Product Management Journey with Keyur Dhameliya

Keyur Dhameliya is the Product Lead at one of the top e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. 
Let us get to know more about him and his view on product management.
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Keyur's foray into the product world began with Paytm. He describes how, back then, there were no well-crafted product manager roles, so he began as a business analyst, and his function gradually developed into that of a product manager. A brutal beginning since the company was attempting to accomplish so many things, and he was also a recent graduate, so the product management journey was really intense for him.
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He states that his career has mostly revolved around consumer products. 

His view on: Product management being different in Singapore from the rest of the world: 

Product Management depends on both countries' cultures and the company's culture. What the users want in one country is very different from the other country. the market is different.

Keyur’s journey started off as an individual contributor and got to leading a team of 40-50 people. 

Some interesting learnings shared by him:

• Always be aware of the company and the country's expectations of you, where you are residing. 
• As you scale up in your career from an individual contributor, you have to build the functional expertise of your field that comes along with experience.
• One should have excellent people management skills. You have to be excellent at people management skills, strategy management, overall roadmap planning. 
  
  Let us look at Keyur’s typical day at work.

It starts off with some catch-up meetings, the overall time is spent on team management, strategy planning, looking at the overall performance of different product lines that are falling under him.

Most of the work at hand revolves around the strategy and product side. 

Another very fascinating and important viewpoint was shared by him about the importance of tools in a product manager's life. 

He explains how product management depends on a lot of tools. 

We are not developers, we do not code. We are not business associates, we don't have to go into the market, we have to sit in between both of them and make things moving. 

A product manager ends up using a lot of tools, from managing PRD to managing projects, Jira, confluence. If you want to make a product management life simpler, and overall tool that covers the whole spectrum and gives them sort of visibility will be of great help. For the industry as a whole, that tool is missing. 

We believe, somewhere here Zeda.io will be of help, providing a collaborative platform, one shall spend less time on operational work and more on building awesome products.

When asked, What is about product management that most people do not understand, he put up some wonderful points as follow:

• Understanding a user is not something that can be learned through books or courses. One must have a thorough awareness of the user's requirements.
• Understanding the local culture and users is critical.
• There are several types of PM fields around the world. In certain circumstances, the function of a product manager is divided. It is critical to have general functional competence. 

You don't have to grasp the language to develop code, but you should be able to communicate with the technical team to move things ahead.

At last, let us look at his views on how product management in Singapore is different from that in India. 

In comparison to Singapore, India is a large country, and the companies operating out of Singapore are most likely not producing products for Singapore, or they have products for Singapore but have multinational companies launching products across several companies in Southeast Asia.

When we talk about India, we're talking about the product manager's emphasis and scope in India. That was a truly eye-opening event for me. Companies in Singapore were not building for a single nation, but for numerous countries.

Looking at the people side of things, the development quality, and manpower availability differs. In Singapore, you might have some difficulty with the engineering side of things. When it comes to India, one is not is blocked by the Engineering side of things. 

He concludes his thoughts by expressing gratitude for the kind of work he is being able to do that is providing him the opportunity to make an impact via his job. 

Surely, a very gratifying experience.

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