14% of 2021 is done. And it has been nothing, if not eventful. Internationally, Elon Musk became the richest man, Jeff Bezos decided to step down as CEO, Wallstreet was sent shaken by a meme shared on Reddit, Trump is no longer the president and is banned for life from Twitter.
How has your year been so far?
The Indian Twitter Storm
Twitter has been in Indian news also, but not for the right reasons some may say. Rihana, Greta Thunberg and a few other celebrities tweeted about the farmer’s protest in India. We’ll refrain from making any political comments at this point. If you want to read more about the tweets you can do so here.
The official stance of Twitter
After it allegedly became the ground for organizing and publicizing the Farmer’s protest, many citizens wanted Twitter to take concrete actions. Probably hoping for something in lines of Donald Trump’s ban.
Long story short, Twitter did not oblige.
This begs the question, should there be an Indian Social Network, created for India and more importantly, in India?
Koo - came calling
Koo is a social networking site launched in 2021. Their USP - made in India. In the last few months, Koo app downloads have surged. It currently boasts more than 4 million downloads.
Thanks to its recently gained popularity, Koo also managed to raise funding of 4.1 million USD.
In all fairness to Koo, it is not just a simple knock-off of Twitter. They had identified a need in the market to provide a platform to the non-English speaking citizens of the country.
The idea behind it was that Twitter is existing in English in India, but the language speakers of India are not on Twitter. Let’s build a deeper experience for the language speakers. And because we built a deeper experience for the language speakers, we were able to make a very localized community.
We started with Kannada, then we did Hindi, then Telugu, Marathi, then Tamil.
These comments were made by the founder of Koo, Aprameya Radhakrishna.
Security Concerns
While our readers can exercise their own sound reasoning on whether to join Koo or not, there have been some recent talks of security concerns on Koo.
Elliot Anderson, a well known ethical hacker, tweeted about it recently. According to him, Koo is exposing sensitive information like email, date of birth and gender of its users. Read more about it here.
But is this just another fad? Only time will tell.
India exits recession amid risks from the resurgence in Coronavirus cases
India’s economy returned to growth last quarter, ending a recession just in time to battle new challenges posed by a surge in coronavirus infections.
Gross domestic product expanded 0.4% in the three months ended December after two consecutive quarters of declines, the Statistics Ministry said Friday. That was slower than the median forecast for a 0.6% expansion in a Bloomberg survey of 36 economists.
Upcoming Product Tank Pune Event
As a product manager, you are faced with different challenges at the various scales of the organization. You could be either building for the first 10 million customers or for the next 100 million customers.
Understanding the next 100m users in India
The next 100 million customers will be very different from the existing 50 million customers, and hence companies must ‘Make for India’ which means taking into consideration various attributes about your consumers like comfort with vernacular languages, where they come from, their educational background, the locality, the capability to understand English as a language, the capacity to purchase.
Across the public sector, operations and risk management could benefit greatly from a shift to the cloud
This heat map shows cloud-based transformation potential within different government functions and highlights six potential high-impact areas—among them health, general public services, and environmental protection.
Getting a job as a Product Manager
Last December, Akshay conducted a survey on “The best ways to break into Product Management”. The results show that most product managers actually transition internally in their team.
You still might need to hunt for jobs as a Product Manager.
Anyone who has interviewed Product Managers (PMs) or interviewed for PM roles would tell you that it’s a pretty crazy role to interview for. You’re expected to be good at a lot of different things and at the same time, you are expected to influence a team of people where everyone is better at their respective functions than you are.
This is an excerpt from a wonderful article written by one of Gojek’s senior PM. Go through the entire article to help you prepare for your product manager’s interview.
A few other good resources
Make impact in the first 90 days of your job - Link
How RazorPay hires product managers - Link
Cracking the PM interview - Link
Discussions on our WhatsApp group
If you have been reading our newsletters, you might have noticed that we regularly feature insightful discussions from our WhatsApp groups.
A few weeks ago, Animesh asked an age-old question for Product Managers on the group -
What's a more crucial metric for the success of new features in the product?
Is it the user retention/stickiness it drives or the scalability of the feature?
To which Bansi, a senior PM from our community replied
Depends on the nature of Product. B2C products demand to be scaled. For the Banking/healthcare products the compliance could play more important role than probably user features. Stickiness and engagement is generally important, but it is critical for user centric products but B2B product may afford to be less sticker as the enforcement comes from the organization policy (e.g. even though the payroll site may not have any stickiness, its users will be as long as it does the job well on payday to download payslip).
Join our WhatsApp group to participate in our discussions.
MixPanel
Product tank Pune’s sponsor Mixpanel has come up with an initiative in association with Servian of Product analytics mastery course. The course starts on 23 Feb 2021.
They are generous and are providing 30 free passes to our members. More details about the course are here.
It’s on a first-come-first-served basis.
Please note this is in the Australian time zone and would start at 3:00 PM India time on Tuesday’s and Thursdays
Hiring
This month, we have openings from early-stage startups to giants like Kotak. Click on the link to find the right fit for you.
Stay connected
This newsletter is just one of many places you can find ProductTank Pune.
For example, our Whatsapp group is where you can find all the unfiltered conversations there.
Our Meetup page will help you stay on top of all the amazing events we conduct all round the year.
That’s it.
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