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The Function of a Product Manager
Aditya Jain | Ex-Product Leader, Google, Snapdeal, Amazon, Shaadi.com
IIM Kozhikode · EPGP - Digital Product Management
The 60-Second Reality Check
The Perception Reality
Engineering wants a ticket-writer. Business wants a project manager. Design wants a visionary. The textbook says you're the "CEO of the product" — with zero formal authority.
Impostor Syndrome by Design
Bounded Jobs
Engineering writes code. Sales closes deals. Their roles have strict boundaries.
PM's Job
You operate in "the white space between everyone else."
Because the role is poorly defined, you will spend your entire career justifying your existence.
Impostor syndrome isn't a personal failing; it is a structural feature of the PM job.
The Creativity Myth: You Are Not the Author
People become PMs because they want their creative ideas brought to life. That is a trap.
You are not the author; you are the editor.
- If you try to please everyone and ship all of their ideas, you will build a Frankenstein product.
- Your actual job is to say "no" to 90% of the ideas in the room and absorb the resulting anger to protect the user.
The 360-Degree Friction
You are the organizational shock absorber. Cross-functional crossfire, daily:
If you need deterministic "right" answers, or if you need everyone to like you, this career will destroy you.
Scenario: The Proxy War
What happens when the org's political gravity contradicts your boss's brief.
Scenario: The Proxy War
The Trap: You are caught in the middle.
The Forced Choice
The Loyalist
Defy the US. Risk them blocking your launch and cutting off your infrastructure.
The Pragmatist
Anger your local Director, who controls your immediate performance review.
The Diplomat
Try to split your 2 engineers to do a little bit of both.
The Unvarnished Truth
I chose Option C. We all lost.
The Loyalist
Defying the US would have meant losing infrastructure.
The Pragmatist
Capitulating would have meant angering the local Director.
The Diplomat
I tried to split the 2 engineers. Neither project got finished well. The Search India team was ultimately dissolved. The Senior Director who championed the idea was let go because he couldn't play nicely with the US team.
The Lesson: You can build exactly what your boss asks for, but if you misread the political gravity and power dynamics of the organization, you will still fail.
Three Vectors of Variation
Not all PM roles are equal. These three axes decide which one you're in.
Vector 1: Scale & Pace
Autonomy vs Ego — the trade you make when you pick the company stage.
High fulfillment, fast execution, low friction. You can pitch an idea directly at the CEO's desk.
The cost: lower pay and limited career velocity.
Massive friction. Everyone is fighting for territory.
But memory is short — you can recover from failures quickly.
Highest Ego reward, lowest execution speed.
You become a "Context Rebuilder" — explaining the same deck to 10 different people who keep forgetting what they agreed to last week.
The Borrowed Authority Trap
The rule: You cannot rely on borrowed authority. PMs cannot be human routers for leadership; you must own the "why" yourself, even if it came from the top.
Vector 2: The Geography Tax
It is not discrimination; it is the physics of asynchronous work.
Bengaluru
You. Your team.
The work day.
US HQ
The decision-makers.
The roadmap owners.
High-leverage, zero-to-one product work requires synchronous, high-bandwidth communication.
The Forced Choice: If you take the shiny FAANG badge in India, you either accept lower-tier maintenance work, or you destroy your physical and mental health taking calls at midnight.
Vector 3: Proximity to Revenue
Your internal status = Your proximity to the core business metric.
seller-facing
direct revenue
The Pivot: At Snapdeal, when I was on the seller-facing side, I was treated as a second-class citizen fighting for legitimacy. When I pivoted to Ads, I instantly gained organizational power.
The Rule: If you want leverage, get as close to the money or the B2C frontend as possible.
How To Survive The White Space
Three rules earned by paying the price of getting them wrong first.
Rule 1: The Tradeoff Defense
Overcoming the "No" Fallacy.
If you just say "no" to stakeholders, they will hate you and route around you. You must make the invisible tradeoffs visible.
The Snapdeal CEO review: The VP of Supply Chain cornered me because fulfillment sucked.
The Defense: "Yes, it sucks. But if I allocate engineers to fix it, we miss our monetization OKRs, and the company doesn't make money. Here is the math. Which do you want?"
Force stakeholders to look at the global tradeoff instead of their local problem.
Rule 2: The Invisible Work Tax
To an engineer, your calendar looks like you are slacking off.
They don't see the context-switching, the alignment building, or the research.
The Execution: At Snapdeal, engineering had chewed through 6 PMs in 3 years. I built the seller funnel and pitched it to them exactly as I would pitch leadership.
You have to aggressively show them your hustle to earn their trust.
Rule 3: The Paranoia Principle
Managerial approval has a half-life.
Explicit approval is not permanent.
The Google Shared Inbox: I got explicit approval from my skip-level Director. But when he left, my manager got cold feet, claimed he wasn't fully briefed, and tanked the project's impact in my performance review.
The Lesson: Trust is not a checkpoint you pass once. It is a weekly subscription. Be paranoid about silent misalignment.
The Flip Side of the Friction
We have spent the last hour talking about the pain. Here is the asymmetric reward.
So Why Do We Endure It?
- We've spent the last hour talking about the pain: the impostor syndrome, the crossfire, the paranoia, and the invisible work.
Because the rewards of operating in the "white space" are completely asymmetrical.
The Fulfillment of the Champion
The deepest satisfaction in this job isn't writing a document; it is watching a product you willed into existence actually ship and change human behavior.
The Non-Linear Reward of Ownership
The Snapdeal Ads Pivot: When we successfully tripled ad revenue, the satisfaction and the organizational credit belonged disproportionately to the product owner.
The Truth about Credit: The relationship between PM skill and organizational credit is non-linear.
If you are a weak PM
You are invisible.
If you are a strong PM
The organization attributes the product's ultimate success directly to your leadership.
The Intellectual Curiosity Engine
- A bounded job (like purely writing code or purely running sales) can eventually become repetitive.
- The PM role forces you to be a perpetual student. In a single day, you are sparring with engineering architecture, negotiating with legal, and designing with marketing.
If you have relentless intellectual curiosity, no other role offers this level of cross-functional exposure and continuous learning.
The Ultimate Privilege
The friction is simply the price of admission for the privilege of ownership.
You are the one who gets to stand at the absolute intersection of human psychology, business economics, and technology.
When it works, there is no better job in the building.
The PRD Arms Race
The Myth
AI is a superpower because it lets PMs write a PRD in 10 minutes.
The Reality
It gives everyone a superpower. If you use AI to write a PRD, an engineer can feed that same document into an AI and instantly generate 50 logical flaws and edge cases to challenge you with.
The Lesson: You can no longer bluff or hide behind a wall of text. The baseline for document quality is commoditized. Your fundamental grasp of the product and trade-offs must be absolutely bulletproof.
The Full-Stack PM
Because PM occupies the "white space" between functions, AI allows you to expand your territory rather than lose it.
- A data scientist (doing my own queries).
- A UX designer (building high-fidelity mockups).
By doing my own data queries and building high-fidelity mockups, I reduced my dependency on organizational bottlenecks to near zero.
The Velocity Inversion: An Optimistic Close
The bottleneck was: how fast can we code?
If an engineer can build in 1 day what used to take 10 days, the execution bottleneck is gone. The most expensive mistake a company can make is building the wrong thing really fast.
The market desperately needs leaders who can figure out what real customer problems to solve profitably.
Your value is about to go through the roof.
Q & A
Let's talk about your reality.
Aditya Jain · Product Lead, Google
Visiting Faculty, IIM Kozhikode