Edition #1: Product Chronicles Market
The science behind why I intend to start this newsletter and podcast
This is my first newsletter mainly to convince myself that there are enough number of new product managers or aspiring product managers out there that will need help or guidance from experienced product manager to be successful in their careers. Below is breakdown of how I went about identifying the problem and quantifying it, eventually convincing myself.
In Dec 22nd 2019, I had an opportunity to present in front of new product managers about how they should prioritize their backlog and how they should manage their stakeholders. During this session, majority of the audience asked questions similar to the ones I asked myself 10 years back while I was struggling as a new product manager. My product instincts immediately kicked in to understand how many such folks exist in the world and in India today and how can I help them accelerate their career. I began by asking two simple questions,
a) How many product managers are there in the world and in India that has less than 5 years of work experience? (Rationale: Candidates with lesser experience will benefit from what I have to share based on my practical experience)
b) How many of them work in startups and how many work in large organizations? (Rationale: Should I tailor my content for small agile teams or for complex organziations)
After hours of digging into LinkedIn, I was able to surface up some interesting data…
The data above shows me that in general, startups (or companies with less than 1K employees) tend to hire product managers that has less than 5 years of experience and India has more associate product managers with less than 5 years of experience compared to their worldwide peers. The highlighted area in orange is the market I should go after. The table below tells me that in India alone there are 5,000+ such product managers with fewer work experience that could benefit from what I have to share.
Net-net, based on the data if I decide to start this newsletter, my maximum target audience as of Dec 2019 will be roughly 20% of all product managers in the world. Also, I do not need to tailor my newsletter for startups or large corporates, it’s an even split between the two.
56,478 Product Managers!
Optimistically, if I zoom out and look at the data from a global view, then my target audience increases to 56K product managers. Put differently, there are 56K product managers with less than 5 years of work experience worldwide that could benefit from what I share. Even if I can reach 1% of this number in the next 6 months I can declare this a success. For my next step, focussing on generating good content for the 56K product managers :)
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