Self reflection – Ananya Kapoor

It’s so funny how I came into this class thinking I knew what a PM does because I had spent 3 weeks of my summer internship working as a PM. Despite my (very short) experience, I could not have been more wrong. As the quarter comes to an end, I wonder what a PM does not do! As a PM, there is a lot of ambiguity and too many things happening at the same time. But the ambiguity is not just there in one’s workplace, each company defines the role of a PM in their own way — so what the job entails at each company might be quite different. You never really know the entirety of what you are getting into and that is equal parts scary and exciting.  

While working on Time Frame, I learned that the most important skill one should have is being a self-starter – most of the times there wouldn’t be a clear description of what you need to do and you need to be able to take charge and get started with whatever little you might have. Being resourceful is so underrated!

I love talking to people and learning more about them, so naturally my favourite part of the class was user interviews and testing. The part that makes it a little less enjoyable is recruiting interviewees and testers (especially since we want them to be someone who cares about the product we are working on). But I also understand there is really no solution for this problem per se.

I did a significant amount of market research as a part of the project and found the process to be quite enjoyable – but much longer and deeper than I had expected. Through this, I become (a little) better at estimating how much time tasks take me. I am far from perfect still, but much better than what I was at the starting of the quarter and I take that as a win.

I enjoyed learning about and engaging with the different tools/strategies one can employ – OKRs ended up being my favorite because of how I can apply them to my personal life as well. It just helps me be more accountable and structured and that is a game changer.

Creating a VPC, BMC and User story map was also a lot of fun. The user interviews for the participatory roadmaps were interesting as well – having participants move around stuff and talk through their reasoning felt like a natural next step to needfinding so I could better understand what is important to them.

Given more time, I would have spent more time doing market research and understanding more about the best way to work towards getting universities to buy our subscription for their students.

Overall, I wish we would have gotten the opportunity to learn more about PM interviews and possibly had some mock interviews to help us get a job as a PM. I also really wanted to learn about negotiation skills (especially compensation for jobs) as this would apply to a lot of us as we look for jobs post graduation.