Cost Control Engineer

Shopsy - orbit shift ?

It’s a good strategy to be a second mover, learning from the first mover and doing it the better way. Shopsy was started by Flipkart as a Meesho combat with big ambitions, 3 years back. Sadly what has left of Shopsy now is, ever changing business goal posts with frequent change in the leadership board. The most recent leader who joined a couple of months back, is muddled in her own understanding to give a solid direction to the team. The work satisfaction has significantly declined in the team members, with a ~40% attrition rate in the past 2 months itself. Managers themselves are failing to keep up their team motivated. While the ground team is overworked, incremental hiring is happening at middle layers, increasing work redundancy and furthermore demotivating the middle managers. This year seems crucial for Shopsy’s relevance in the flipkart ecosystem. Let’s wait & watch.

How to find high growth startups?

I have been working in a FAANG as software dev for more than 3 years now. As an engineer I feel I have grown a lot but I lack technical skills to build products ground up. I am looking for a change now, how to find high growth startups? Like how to apply and search for them? What's the interview prep like?

Is Product really for me?

Need advice from experienced Product Managers at tech product companies. This is my first job. I come from an IIT with top of the class grades (in a non-IT branch with no DSA prep) and had very strong extra-curriculars too. Having said that, I was a top candidate for consulting roles as well as product roles on campus. As fate would have it, I got into a PM role. Now I have always been fascinated by the role solely because it was always glorified as 'the Entrepreneur to be' role. (at least to me, that was the entire USP of it). It has been a few months for me in Product. During the prep, there is all the Product thinking and user empathy, maybe some ask of data analysis. But when it comes to the real job, I am barely ever able to get my hands on the first two. All the time gets used up in execution because my company is too lean to have any dedicated project managers (the pay is great though). The remaining time goes in data retrieval (not analysis) because apparently PMs and SPMs don't write queries or interact with users. They opine (what their manager opines up the ladder) I fear if it's the same everywhere else. It was like this at my previous organisation (internship, non tech) where the CEO yelled at people when on-ground numbers did not reflect his thoughts. The only difference here is that there is no yelling, just subtle corporate HR cushioned pressure. Maybe it is the 'fast moving' nature of the organisation but the best that I can describe it as is a feature shipping factory with no aim for differentiation whatsoever. All ideas are built from the incumbents' implementations. Any attempt at differentiation is shot down (by middle management) whose primary metric is the number of features against their name at the end of the appraisal cycle. While top down, this may look great: we are trying 100 things, getting 90 of them correct. But there's a possibility that we could have done 92 things, 91 correct, 1 wrong. But the 1 extra correct thing could have been something novel that the users actually wanted. The chances of this happening are not so bleak, in my opinion, because the high level (upper management) cannot possibly be in touch with the on ground reality (no matter how much they claim it in their linkedin posts). I am told that I should push engineers towards the solutions that will be the fastest (even if they callout potential tech debt) so that more features can be shipped in the least amount of time. Now, I really don't aspire to be like the people who are above me. And I don't know if it's a normal thing. I don't want to become the person who imposes their 'hunch' (just a copy of what some other app did 2 years back) onto the actual owner of the project when data is inconclusive. I don't find any intellectual stimulation in it. Am I PM-ing wrong? Am I PM-ing in the wrong Org? Or am I not meant to be a PM?