In this Accredian Spotlight interview, we feature Yashodeep Faye, a Power BI Developer with over 5+ years of experience. He is currently associated with Grand View Research. His insatiable quest for knowledge and upskilling led him to enrol in the Global Certificate in Product Management at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Yashodeep: I’m from the August 2021 batch, for the GCPM program. About my current work profile, I work as a Power BI developer along with working on different projects related to providing data solutions to stakeholders and our clients.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Product Management?
Yashodeep: After completing my post graduation in marketing and operation, I joined a lead generation organisation as a Data Analyst and here I worked on data-scraping, verification, transformation and loading to our in-house data warehouse using the Talend tool.
After a year, I left that organisation and joined Grand View Research where I was given the position of Associate in the BI department. Here I learnt about various tools and techniques for data modelling and transformation.
I was given the opportunity to learn and work on the Power BI tool to visualise data in a meaningful way. Since I was good with MS Excel and had experience with handling data, I helped the organisation to reduce the process of data transformation from 3-6 hours to just 30 mins to 2 hours.
For this I was awarded the “Ace of Initiative” by my organisation. I am currently working with different teams to develop new processes and automate the task so that we as an organisation provide the solution to our clients in the best possible way and in least possible time.
Question 3: What all Product Management concepts, frameworks & tools have you mastered in your program at Accredian so far?
Yashodeep: Product management has helped us look at things in a different way. To see the holistic view for any process that relates to a product’s lifetime development.
For any product, how big of a part research plays to decide the vision/mission of the company that aims at establishing the connection with its stakeholders is both external and internal.
How tools like Miro/Jira are to be used in brainstorming for the ideation of the product and to keep every team involved in the decision making process for that product. So far I can say, I can easily work on Miro boards for ideation and designing the product development.
Question 4: What are some of the initial challenges when you got started on your Product Management journey and how did you overcome it?
Yashodeep: Initially it was a bit difficult to understand what was going on, like why this, why that about the product journey. Why we have to follow certain procedures for a particular process and how difficult it is to keep each team in the organisation in sync.
But as the class started picking up pace I can relate to most of the topics and concepts learnt during my post graduation. But here it was more into actual implementation and its cause.
By practising a few of the concepts in my current organisation I came across why some of the processes are necessary to achieve the final goal for any product or service.
Question 5: Who is your favourite faculty at Accredian and what did you learn from them the most?
Yashodeep: It would be Ishan and Sai. It was great learning from them and understanding their implementation of the concepts into real world scenarios.
Question 6: In your view, What is the goal of product management & how has it evolved in the last few years?
Yashodeep: The end goal would be positive Customer satisfaction and increased revenue for the organisation. Over the years, the concept of product management has diversified. It not only looks after product development but also focuses more on all the elements that are part of it, be it direct or indirect effect on it.
Question 7: What are the current trends in Product Management that you are most excited about?
Yashodeep: The rise in the digital world has surely affected the trend in product management. It’s more reachable and more into customer satisfaction than the revenue generation, along with diversification of the products and increase in the features of the tools supporting in the decision making.
Question 8: Which are some of the Product Management blogs, podcasts, communities, & channels that you follow?
Yashodeep: Till now I only follow PM schools for its blogs and sometimes few articles on Medium.
Question 9: Please tell how your journey has been with Accredian so far and what are the elements that you liked.
It’s been a great journey so far. Learnt new dimension towards how a single role has to work and keep track of various things, not master of it but surely good at it so that it helps everyone in the related to that product evolution and implementation.
Question 10: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Product Management?
Yashodeep: Don’t think only about a money hike or working in your dream company. One should have that connection, empathy towards, with its end customer and with the company’s internal stakeholder.
You should have a knack for working that extra mile to create new dimensions in the market with creativity and problem solving.
Hope you enjoyed reading this interview. If you want to read more such interesting student stories, check out Accredian Spotlight.
