How to change careers to Product Management with Amanjot Malhotra, Actiwate | Product Talks

Amanjot Malhotra is a Serial Entrepreneur, a Product Specialist, and a Growth Hacker for start-ups with 5+ years of experience in Designing, UI/UX, Product Development, SEO, Digital Marketing and Growth Hacking. He recently co-founded Actiwate, an on-demand software development company.
He is an avid professional who strongly believes that “execution is the key to success for any idea”. He has strong abilities to bootstrap an idea and implement it to achieve the objectives of the organization.
We recently invited him for a Product Talk on “How to break into Product Management?”.
We started with a very basic question “ Why become a Product Manager?”

Amanjot believes “not every engineer can become a manager”. According to him Product Management is not only about managing the teams, connecting with developers and getting the products shipped. He says, the role of a product manager is the intersection between design, tech, monetization and marketing. To become a successful product manager one must have a good mix of these skills. Product Manager is like a mini CEO in the company.
The most important role of a product manager is understanding the product requirements and delivering the right product to the user. The second most important role of a product manager is setting up a product culture by imbibing the practice of “customer empathy” amongst your team members.
We then asked, “What are the qualities of a great product manager?”
He says, a great product manager is always customer/ user focused, has a clear vision for his product, he has a good design for his product, understands the importance of data collection and analysis, is focused leader, has strong work ethics and loves to take initiative. And at last it is the Product Manager who is responsible to get the best out of the team and thus, needs to be very efficient in people management skills.
According to Amanjot every company has a different definition for the role of a Product Manager and you need to figure out what kind of product manager you are and what best suits your skill sets. He says, there are different kinds of PM i.e. a Business PM is good at strategy and empathy but is not a technical PM, a Designer PM who has good designing and interface skills but is not good at marketing the product and team management, a Developer PM who can code for a product but might not be good at marketing the product.
Learn how to acquire the right skills and what should you keep in mind while doing product management in this exclusive AMA with Amanjot Malhotra.