{"id":1078,"date":"2020-10-21T13:09:08","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T07:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/open.money\/blog\/?p=1078"},"modified":"2024-05-29T14:37:51","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T09:07:51","slug":"going-the-distance-how-entrepreneurship-made-me-a-better-product-manager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/open.money\/blog\/going-the-distance-how-entrepreneurship-made-me-a-better-product-manager\/","title":{"rendered":"Going the distance: How entrepreneurship made me a better product manager"},"content":{"rendered":"I started my career in my final year of graduation. During my early days, I helped my dad with the software distribution business that he had set-up in Delhi NCR. Having had a strong grip in the software industry, I was easily able to find freelance projects during my post-graduation days. Soon I decided to take the \u2018entrepreneur\u2019 path rather than opt for campus placements.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nI started a couple of ventures – first in the B2B market space, where the main focus was on providing turnkey IT solutions to small businesses right from ERP Implementation to web design & procurement of IT Infrastructure. My second venture was in the B2C market space, where I started an online grocery store for an emerging township. However, both these ventures didn’t work out well & I decided to take a different route.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nSoon after, I got an opportunity to join an ERP company as a Software Developer and worked there for 4 years.<\/span>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\"#OpenerSpeaks_Lokesh\r\n

My journey with Open<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\r\nI joined Open a year ago and my journey has been all about new challenges & roles. I started out as an individual contributor, which later developed into a \u2018Team Lead\u2019 role & then eventually shaped up to that of a \u2018Technical Product Manager\u2019.<\/span>\r\n\r\nMost traditional financial software companies in India, often record accounting & banking transactions in an offline manner via native applications. This often leads to problems like non-accessibility to data 24×7, device dependency, human errors, data security, mismatch in books data versus bank data, etc.<\/span>\r\n\r\nMost business owners either end up spending a large amount of time rectifying these issues themselves or hiring a financial consultant. And these are the exact challenges that I\u2019ve been working on solving for business owners all over, for the past 15 months.<\/span>\r\n

The API adventure<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\r\nI was initially given the opportunity to build an API-based plugin that can be used to easily integrate Open with a third-party accounting software. This way users on Open could easily manage their collections and payouts from a single platform.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nIt was very tricky to design a schema that was both compatible and scalable. Working with supportive and like-minded colleagues helped me a lot at conceptualizing technical solutions for such complex problems.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nI brainstormed with the product team for hours to come up with a workflow that helps users automate all their accounting. This way, they\u2019d no longer be required to spend hours <\/span>manually tracking income & expenses and recording them in their accounting software.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\r\n

Leading the way<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\r\nI was then given the opportunity to take lead as a \u2018Technical Product Manager\u2019 for the finance module. My previous ventures had equipped me with the functional knowledge & user expectations that one needs to keep in mind while designing this module. And I could easily approach the leadership team at Open to share my vision for the roadmap ahead.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nI started out setting up accounting rules and the flow of information in different DB tables – one thing that was both interesting and challenging at the same time. And we eventually built a GST compliant finance module that provides options for collections & payouts directly against invoices and bills.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\n\"#OpenerSpeaks_Quote_Lokesh\r\n

Breaking new grounds<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\r\nAs Product Managers, we regularly interact with the business team to <\/span>plan & execute <\/span>a comprehensive go-to-market strategy. Along the same lines, there was a requirement to build a robust portal <\/span>that would help our business partners to<\/span> buy, distribute, or sell licenses directly to end-users.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nHaving worked in software distribution at the start of my career, I was able to understand the pain points faced by partners, much better. Right from managing channel distribution, product placement to pricing policy – we streamlined it all. <\/span>This portal is now live and keeps track of each license activation, revenue calculation, customer\/partner management, etc.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\nIn parallel with these challenges, I had taken an initiative to implement Agile methodology in the engineering team. This helped my team to plan, track & release the sprints on time. Meanwhile, tools like JIRA helped the team to maintain sync between product requirements and development.<\/span>\r\n

The way forward<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\r\nA year from now, I want to equip Open to cater to the banking needs of small businesses & freelancers in a much more advanced manner. One single platform that solves business finance challenges right from tax filing to tax payments (indirect & direct) & generation of advanced MIS reports. We are also working towards helping e-commerce resellers on Amazon, Flipkart to automatically track their payments with ease. And by integrating expense management into banking & finance – this is sure to save them a ton of time.<\/span>\r\n

The Open life<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\r\nThere comes a point in your career when you need to gear up for bigger goals and push yourself out of your comfort zone. One where you transition from being a mere contributor to a leader. Open was that turning point in my career.<\/span>\r\n\r\nIf you are someone who wants to thrive at work in a growth-oriented environment; if you want to learn and grow with Asia’s first and fastest-growing neobanking startup, come and be a part of Open<\/a>.<\/span>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n