From Google PMM to Instagram PM
About us: Andrew (AM) and Chandrika (CM) met during their MBA program at MIT Sloan and connected over their passion for product, growth and paying forward the help they got transitioning into product management. AM currently works as a Product Manager at Moveworks and CM works as a Product Manager at DocuSign.
In the 3rd series, we are covering our peers who made the transition into Product Management from a variety of different backgrounds so they can share insights and lessons learned. For this post, we spoke to our friend Robin who is currently a PM at Instagram. Prior to transitioning into the PM role, Robin worked as a Product Marketing Manager at Google.
As a Product Manager at Instagram, Robin is focused on the Android user experience, working with a horizontal team across multiple surfaces. In addition to working with the insights team to understand and optimize how users interact with the product, he also engages heavily with the infrastructure team, identifying areas to optimize such as media latency, reliability and quality to improve the user experience. As an interesting fact, he has onboarded 100% remotely to his team at Instagram.
Why did you want to become a PM?
When I was in university, I really wanted to start my own business and so I founded Luna - an app that assists users to navigate to the safest routes at night. This was particularly useful for students coming back to their homes at night. After graduating university, I continued the company and expanded to a six-person team. Together, we built the Android and iOS versions of the app, which pulled data from several, disparate sources to help identify the safest routes. In this experience, I really loved taking user insights, creating a story, and thinking through product requirements.
Years later when I joined Google, I wanted to find opportunities that would allow me to PM, without the title. In India, I found myself understanding the SMB owner persona to optimize the Ads and business listing experience to them. Later, I was working closely with the Search Engineering team to create immersive cultural experiences on the Google Search bar (such as Ramadan and the Royal Wedding). At this point, people told me that “I wasn’t getting credit for the stuff I enjoyed building”.
Though the “20% time” Google initiative, I picked up an opportunity launching Google Podcasts. As the Product Marketing Manager, I actually did a lot of work outside of my scope such as directly working with engineering to ensure the app was translated to over 76 different languages in the Play store listing. Even though I was the only non-technical person on the team, I got joy shaping the user experience.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced transitioning into PM?
My challenges varied throughout my work tenure. In another PM role I worked in, the culture was different and I had a hard time aligning on values. My challenge was to not only ensure a good team culture fit but also have relevant, strong industry experience so I could add unique value.
Upon reflection, I have two themes:
Owning Making Key Decisions: In Product Marketing, I provided recommendations but as a Product Manager, I am the owner of all decisions and need to live with the consequences.
Paying Attention to Detail: At Google, it was on me to pay attention to minute details. This is critical if the team is fairly junior and hasn’t been fully trained to de-risk activities. For example, I had to write down 26 user scenarios for a basic sign-up flow. This was necessary as anything could go wrong and engineering needs to be prepared for all scenarios.
What did you have to unlearn?
I’ll rephrase that I had to learn that I was the one now making and owning decisions. As I took on more projects, I became more empowered to make the final decision, which is important since people will seek my opinion.
What skills and experiences you found were transferable to PM?
There were several skills I had developed as Product Marketing Manager that are transferable to PM:
Being a diplomat: As a PM, you need to steer the ship and ensure all the crew mates are happy. People have different desires and so I need to understand people’s motivations to help them grow and get them what they want.
Leveraging user insights: It’s a PM’s responsibility to understand the user and guide the engineering team to build user empathy. As a PMM, I ran user research and represented a user perspective in a very similar fashion as a PM.
Working on cross-functional teams: PMs often rally cross-functional teams together and are responsible for driving alignment. As a PMM, I was often a key representative on these cross-functional benches. Having that perspective has helped empathize with people in other roles.
What was the one most important resource you had to make the transition? Why?
My first engineering manager was a great resource. I felt that we were start-up co-founders and loved it. He provided a lot of context to the team to share the vision. Also, he got me up to speed with the technical details. In a way, he gave me agency - a feeling that I continued to recreate in any project that I take on as PM.