Involving Engineering in Product Discovery with Tinder Senior PM

This week, Product College hosted Sandhya Ganesh, Sr. Product Supervisor at Tinder, for a particular #AskMeAnything session. Sandhya tells us about her expertise switching from Amazon to Tinder, how she includes Engineering within the discovery course of, and what to do when intestine feeling conflicts with knowledge.

Meet Sandhya

Sandy Ganesh is a Senior Product Supervisor at Tinder, specializing in engagement and retention progress. She has been praised by colleagues for her creativity and insightful concepts. She is data-driven and makes certain to maintain her prospects’ desires and wishes in thoughts in each step of her work. Earlier than her present function, Sandy spent simply over a 12 months at Amazon as a Senior PM constructing software program merchandise for his or her Office Well being and Security Pillar. Throughout her time there she led the expansion technique for a survey product which gave her group knowledge to successfully drive product and program technique to be able to enhance the well-being of the group.

Being a global scholar excited about Product, what could be one of the best ways to enter into PM roles, as a result of making use of to those PM roles have a requirement for greater than 2-3 years of expertise?

It comes down to three issues primarily based on my expertise:

1. Upskill and develop your PM abilities
2. The way you convey the story about your abilities and expertise (this could be a faculty challenge, a private challenge as nicely if you’re recent out of college). The story wants to indicate your considering, your drive to take an initiative and be taught and the affect you may have created. These are the abilities you want as a PM as nicely.
3. Community. By community I imply figuring out the individuals who may help you perceive the interview strategy of the businesses you have an interest in and networking with individuals who could be your potential mentors. And final networking with Hiring Managers by sending them a considerate word on LinkedIn on who you’re and why you’d be a match for the function on their group.

PS: Don’t take the years of expertise as a tough rule.

As you’re very data-driven, in a case the place your instincts/intestine feeling are pointing in a route completely different from the information, which do you select?

After we have a look at knowledge I at all times like to take a look at a number of knowledge sources as a substitute of only one i.e. knowledge from person analysis which could be within the type of person interviews, surveys, observing a spotlight group, knowledge from analytics, knowledge from our buyer help/member expertise.

Sometimes the important thing insights and downside will discover itself in a number of knowledge sources and as soon as we see a sample emerge I prefer to pursue those which are recurring most variety of occasions and that’s the most important difficulty for many of our customers.Then again, there are at all times cases after we don’t have the information we want. On this case, I like to make use of learnings from previous experiments and my instincts primarily based on expertise working in that business and understanding the person teams to kind a speculation and do a fast and scrappy check to validate.

Are you able to inform us about your expertise of leaving Amazon and in search of a brand new function? Are you able to describe the expertise of making use of and interviewing with Tinder? Why did you find yourself going with them?

This was a chance that got here to me (I bought reached out to by a recruiter) and I made a decision to be taught extra concerning the function and have a dialog. By way of the interview expertise it was fairly just like the FAANG – i.e. interview with the HM after which a digital onsite with completely different Product Staff members and cross purposeful companions. This function offered a superb problem and alternative for profession progress and therefore I made a decision to take it up.

Learn subsequent: The Final Listing of Product Supervisor Interview Questions

How do you contain engineering groups early within the course of with out diverging focus? How do you combine (steady) discovery with a group that’s targeted on the present wager/experiment?

I sometimes prefer to work on figuring out the issue/alternative areas and brainstorming a few options first. I then prefer to run it by my engineering supervisor(s) as an concept in a 1:1 and see what they suppose. A lot of the occasions they supply very invaluable suggestions that I like to consider and incorporate.For steady discovery, first step is to create a tradition and discussion board to debate new concepts from PMs, engineers or anybody. Sometimes I love to do a Jam session as soon as a month with the group together with eng., design and analytics.

So that you don’t embody engineering in any respect within the discovery section after which brainstorm potential bets (I suppose with the designer) earlier than working these by the EM?

Not likely. I’d take into account the ideation as discovery. What I’ve discovered after making an attempt a number of strategies is that getting into with an concept for engineering to react and reply to works higher than going with a clean slate and saying let’s brainstorm. That doesn’t imply my concept is last it’s only a technique that has helped me have a extra significant brainstorm with my engineering counter half. I do the identical train with my design and analytics companion.

Try: Product Discovery 101 for Product Managers

This jam session is about sharing findings with the entire group? Principally a abstract of all of your learnings that you would synthesize from monitoring/suggestions/tickets & interviews over the previous month?

Similar with the Jam session. Going with a possible answer primarily based on synthesizing previous experiment/analysis knowledge moderately than a clean state helps with extra productive dialog. We have now come out with completely completely different options than what we began with earlier than in lots of cases. 

And by way of discovery – do you purpose to have a stream of steady interviews (which could be targeted on particular issues, but in addition to constantly construct insights in your area) e.g. 1-2 interviews per week – or do you interview solely when diving into particular discoveries?

Principally latter. However we share and leverage the insights obtained from analysis/ focus group research requested by different PMs.