I joined Haptik a year ago as a Product Manager, when I joined, the product was in its initial stage. Fast forward to today, we have achieved a product-market fit and powered a whooping 6 million conversations for 500+ SMBs.
While the numbers grow as I write, this piece is not about Interakt. It's a glance at the culture from a PM's lens.
The adage, "No two days are the same," fits the PM's role. While the product, the position, the organization type, and a myriad of other factors determine how one's day looks. Some elements remain constant across all the PM's functionalities. Such as:-
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Communication: Be it internal meetings with engineering or feedback from customers. The calendar is spread across all departments, toppled with a hybrid work environment that makes it a packed schedule. This is where prioritization kicks in. At Haptik, we promote asynchronous communication through Slack channels and Hangouts.
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Ownership: The PM's role includes a great sense of ownership. You get to dive headfirst into problems that have a high impact on business goals. With mistakes comes the power to fail fast and learn quickly. I recollect messing up the signup flow in my first week of joining, but I wasn't put on a harsh stand of questioning, which I believe is the best thing about Haptik. They let you do the goof up, come up with the course correction, handle the crisis, and work on crisis prevention.
The other unique aspect is the belief system at Haptik, which is built on trust across all the teams, be it Product Management or Design or Engineering, or any different roles. I recall an incident where two marketing interns handled all external communication. And they came up with quirky ideas to craft the creatives, which did amazingly well.
- Collaboration: Collaboration is a niche feature where every PM can reach out to other PMs working on a particular product or Sales rep if they require guidance on the specific details
- Transparency: A necessary add-on to every role, Transparency is the key to being a happy PM or maybe not a glad PM but a PM. The takeaway is that everyone must be on the same page regarding plans, delays, and unexpected roadblocks happening at any level, functionality of a project. Be it the OKR meetings with your managers, review meetings, appraisals discussions, or feedback calls in general, the transparent culture can be seen in all workflows and is a common theme amongst teams.
- Upskill: To upgrade, you need to upskill. The idea is to understand design, analytics, and tech with a pinch of business understanding. At Haptik, every employee gets access to leading e-learning platforms that they can undertake to upskill. Additionally, webinars and workshops on various topics are often held company-wide. One such series is "Expert Talk," where subjects ranging from microservices to product marketing are covered by industry leaders worldwide.
Apart from the gazillion other things, Haptik organizes hackathons. Most recently, we had a virtual hackathon, which garnered a good deal of participation org-wide. The hackathon had solutions ranging from Slack bots to OCR-driven detail extraction to an Employee engagement boosting bot. Each prototype had a detailed demo, with some of them taken up as full-blown projects. Events like these promote multidisciplinary upskill across the organization.
The role of a PM is impressive. The bar is relatively high, which makes it challenging and exciting. And nothing can be more exhilarating than seeing the impact of your product.
Haptik is easily one of the best places to hone your PM mojo and have the opportunity to create an impact.
