Jupiter Money: Shamelist & Learning

Overview

I worked for Jupiter Money as a Product Manager-2 for more than a year. Here are the areas where I could have performed better, in hindsight. The idea of this blog is to increase my self-awareness, accountability, and reflect on my journey.

Shamelist

1. I asked another team’s developer to make changes to the homepage without aligning with the Product Manager. When the developer followed my request, the homepage UX was broken. I should have aligned all relevant stakeholders so they could have pointed out the issue before it occurred.
2. I pointed out strategic issues and engineering challenges in a WhatsApp group where the entire team could see my misalignment. While my objective reasoning was correct, publicly pointing fingers doesn’t help. I should have had these conversations in a 1:1 setting to deeply understand the issue and try resolving it there.
3. I went to the leadership team about how the product discovery process was broken, had problems, and bugs, without presenting a plan to address the negative impact of these issues and how to fix them.
4. I wasn’t clear with my product vision and journey suggestions to the team, which led to a communication gap between what I was trying to say and what they understood. A simple Minto Principle explanation would have fixed this.
5. While working with cross-functional teams on a feature, I let them drive the product vision. Everyone had their own ideas about implementation, causing the project to get stuck and frustrating everyone. I could have driven the product vision more proactively and aligned stakeholders.
6. I managed a feature that took two weeks of engineering time and two weeks of design time based solely on my intuition, and it wasn’t very successful. I could have easily tested just the idea in a week, allowing for more refinement of the product and increasing the team’s confidence in the vision.
7. I could have been more humble and listened to domain experts when they discussed customer-related behavior, incorporating their insights into the product journey. I was analyzing people based on their product skills when their true potential lay in their experience and insights into how consumers behave.
8. I shouldn’t have asked questions to my peers when I already knew the answers, as it felt like I was trying to show off my product knowledge. I could have simply stated my assumptions and asked if they aligned with them, which would have made everyone more comfortable.
9. I didn’t spend enough time with my team outside of work early on. Having deeper personal connections towards the end of my time there made collaborations 5x easier.

Learning

1. Think more deeply about the long-term vision and connect it to each OKR your product is driving.
2. Be more direct with requests and provide clear content.
3. If there are two owners of a document, there is no owner. Nobody takes the blame when things go wrong. As a Product Manager, it’s my job to ensure the product is useful and users find value.
4. Consider how your message is being received and adjust it according to the audience.