This week, Product Faculty 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 information.

Meet Sandhya

Sandy Ganesh is a Senior Product Supervisor at Tinder, specializing in engagement and retention development. She has been praised by colleagues for her creativity and insightful concepts. She is data-driven and makes positive to maintain her prospects’ desires and wishes in thoughts in each step of her work. Earlier than her present position, 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 staff information to successfully drive product and program technique with a view to enhance the well-being of the staff.

Being a global pupil considering Product, what can be one of the simplest 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 is usually a faculty undertaking, a private undertaking as properly if you’re contemporary out of college). The story wants to indicate your pondering, your drive to take an initiative and study and the affect you will have created. These are the abilities you want as a PM as properly.
3. Community. By community I imply figuring out the individuals who might help you perceive the interview means 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 be aware on LinkedIn on who you might be and why you’ll be a match for the position on their staff.

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

As you might be very data-driven, in a case the place your instincts/intestine feeling are pointing in a course completely different from the info, which do you select?

After we take a look at information I all the time like to have a look at a number of information sources as an alternative of only one i.e. information from consumer analysis which could be within the type of consumer interviews, surveys, observing a spotlight group, information from analytics, information from our buyer assist/member expertise.

Sometimes the important thing insights and downside will discover itself in a number of information sources and as soon as we see a sample emerge I wish to pursue those which might be recurring most variety of occasions and that’s the most important subject for many of our customers.However, there are all the time cases once we don’t have the info we’d like. On this case, I like to make use of learnings from previous experiments and my instincts primarily based on expertise working in that trade and understanding the consumer 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 on the lookout for a brand new position? 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 received reached out to by a recruiter) and I made a decision to study extra concerning the position and have a dialog. By way of the interview expertise it was fairly much like the FAANG – i.e. interview with the HM after which a digital onsite with completely different Product Group members and cross practical companions. This position offered an excellent problem and alternative for profession development 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 staff that’s centered on the present wager/experiment?

I sometimes wish to work on figuring out the issue/alternative areas and brainstorming a few options first. I then wish to run it by my engineering supervisor(s) as an thought in a 1:1 and see what they suppose. Many of the occasions they supply very beneficial 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 staff 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?

Probably not. I’d contemplate the ideation as discovery. What I’ve discovered after attempting a number of strategies is that getting in with an thought 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 thought is closing it’s only a methodology that has helped me have a extra significant brainstorm with my engineering counter half. I do the identical train with my design and analytics accomplice.

Try: Product Discovery 101 for Product Managers

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

Identical with the Jam session. Going with a possible resolution primarily based on synthesizing previous experiment/analysis information fairly than a clean state helps with extra productive dialog. We’ve got 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 circulation of steady interviews (which could be centered on particular issues, but in addition to repeatedly construct insights in your area) e.g. 1-2 interviews per week – or do you interview solely when diving into particular discoveries?

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