Today in our Success Story blog, we introduce you to Dhan Bahadur Singh who is a Product Manager at NatWest Group and was in the GCPM, 2021 batch at Accredian. He shares his journey of achieving success and landing a career in the Product Management industry. Get to know more about him as he guides us through this amazing process.
Watch his interview here:
Q.1 Tell us about your current role and background.
Hi, I’m Dhan Bahadur Singh. I have completed my Master’s in computer science and have been working in the financial services industry from the past 17 years with rich experience in broking, BFC and the banking sector.
Currently, I am associated with the NatWest Group. I joined as a Project Manager and recently got an opportunity to switch my role to a Product Management profile.
My current role is as a Product Manager with the commercial banking team, which includes job responsibilities like developing and maintaining a product vision strategy roadmap to track and analyze the performance of products and incorporate e-learning into production optimization strategies.
Q.2 What challenges did you face while exploring a Product Management role?
For me personally, the most challenging part while exploring the product management role was to understand the difference between the project manager and the product manager role as I came from a project management background.
Initially I was finding it very difficult to target the organizations which have the product manager role.
The second challenge was to explore which kind of product management role do I need to apply to, as I believe there are many product management roles like business product manager, technical product manager, designer, product manager and growth product manager.
My past experience falls into the business product manager role. Hence, that has helped me to explore opportunities for matching my role with the profile. When I got the understanding of this role, I was very clear about which role I need to choose and make my career with.
Q.3 How has Product Management helped you in your new role?
The Product management role helped me in solving problems for businesses and people. It also helped me to think creatively and out of the box to understand the customers’ problems and help them find the solutions.
I understood that by building a new product, developing an existing product further or getting any of its features to work together within the organization for different stakeholders, teams and colleagues is a good way of utilizing my Product Management skills.
Q.4 What was the interview experience at your current company?
At my interview, I went through scenario based and behavioral questions. The interview session was splendid as many product manager questions were asked. For e.g.
- What are the key responsibilities of the PM role?
- How do I determine what customers want and need?
- How do I help the product starting from the designing phase towards the full development of it?
Two experience based questions were also asked like:
- Which is one of the different and unique features of the product you had worked upon?
- What challenges did you face to overcome it so that it should be easy for a customer to use?
Q.5 Why Accredian? How did it help you?
At my current organization, as I was performing the product manager job, I was not fully aware of the product management role and to ensure that I joined Accredian and I was able to bridge this gap with proper understanding of the role.
But the different phases involved in designing and developing a product along with related examples really helped me to understand the problem from every angle.
I got to know about what important challenges I will face and how I can overcome them with the use of specific tools and techniques. It has definitely helped me to become an effective product manager and to stand as a competitive candidate in the industry.
Q.6 What advice would you give to Product Management beginners?
The only advice which I would like to give to product management beginners is that they should be good at communication, analysis, prioritization, breaking down complexities, vision and managing a roadmap.
Bit of research would also be good for your product management journey. If you are familiar with lean methodology and agile development, it would be like a cherry on top. If you are a multitasker, then this is the profile, you would really love to work as. Finally, I would like to thank Accredian for providing me with an opportunity to share my success story. Thank you.
We hope you found this success story interesting.
1 comment