Vikrama Dhiman
Vikrama Dhiman heads all things product at Gojek, including product management, design, program management, and research, across Indonesia, Singapore and India. He has over 16 years of experience building internet products, consults with Fortune 500 companies, and is among the most well-known and respected product leaders in all of Asia.
Career Skills
When transitioning into PM, focus on developing the core skill (Data, Tech, or Design) that is furthest from your previous background to gain maximum leverage.
"My advice is if you're coming from design and research background, then you pick data or tech. If you're coming from a data or tech background, then you pick design and research, and that gives you th..."
Transitioning into product management is generally easier and faster earlier in one's career.
"It also makes a big difference if you are transitioning when you are slightly younger in your career. If you are already senior in a function and then you are transitioning, sometimes it can take a lo..."
Communication Skills
Effective stakeholder management requires balancing the need to raise hard issues with a collaborative, ego-free approach to decision-making.
"There are three tenets that I define in working well as a product manager with others. Number one is raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with. Bring out important topics without dra..."
Successful pushback involves de-escalating emotional conversations and refocusing on logic.
"What I've seen that people who do pushback very successfully and are still considered not difficult to work with, they are also able to bring the tempo of the conversation to a more logical space from..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Use live brainstorming on familiar products to evaluate a candidate's ability to reason through goals, users, and trade-offs.
"I'll typically pick up a product that they use most often and then I will be like, 'Okay, what if this product were to do this? Then what do you think, it makes sense? Don't think it makes sense? What..."
Product Management Skills
Product strategy is the specific plan for how to achieve a set goal, focusing on user segments and sequencing.
"Product strategy for me is where you are able to define that while somebody defines that this is the mountain that you're going to climb, but okay, how are you going to climb that mountain is basicall..."
The quality of written artifacts like PRDs is a primary way to demonstrate your 'impact on impact' and professional craft.
"Is your PRD quality good enough? Are you writing that the draft notes that go and circulate to the care teams, to the marketing teams and so on? ... You must have that impact to impact through the art..."
Career stalls are often linked to a lack of high-quality, tangible product artifacts.
"Can you show me your last PRD? Can you show me the last product note that you sent? Can you show me the product strategy doc that you have or collaborated on? Can you show me the brief that you sent t..."
Early in a product career, execution and tangible outputs are more important for growth than high-level strategy.
"The very first thing that anyone, when you're starting off, produces is outputs, okay? The output can be launching a product, it can be analyzing and running an experiment, and it could even be just b..."
High-quality output often involves organizing and simplifying complex information for the rest of the team.
"Outputs is shipping products, but it also comes in smaller things. For instance, if you are sourcing content for your homepage, what are the different avenues that you can source content from? What is..."