Thursday, March 20, 2014

Interaction with Students at Sunstone Business School


Being all in one: product manager and concept of product management


Takeaways from Guest Sessions by our student Milind Shirolkar
Guest: Aditya Bhelande, Founder of Yukta – a product consulting firm
Product management is one of prime focused elective courses here in Sunstone; Sunstone brings in live experienced individuals to share expert insights in this area.
Theme of Session was well poised of explaining concepts of product management: product strategy, product marketing, and product development. Mrityunjay, a senior Sunstone faculty, shared his views on role and responsibility of project manager. Mrityunjay also pointed out that a Product manager or a VP-product is a Mini-CEO of the organization. He is jack of all trades and intensively involved right from product grouting to product launch into the market. He also manages the support, continues improvement and reengineering of existing products.
Session was also involved in some brain-storming examples around digital marketing products such flash ads, social media marketing products. Here are some examples we worked on
  • Credit card, COD , net banking tool for e-commerce site design and operating and marketing model for such a product
  • Flash and road block ads in websites today, design and market model around such digit marketing products
Second half of the session was about interaction with Aditya Belande: founder of Yukta a product consulting firm. Aditya comes with 13 years’ experience in product management as product manager worked for many multi-national companies and some very innovative products
Aditya is a very witty and street smart person explained us the ground realities of a product manager, his behaviour and commitment required to the role.
His slides explained, product manager basically is
  • Market orientated: Find opportunities, communicate with customers and prospective customer
  • Researcher: Builds data cases, Identify business problems and find solutions
  • Architect: Define Solution layers, features and operating procedures
  • Diplomat: Works with Sales, quality, engineering, operations, and customer services teams to align them to one goal.
 Overall session left us with aura of excitement in field of product management and challenging role of a product manager and also guided us to crave road to become successful project manager in the near future .