About our blog
How to PM is a passion project started by Andrew Mairena and Chandrika Maheshwari, friends who met at MIT Sloan during their MBA program and connected on their shared passion for product, growth and paying forward the help they got transitioning into product management.
We met in Strategies in the Platform Economy class taught by Andrei Hagiu (@theplatformguy). Over time, we realized that we were sharing the same information with peers and prospective MBA candidates trying to break into product roles. There is a lot of material (Decode and Conquer and Cracking the PM Interview) out there to help MBA students interview for PM roles but little content to generate credibility and become successful once they are in that role. We thought of creating a scalable way to get this information out there, connecting with peers who were sharing similar information and creating a playbook to help new PMs.
About the authors
After graduating from the University of California Berkeley, Andrew worked in various engineering roles in the solar and semiconductor manufacturing industries for seven years. In 2017, he enrolled at MIT Sloan School of Management and took on various leadership roles - an SVP of the Product Management Club, co-organizer of the MIT Tech Conference and co-created a new Action Learning course - the Product Management Lab. After graduating in 2019, he became a Product Manager for a start-up called Moveworks, an enterprise SaaS AI platform that resolves employees' IT support issues - instantly and automatically. He has published blogs on the application of BERT in the IT space.
Chandrika graduated from BITS Pilani (India) in 2011 and started her career in management consulting. Finishing up her consulting stint after spending time in Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) practice, she segued into the tech world in a Product Marketing role at Google. After working for 6 years, she moved to Cambridge to start her MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management. In her time at Sloan, she was the co-president of Technology Club. Since graduating in 2019, Chandrika has been working at DocuSign as a Product Manager focused on the self serve users for their eSignature product.
If you are looking for other resources related to Product Management, check out:
Jeg Sith’s blog on breaking into product management
Joe Akoni’s blog on being a P-0 PM
Lenny’s Newsletter on product, growth etc.
Julie Zhuo’s newsletter on building successful products and teams
