What is an education?

Education is not a collection of facts, it is not intelligence either, which tells you how to apply the knowledge. Education is finding the way, when confronted with life’s challenges. Education is the light which shows the way when there is a darkness all around. Education is not literacy, which enables you to read books. Education is the understanding of life, how the world works. The most important Education is the knowledge of how you (yourself) work?

Unfortunately, most schools only teach literacy, which enables you to pass exams and to an extent read, explore and discover ideas of famous thinkers. Schools don’t teach you to innovate, they don’t teach you how to find the way in life when you are stuck. Then why do we go school to receive education? We don’t go to schools for literacy, we go to schools for getting challenged, for thinking beyond our limitations when we are posed with tough problem. In that way, we receive education. Schools don’t last with us for a lifetime, education does.

In everyday, we get a chance daily to solve problems, get challenged, find solutions, go beyond our comfortable limits. The challenges comes in various forms: to someone who is trying to code a new feature the challenge is how to write the code effectively so that it integrates well into the system and problem gets solved accurately using minimal resources, to a struggling mother, the challenge is how to make her a 7 years daughter more responsible. Each day, each one us receives an education in a school called life, whether we choose to accept the challenges of life or not depends on how willing we are to learn, to get challenged and persistent in face of uncertainty. Education is not simply applying solutions where the problem is already defined, it is defining the problem and finding the solution to a new problem, each day.

Education is a way of life. It is an inspiration to live, a guiding force, which propels us towards success. So, are you a literate or educated?

What the heck is with job title?

Why are we so obsessed with job title, be it CEO, Product Manager, Director, VP… and so on? Have we not invented all this title crap to just exercise the control mentality. A CEO has the maximum power and office peon has the least power. It is all power structure at work. A power structure will almost always create a less powerful products, unless the CEO is someone like Steve Jobs, who has a Vision about the product. Any organization with titles is made to kill productivity and creativity. Some suggest that titles denote the area of influence, nothing can be further from the truth. Go to any organization, informal authority is what gets the work done. Isn’t it? Why we need titles? To earn more money in the organization. To have better lifestyle than juniors. A senior job title allows you more time for yourself, be more creative, supposedly more responsible for others work.  What a collective sham we live in!

A truly creative organization will allow people to pick up the titles based on the value they want to bring in. An organization is build by the people, for the people inside and outside the organization. The idea should be to chuck out the titles and give a way to value, which can be directly linked to customer satisfaction and brilliance or creativity in solution provided.

Why to live in 20th century anymore? Lets grow up to new realities and accept the way people work in the new world.

Product Management vs. Project Management

Product management cannot survive without good project management. More than often, specially in an internet based startup, people don’t understand the difference between product managers and project managers. For most people, they are one person. Even the senior management who hires a product manager often confuses them with project manager. So, here is the list, which every manager should read, to differentiate between the project manager and product manager. This list enables a manager to set the right expectations according to the role.

Project Manager
- Manages the project
- Creates the project plan, including deadlines
- Follow up with product managers, development team, QA team to get things done
- If needed, also does efficient resource planning among various projects
- May influence product development depending upon resource availability
- Prioritizes the task list for the resources or dept heads.
- Makes sure that team has the required infrastructure available to get the job done
- Participates in group discussions on a regular basis to facilitate cross-team interaction. (E.g. Development team, Product team and UI team)
- Does not give any (or less) input on how to code a program
- Does not give any (or less) input on product management

Product Manager
- Does a market research
- Does a customer research
- Is also called anthropologists of a product because of their better awareness of the product and interaction of the product with the end user.
- Develops a list of feature set for product
- Creates the product flow
- Develops use cases
- Understands business as well as user experience of the product
- Co-ordinates with the UI team, development team, QA team to ship the product.
- Is actually a product owner
- Can influence a product shipping date depending on Market / Business needs
- Manages the product road map
- Manages the bugs list and may decide which one should be fixed first.

So, what’s the moral of a story? If you ask product manager to manage the resources/ engineering team/ QA team and get involved in daily tasks of project management, you are going to loose out on a product improvement. Who else is the better person than product manager to innovate or develop better solutions for your customers? Think about the implications for a second.

- Do you want to loose end customers?
- What is important for your business?
- Retaining end users by providing them better services or continuously handling internal fires, which are the part of a project management?

I am sure your answer will lead to a right direction.

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