Sandhya tells us about her expertise switching from Amazon to Tinder, how she includes Engineering within the discovery course of, and what to do when intestine feeling conflicts with information.
Meet Sandhya
Sandy Ganesh is a Senior Product Supervisor at Tinder, specializing in engagement and retention development. She has been praised by colleagues for her creativity and insightful concepts. She is data-driven and makes certain to maintain her clients’ desires and wishes in thoughts in each step of her work. Earlier than her present position, Sandy spent simply over a yr at Amazon as a Senior PM constructing software program merchandise for his or her Office Well being and Security Pillar. Throughout her time there she led the expansion technique for a survey product which gave her staff information to successfully drive product and program technique in an effort to enhance the well-being of the staff.
Being a world scholar fascinated by Product, what can be one of the best ways to enter into PM roles, as a result of making use of to those PM roles have a requirement for greater than 2-3 years of expertise?
It comes down to three issues based mostly on my expertise:
- Upskill and develop your PM abilities
- The way you convey the story about your abilities and expertise (this generally is a faculty challenge, a private challenge as nicely in case you are recent out of college). The story wants to point out your considering, your drive to take an initiative and be taught and the impression you’ve created. These are the talents you want as a PM as nicely.
- Community. By community I imply figuring out the individuals who may help you perceive the interview means of the businesses you have an interest in and networking with individuals who will be your potential mentors. And final networking with Hiring Managers by sending them a considerate observe on LinkedIn on who you might be and why you’ll be a match for the position on their staff.
PS: Don’t take the years of expertise as a tough rule.
As you might be very data-driven, in a case the place your instincts/intestine feeling are pointing in a route completely different from the info, which do you select?
Once we take a look at information I at all times like to take a look at a number of information sources as an alternative of only one i.e. information from consumer analysis which will be within the type of consumer interviews, surveys, observing a spotlight group, information from analytics, information from our buyer assist/member expertise.
Sometimes the important thing insights and downside will discover itself in a number of information sources and as soon as we see a sample emerge I prefer to pursue those which can be recurring most variety of occasions and that’s the largest situation for many of our customers.Alternatively, there are at all times situations once we don’t have the info we want. On this case, I like to make use of learnings from previous experiments and my instincts based mostly on expertise working in that business and understanding the consumer teams to type a speculation and do a fast and scrappy check to validate.
Are you able to inform us about your expertise of leaving Amazon and searching for a brand new position? Are you able to describe the expertise of making use of and interviewing with Tinder? Why did you find yourself going with them?
This was a chance that got here to me (I bought reached out to by a recruiter) and I made a decision to be taught extra concerning the position and have a dialog. When it comes to the interview expertise it was fairly just like the FAANG – i.e. interview with the HM after which a digital onsite with completely different Product Staff members and cross purposeful companions. This position introduced a great problem and alternative for profession development and therefore I made a decision to take it up.
Learn subsequent: The Final Listing of Product Supervisor Interview Questions
How do you contain engineering groups early within the course of with out diverging focus? How do you combine (steady) discovery with a staff that’s centered on the present wager/experiment?
I sometimes prefer to work on figuring out the issue/alternative areas and brainstorming a few options first. I then prefer to run it by my engineering supervisor(s) as an thought in a 1:1 and see what they assume. A lot of the occasions they supply very precious suggestions that I like to consider and incorporate.For steady discovery, first step is to create a tradition and discussion board to debate new concepts from PMs, engineers or anybody. Sometimes I love to do a Jam session as soon as a month with the staff together with eng., design and analytics.
So that you don’t embrace engineering in any respect within the discovery part after which brainstorm potential bets (I suppose with the designer) earlier than operating these by the EM?
Not likely. I might contemplate the ideation as discovery. What I’ve discovered after attempting a number of strategies is that getting in with an thought for engineering to react and reply to works higher than going with a clean slate and saying let’s brainstorm. That doesn’t imply my thought is ultimate it’s only a methodology that has helped me have a extra significant brainstorm with my engineering counter half. I do the identical train with my design and analytics companion.
Take a look at: Product Discovery 101 for Product Managers
This jam session is about sharing findings with the entire staff? Principally a abstract of all of your learnings that you possibly can synthesize from monitoring/suggestions/tickets & interviews over the previous month?
Identical with the Jam session. Going with a possible answer based mostly on synthesizing previous experiment/analysis information quite than a clean state helps with extra productive dialog. We’ve come out with completely completely different options than what we began with earlier than in lots of situations.
And when it comes to discovery – do you intention to have a move of steady interviews (which will be centered on particular issues, but additionally to constantly construct insights in your area) e.g. 1-2 interviews per week – or do you interview solely when diving into particular discoveries?
Principally latter. However we share and leverage the insights obtained from analysis/ focus group research requested by different PMs.
