Diversity in Product: Sheetal Kalra
Sheetal is a seasoned Edtech professional with 17+ years of experience. She has worked across a variety of roles, including product management, release planning, technical enablement, software development, and consulting.
She currently works as a Product Manager at HackerRank, and previously worked at companies like Yahoo, NetApp, Nutanix, Samsung, and Qubole. Sheetal has been mentoring & coaching college students over the last few years.
In her own words: “I am a hustler and lifelong learner. This led me to push myself out of my comfort zone, challenge the status quo and break the barriers. My favorite mantra has always been ‘Learn, Unlearn and Relearn’ and this has motivated me to be persistent in tough times.”
We’d love to hear about your journey into product management. How did you become a PM, and what were some of the challenges you faced in securing your first PM role?
I have done my Masters in Computers Applications and started my career as a Software Engineer, and continued for almost 5 years. After my son was born, I took a break for almost two years. During this break, I did a lot of self-reflection and analysis, and I decided to come back as an Academician. This gave me an opportunity to pursue one of my passions for teaching and work-life balance while my son was in his growing years.
The IT Industry was going through interesting times and there were companies which invested a lot in their engineering upskilling. That’s where I found a sweet spot with NetApp and joined them as a Technical Training Instructor. I completed my Executive MBA from XLRI, a premier institute in India to pivot myself to a management position.
I kept growing in the technical enablement space in Senior Management positions and managed stakeholders, vendors, customer engagement, budgets and resources. In these roles I worked closely with Engineering Leadership and discussed my interest and preparedness to switch to roles aligned to Program and Product Management.
I have been an avid reader and have read books on different topics ranging from behavioral economics, user psychology, strategy, entrepreneurship and similar areas. This has broadened my horizons and prepared me for the next milestone in my career path.
Eventually, I got referred by my senior ex-colleague for the “Product Manager - Release” opportunity and after a series of interviews, I got hired. At Qubole, I got some amazing mentors who helped me get a grip on this role. I would specifically mention my Manager, a seasoned Product leader, who coached me to bring in an outside-in and inside-out view of product management.
Alongside, I joined an Executive Education course in Product Management that equipped me to gain competency to build and manage the end-to-end product lifecycle successfully, with data driven approach and design thinking.
What are some ways hiring managers can make that first PM role easier to obtain for people who don’t look or think like them?
Hiring Managers need to be open to the fact that Product Management is both an art and science. In my view, product management is a problem solving skill using first principles thinking along with these essential skills: product sense, design thinking, analytics, and execution.
In my experience, I have noticed that Data Analysts, Software Engineers and Quality Assurance Engineers can move to a product management role provided they have strong problem solving skills using first principles thinking and knack for the skills discussed above. In today’s world, customer / user empathy is another important aspect which anyone in this role has to develop with time.
I recommend that hiring teams give a take away home assignment. This assignment can be Case Study Round and Include any issue observed in their own company - around Acquisition, Onboarding or Engagement. This exercise could ask the candidate to come up with strategies to improve on the observed issue and provide some solution proposals.
This will require candidates to comprehend your product / offering from different perspectives and provide detailed analysis while solving the concerns faced with users. An interview round, discussing this case study would allow an Interviewer to judge product sense, analytics and strategizing skills. This assignment can give a lot of insights about the candidate and create the opportunity for more diversity of skills.
Looking back on that first PM experience, what advice would you give yourself?
I am customer / user centric in my approach to problems. I learned this mindset as part of my enablement experience, where the learner is the core of your experience that you provide. We used to develop and deliver the courses keeping learners in mind and also analyzed their feedback to further improve the overall learning outcome.
In the Product Management role, this skill helped, but the challenge is to collect and analyze data about your customers and users. In most of the companies, there is a lot of customer data in disparate sources: NPS / CSAT feedback, customer interviews, GTM teams and quantitative data - in tools like Pendo, Google Analytics around product usage by the existing customers' users.
The key is to bring all this data together, and analyze to find any patterns and determine if qualitative data qualifies the findings of quantitative data. This is all learnt with experience, where you make mistakes initially and further analysis push you to keep qualifying your hypothesis and findings.
This needs to be combined with storytelling and eventually key messages or take away from the analysis. This is what I learnt with help from my mentors at Qubole: how to create a story around data and communicate insights to the audience in easy to understand and engaging ways.
Product management can sometimes be an isolating role. What are some approaches you’ve taken to get support?
For the above statement, I agree to disagree :) As a product manager, one gets an opportunity to manage and work with multiple stakeholders. In the startup world, often as a product manager you uncover challenges and solve them, experiment different ways of doing conventional things and define best practices. In these scenarios having a strong network of fellow product managers and your peers help you discuss, brainstorm and validate your ideas and approach.
The course I attended gave me access to a strong network of fellow product managers. We are connected over social media, and we constantly seek advice for issues faced and offer solutions based on our own experience.
At Qubole and HackerRank, the product management groups conducted regular meetups to discuss and share our learnings, findings, issues and roadblocks and get some invaluable advice and support from the peer group.
I would strongly recommend to start similar meetups if not available to discuss and present. These meetups can include Product Managers, Designers, and Analyst teams. The topics can vary from implementing new processes / frameworks / tools utilized, issues solved / learning new concepts and sharing these with a bigger group.
From your perspective, what’s one thing people should be more aware of?
Product management skills allowed me to look at the world from a lens where I started asking the question “Why?”
Each problem / pain point / user perspective brings with it an opportunity to enhance an existing product / solution. And there is a requirement to answer these questions of “why?” and “why now?”The aim is to clarify your product goals and align them with your organizational strategy goals while solving the user pain point.
In my opinion, the most tough job for a Product Manager is to prioritize, how to be ruthless when deciding what to pick first and why? As a Product Manager, it's your job to first align yourself with company goals and strategy and then bring these to your product goals.
Ex. Your company decided to focus on Customer Expansion and Retention, this clearly implies that enhancing user experience is the top most priority and all the features in backlog that align to this strategy should be first to be addressed based on their overall impact with customers.
There has to be an alignment wrt the vision that you have defined for your product and while making decisions, typically saying No to customer requests make it tough at times. The ability to arrive at this decision comes only with the thorough market research, understanding competitor landscape and company’s vision to be well aligned with your product goals and lots of experience dealing with such situations.
For aspiring PMs, I would strongly recommend to start studying a product with this lens. Look at any product of your choice and study their Vision statements, see what all new / existing features have been introduced and you would find that overall these new features align with the product goals and organizational strategy.
At the core, any product wants to acquire and retain a customer and make them their brand ambassadors, these are not straightforward and your north star metric and organizational strategy be your guiding light to achieve this.
To summarize: Align Company Strategy -> North Star Metric -> Product Goals -> KPIs
What’s the best way for readers to reach out to you and stay on top of what you’re doing?
I would like to share the following:
Email ID: sheetal_anirban@yahoo.com
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheetal-kalra-42574020/
We’re always looking for new perspectives to highlight, to bring more diversity into product management! If you have someone you’d like to nominate, please send us an email at admin@productteacher.com, we’d love to hear from you!