Micro-Interview: Boyan Kelchev, Director of Product Management
388 words on product management.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Boyan Kelchev is a Director of Product Management at Hyperscience, a technology company that develops AI-based enterprise software designed to automate office work processes.
In under 500 words, he shares:
How he got into product management…
How he starts his mornings for maximum productivity…
Some of his sources of learning…
And more…
Enjoy!
“How did you get into product management?”
I was lucky to find myself among some of the smartest people I have ever met in graduate school. Some of them introduced me to the more nuanced aspects of Product Management like making decisions in uncertainty and the importance of leadership. That got me interested. After that, it was just a matter of finding the right company to transition into Product Management with.
“How do you start your mornings at work?”
I start by thinking about the 3 most important things that I need to accomplish that day. And I also remind myself that “urgent” doesn’t usually mean the most “impactful”.
“What do you know about product management now that you wish you’d known when you first started?”
At least some of the keys to being successful in PM are quite simple: having a solid system to stay organized and creating a habit of constantly questioning yourself whether you’ve paid enough attention to the details, such as when you’re thinking about clients’ jobs to be done for example.
“What did your biggest product failure teach you?”
As a Product leader, I still remember the time when one of my first reports told me they did not fully trust me. That taught me several lessons, and some of them were not apparent right away. A few of the more important ones were: create enough space to reflect regularly or you’ll miss important signals about your team and product; use narrative as much as possible to clarify the purpose of what your product is enabling for the world; and constantly ask yourself “are you focused enough?”.
“What’s the #1 thing that has helped you shorten your product management learning curve?”
Learning is usually about the people and situations you find and put yourself in. Having the opportunity to start leading a team of Product Managers relatively early in my PM career, while having strong managers myself, helped me learn how to focus better and allowed me to see situations from a variety of perspectives, which ultimately helped me learn fast.
“How do you stay updated on the best practices in product management?”
I am a firm believer in learning by doing. In that sense, staying updated on best practices is as simple as finding interesting problems in my day-to-day life and leveraging my colleagues and network to generate ideas of what best practices to apply for each problem. That usually leads to some amount of additional research and reading. Another tactic I like is taking a moment to step back and ask yourself how some of your mentors or thought leaders, knowing what you know about them and the practices they recommend, might go about a particular problem.