In the Entrepreneurship Mentoring Course, SBM ITB invited Riri Astarina, Alumni MBA ITB 2017, as a guest lecturer to share her experience as a Product Manager in Sinbad.
Sinbad is a B2B startup company in Jakarta, focused on the FMCG industry and committed to helping retail stores in Indonesia grow their business. To date, Sinbad has already funded four rounds of funding and has around 150 employees to maintain its four platforms: Sinbad Red for public organic users, Sinbad White for sales field, Supplier Center for suppliers dashboard, and Admin Panel for internal Sinbad dashboard. All these Sinbad platforms are downloadable through Android Play Store.
At the beginning of her presentation, Riri presented data of the Sinbad internal team, specifically the proportion position in Sinbad. Turns out, product management became the second biggest (11.2%) position in Sinbad after software engineering (45.9%), considering Sinbad is an app-based company.
She explained that in Sinbad, as a product manager, she played a role in answering user problems that align with company objectives. “The role is an intersection between Design, Business, and Technology,” she said after explaining how a product manager works with many talents such as product designers, data, customer services, business, and engineers to make sure we are delivering a product. Also, as a product manager in Sinbad, she has to stick to the “SET SAIL” value of Simbad, which are Service Oriented, Entrepreneur, Teamworker, Speedy, Adaptable, Innovative, and Listen.
She explained that four basic skills are needed as a product manager: communication to interact with many stakeholders, ownership or leadership to be proactive and taking the initiatives, problem-solving to solve the problem, and analytical thinking to have a sense for analyzing the situation or problem. In addition, there are some basic principles needed by a product manager, namely: being user-centric and creative to focus on user-friendliness and give creative solutions. It is also important to always have a long-term product vision to coordinate effective roadmaps. Lastly, managing team goals and results with speed and efficiency is also important.
Finally, Riri explained the stages of product development. It consists of research to validate the assumptions, setting up Business Required Documents (BRD), ideation where PD and PMs craft the best user experiences of the user, and documenting to create a readable document called Product Requirement Document. Riri closed her presentation by giving real examples about how Simbad developed its products.