How Rohan Went From Frustrated PM to Respected Product Leader in His Company
Read Rohan’s experience completing Prod MBA below:
On The Wrong Path, But No Idea How to Solve It.
When joining my company, I had a gut feeling we weren’t working on the right thing.
Ideas seemed to be disconnected from each other. Leadership clearly weren’t aligned. We couldn’t even articulate what the purpose of our product was, or outcomes we wanted to deliver.
I had read enough about product to realise:
Something was wrong.
I realised we need to articulate a product strategy to help us succeed.
I realised we needed to find the right path for our product.
I realised we needed to gather evidence & be more scientific in our product approach.
I just didn’t know how to do any of these things.
And I realised, I needed to be able to challenge our senior leadership team in a meaningful way, using evidence, to lead them towards a more clear vision, strategy & set of outcomes for our product to deliver.
Feeling Lost At Sea
Until starting Prod MBA, I felt completely lost. The path forward was not clear at all. I felt at sea, aware something was wrong, but not sure what to do about it.
It was extremely frustrating.
7 months spent delivering features I knew weren’t going to create value for our customers.
7 months struggling to motivate myself - and my team - to deliver on our work.
But, with no structure, no repeatable playbook, no consistent product approach, I just had no idea what to do next.
I absolutely loved the unique structure of building a real product & connecting the dots between each step.
How Prod MBA Showed Me The Way Forward
From Week 1, I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I absolutely loved the unique structure of building a real product & connecting the dots between each step.
So many coaches & courses talk about frameworks. However, done in isolation, these are so dangerous. You just get knowledge without any reliable structure or context about when - & how - to apply them in the real world.
It was really transformational when I started to understand how to structure & fit each framework to the right problem.
Starting a real product by myself? It’s really the only way to force you to say ‘this is real”. It’s not just conceptual. Not just theoretical. Not just going throguh the motions, delivering features & stories as I usually did.
I was forced to build from concept to delivery, which turned out to be a very powerful journey for me. Completely changing my mentality when it comes to product. Even as a startup founder in the past, I realised I had missed so many key elements in my approach.
Applying Learnings to Influence Stakeholders
The first really powerful moment when I saw the value of Prod MBA back in my day-to-day work was introducing the Blue Ocean framework to show stakeholders what our product strategy should be.
Suddenly showing a deep strategic & business understanding helped me build trust with leadership. This started a mindset shift within the leadership team that we needed to change direction.
Being able to quantify user research into key frustrations & corresponding opportunities was powerful in showing them there was a big business opportunity to pursue.
Then backing that up with a clear analysis of value, feasiblity & usability risk when it came to what we were going to build also immediately grabbed my stakeholders’ attention & built a lot of trust in me & the approach I was introducing.
The Results 6 Months Later?
I’ve seen a dramatic change since graduating from Prod MBA.
I’m so confident in my role. I know exactly what I’m doing & what we need to do. That’s filtered into how I plan & how the product strategy drives all our decisions.
I also run workshops with senior leadership regularly now. For example, I’m doing one on product vision today, to align key stakeholders (& get the rest of the team onboard & excited about where we are going). These workshops have created a big cultural shift as well; we have fewer meetings & now tend to move quickly from problem to solution.
Finally, it looks like I’ll be promoted to Head of Product role in the coming months. We are just in the process of defining the structure & setting personal goals for me to hit in that new role, which is really exciting.
🚀 Want to fast-track your product career like Rohan? Check out the new Prod MBA modules here