For our next installment of the Women in Product Management Series I interviewed\u00a0Monika Murugesan, Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Schneider Electric.<\/p>\n
When I was in college, I did not know what Product Management was. I started my career as an engineer, but something always bothered me. The products I developed were already defined. I wanted to know, why are we building this particular product? Who made the decisions? How did they make the decisions? Why do some products show profitable results, and some don\u2019t? I wanted to know what was happening on the other side of development.<\/p>\n
I got my executive MBA and moved into international business operations. I was completely on the business side, but I missed the engineering side. That\u2019s when I decided to lead the Product Management division for the company, a perfect blend\u2014business and technical skills combined. This journey took me over a decade, but everything I did along the journey has helped me with what I\u2019m doing today.<\/p>\n
There are no missteps, only lessons learned.\u00a0Product Managers don\u2019t know the answers to everything. If you are waiting to know all the answers, you\u2019re never going to build a product\u2014your product is always going to be in the market study and voice-of-the\u2013customer space. It takes personal growth to know you can start moving forward with a little bit of ambiguity. Sometimes it\u2019s more ambiguity, sometimes less. Have the confidence to move forward and figure things out as they come along. Otherwise, perfection is going to be the enemy of your progress.<\/p>\n
Your days are never the same. As a Product Manager, you may be doing business planning in the morning, like business planning and talking to customers in the evening, selling the value of your product. Every day is totally different, which is why the Product Manager role is more fun than any\u00a0\u00a0job I\u2019ve ever had.<\/p>\n
As a Product Manager, you get to do so many different things in one role, and it is cross-functional. You get to work with Finance, Manufacturing, Quality, Product Development, Sales, Marketing, and the customers. Every function is touched by the Product Management team. And the Product Manager is the one person who gets to see the entire product from A to Z of\u00a0-from concepting through the development cycle, to launch and end of life.<\/p>\n
All Product Managers should learn effective time management, especially as they grow\u00a0in\u00a0their\u00a0careers.\u00a0There\u2019s so much to know about a product\u2014both depth and breadth. You need to know when and how to balance your time and when to shift your focus\u00a0on\u00a0the next priority. You need to ask the right questions and know when to delegate. There is no one magic formula.\u00a0But with time, you will learn to use your time effectively.<\/p>\n
I\u00a0look\u00a0for somebody who\u2019s confident and comfortable working with ambiguity. That\u2019s a key skill. I need someone who can say, this is how much I know,\u00a0and these are the things I don\u2019t know, but I\u2019m going to move forward with the next step. It is okay to\u00a0say\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d\u00a0but\u00a0you\u00a0need to be able to pivot as\u00a0you\u00a0get those answers.\u00a0And,\u00a0you must be able to influence without authority. Whether you are entry\u2013\u00a0level or growing in your career, the ability to influence without authority\u00a0is always going to be\u00a0key.<\/p>\n
In the beginning of 2020,\u00a0because of COVID,\u00a0many people were\u00a0reconsidering what they wanted to do with their career. I was coaching women,\u00a0from the technical\u00a0and marketing\u00a0sides of the business who wanted to move into Product Management. They often had a lack of confidence because they didn\u2019t have all the answers, or they didn\u2019t have the experience to check off every single item in the job requirements. I encourage women to build their confidence, thinking about ways they can transfer skills from one experience to another. Don\u2019t wait until you can check every single item! Go for the job, even if you only have 50 \u2013 60% of the requirements. If you don\u2019t\u00a0try, you\u2019ll never know. Submit your resume and see how things go. You can always develop skills; it\u2019s the willingness to learn that matters.<\/p>\n
I like encouraging talent. If you are in a place of leadership, and people are looking up to you, encourage talent and be the wave that lifts others\u00a0up. It is very important to help\u00a0others because\u00a0it helps you,\u00a0too. Whenever I talk\u00a0to a\u00a0new college\u00a0grad, it gives me\u00a0a\u00a0different level of energy.\u00a0Mentoring is\u00a0definitely a\u00a0two-way street.\u00a0\u201cLook for ways to help others\u201d\u00a0is a motto I live by.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For our next installment of the Women in Product Management Series I interviewed\u00a0Monika Murugesan, Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Schneider Electric. How did you get into product management? When I was in college, I did not know what Product Management was. I started my career as an engineer, but something always bothered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":15298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-103","description-off"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14929"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14936,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14929\/revisions\/14936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productside.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}