Anup Mutalik

Product management was a dream to me when I joined Intuit, and after twelve years, working across India and America and UK, I view the role as an integral part of who I am as a human being.

Here are a few things I can help with:

1. Transition from Engineering or design to PM/ Is PM right for me?

I transitioned from Engineer to APM in one year of joining Intuit. I put myself out there, and volunteered my time outside of my job description, and I have tons of learnings on how to best achieve that within the company. Would love help.

2. Product strategy/Roadmap/vision deck

After three years as APM and PM, I was assigned a big role to launching our flagship products in seven countries -- this required not only learning different cultures and working styles, but since it was the time the company was going global, I had to meet with our CTO every month to share progress, motivate teams across geographies to work on the vision we set. Would love to impart any learnings I have around this.

3. Stakeholder management/ Managing up as a PM/ Politics and conflicts within the team

This is the most pressing aspect of being a PM for me. You are in the center of everything, a default leader. And a true leader in that because no one is bound by anything to listen to you and yet for successful functioning, they'd need to. This comes with a ton of conflicts and having worked across a small startup team of 4 to, getting products delivered across 7 countries and 200+ people, I have had my share of learnings, mostly things I could have done better and would love to pass that on.

4. Experimentation/alpha beta test setup/ Running lean experimentation

This is my favorite topic. I lead a team in 2010 to build a product in India that helped farmers sell their product directly to buyers instead of the middle people who took 50% cut. Building a software product to an illiterate population is perhaps the biggest design challenge and we ran hundreds of lean experiments that I have learnt so much from. In 2016, I ran a team that was first one at Intuit looking at AI and machine learning to help forecast small business finance. Tons of learnings there with how to experiment on AI products as well.

5. PM career development

I moved from APM to Principal PM in a big company and then to running the product segment in a startup. Setting OKR's, annual goals, and then making sure you are set up for success to get to the next level is the most pressing mistake I made in my journey. I never paid much attention to it, and only gradually learnt its significance. I would love to help anyone who wants to identify an objective path to growth, and how to set yourself up for success.

6. I am stuck

This is perhaps the most common of the feelings i have as a PM. I am often overwhelmed with the expectations coming from all different directions and I know that one single mishap has far reaching consequences across many teams and it is not the best feeling. PM is a stressful job, and I have been there. If you are stuck in anything, please reach out to me. I will listen to you, perhaps provide some guidance on how I had or had not successfully navigated something and be a friend. We can not allow our jobs to take away our health.