About author :
Sumit Tanwar (Business Associate at Gartner, MBA IIM Calcutta 2017-19)
MA: How did this journey begin? What inspired you to take up Product Management?
Sumit: When I joined IIM C, I had two years of work experience in software development. When you work in such a role, you always have one side of the problem at hand. You are just given the requirement and most of the time, there is no scope of understanding the business angle behind it. So my MBA journey started with a goal in the back of my mind to leverage my existing experience along with now understanding the business angle. So after a few months, I realized that operations and product management are two streams that align with my goal.
Thinking of ahead when I imagined sitting in front of an interviewer and answering the question 'Why should we hire you for this role', I considered there would be two aspects to it - what kind of work experience I had and What did I learn in my MBA. So, as far as the first part is concerned my background work experience will back me up and for the second part, I worked on enhancing my profile by talking to alums in similar field, working with campus committees, participating in live projects, case study competitions, etc. So, this is how I am here today.
MA: From choosing the subjects in college to now working in the field, how does this transition feel?
Sumit: Learning in college is basically in two folds, one is the learning that happens through your curriculum like whatever you are reading from your books or is being taught to you in your classroom sessions and the second learning is the learning that you do by yourself through an internship, live project and even talking to other people. So the first kind of Gyan has a very limited application in real life, but the knowledge that you gain through the other half, through your live projects and similar things, is basically what marks the foundation of your industry experience. When you are at work, every day is new, with a lot of variables that keep changing around you, which is not true when you are studying a case from your book where everything is defined, and you have a particular scenario that is in front of you. So what you learn in the curriculum obviously is the base, but how you utilize it in your work is something that you have to learn by doing things. The formula to find 'inventory turnover' is not useless after college, but how to make it applicable to your business area is the key. That kind of applicability is something that one needs to focus upon.
MA: Can you tell us about your job role?
Sumit: Gartner is basically into research and advisory. We have a publicly available platform called 'Gartner Peer Insights', where we have listed down a lot of IT products and the vendors who are providing these products, for example, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc. So, there are basically two stakeholders, one is the people/consumers who use these products, they can come on this platform and give a review or rate the product and share their experience, and the second stakeholder is the vendor of that product. So it serves the purpose of a feedback platform. Now, if a particular investor wants to invest in a product they can come here and read the experience of customers, and similarly, the vendors also get customer insights into their tools, and this helps them improve their products.
Over the time, we started preparing research documents for vendors using this platform. So, I manage the digital operations that are involved in producing such research documents. I handle the overall operations that are involved in this process, the data gathering, communicating with the engineering team, stakeholder management, and then comes the part of my Product management role, where I own this product and work on its continuous improvement so that it becomes better with time.
MA: What do you think are the qualities and skills that are needed for someone who wants to excel in these fields and bag their dream job.
Sumit: I will share here a few general things that I followed, which are applicable to any field. One was to interact with people who have excelled in a field or read about them, connect with such alums on LinkedIn, understand what all they did, and how did they reach, where are they are. List down the skills they acquired, let's say there are 10 such skills. You might already have 5 skills out of them, and now you know you have to work on filling this gap of 5 skills and get a 10/10 on your CV. This is applicable everywhere in the job market, filling the gap between the skills you have and skills that have to be developed.
Develop these skills through courses, online training, live projects, and case studies.
Coming to particularly my field, in operations and product management, problem-solving is one skillset you definitely need to show on your resume; other important skills are leadership, stakeholder management, and of course, excellent communication. An important quality is long-sightedness and planning abilities that are a must for being a good product manager.
I also have a small tip from my personal experience that might work wonders in an interview. Usually, I read a lot of books from CEOs, founders, etc and quoting a small statement from these books during your interview can show your genuine interest in the role and can also help you steer the direction of your interview.
I also, listen to a lot of entrepreneurial podcasts, they are not necessarily on product management, but it gives practical knowledge, how have people overcome challenges in their organization, their success stories and also failure stories. Talking about these things helps you gain an edge over others.
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