Last Updated on August 9, 2024
Photos courtesy of CEO Portrait NYC (www.ceoportrait.com)
Aveneel Waadhwa is a Product Manager based in New York City. He grew up in New Delhi, India, and then moved to the US at the age of 18 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he double majored in Data Science and Economics, graduating in 2021. Aveneel is an accomplished Product Manager having worked at Microsoft for three years and at three different startups as a product manager intern during college.
He likes to give back, too. Aveneel is the co-founder of the Aspiring Product Manager, a non-profit organization that aims to help up-and-coming, aspiring product managers to break into the tech industry by providing mentorship, guidance, and feedback on the job application process.
He currently works on artificial intelligence products at Microsoft, where he has made a great impact by helping the company save millions of dollars to accelerate innovation. Aveneel is worldly and has worked and studied extensively in India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Portugal. His exposure to different work cultures and environments has shaped his understanding of global dynamics and multicultural collaboration.
He is an aspiring entrepreneur and is working towards starting his own company in the next few years. He frequently hosts coffee events on Saturdays to connect with his friends in New York City to build community. These events are called “Customs” and Aveneel hopes to expand them to be public events in the future. Aveneel is an avid traveler who has visited 43 countries, is a big cinephile, and is a big soccer fan.
During our conversation, we spoke about the future of product management and the skills that have fuelled his success.
For the uninitiated, what does a product manager do?
Back in college, I attended a startup school program in 2018 in Lisbon. You sit down with a team of five and start a company in three weeks. That was exciting. I always wanted to create my own company and build something from the ground up. I asked my professors, how can I keep doing this after college? So that I am set up to become an entrepreneur, a founder? The perfect role is being a product manager, I learned. You create a roadmap, work with engineers, create a design, and ship it. You work with marketing and advertising. Wearing many hats excited me. I wanted to be set up for success as a founder.
What makes a good product manager?
It depends on the company. You typically have to be really good at driving the vision, and drive optimization. Make a track record of success with customer feedback. Be ready to take customer feedback and improve the product. See what other companies are working on. Be ready and happy to get things done. A product manager must create strong relationships in various fields, from business to tech and design. You work together across many fields to launch a product.
Is the product management role growing in popularity?
Product management roles are definitely growing in popularity. People want more ownership of the product they are working on. If you’re a product manager, you are responsible for the product, and not the people. You create the road map, work on it with engineers, and present it to all of the company’s teams. It’s a multi-faceted job where you get a lot of ownership and responsibility.
How do you think the role of the product manager will change in 2024, and beyond?
In 2024, we are going to see more product manager roles filled. The role has changed a lot for product managers, from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to other AI products such as Perplexity. Now we have a lot of tools to help automate tasks, like Gamma AI to help create presentations after taking in basic input. A lot of people think AI might replace product managers, but it’s only helping them be more efficient, so they can make big decisions and work one-on-one with teams. With developments in AI, coding skills could be replaced by AI but soft skills are more important than ever. So focusing on these soft skills will be paramount to success.
What’s one tactic you’ve used for success?
The most important thing a product team can do is work with their design and engineering teams, use the product, go through workflows, and ask, ‘How can we improve this?’ Change what you want to change. Go backward from there. Sit down with product designers, and make things simpler. Showcase something, and make it easier for the end user. Use tools such as Canva to create simple design mockups to show to your engineers.
What sets you apart?
My biggest strength as a product manager and as a professional is my resilience. I have been through things where I needed resilience to succeed. To get to the bottom of things. You must have determination. Sometimes you might have to pivot from one thing to another. Also, having an open mind is important. But being resilient and having conviction in something you believe in is paramount to me. I am also extremely curious. In life and work, I’m curious about everything. I’m always researching and learning about something. I’m curious about the ‘why.’
How can a product manager use customer feedback to improve the product?
The feedback depends on the product. People can email you directly to give feedback or post issues on GitHub. Another idea is hosting focus groups. Getting different opinions and feedback from customers is key. It might give you new ideas. If you’re a small startup or company, you should reach out to customers and do one-on-one calls with them. I was the first customer of one app, so I provided help directly to the team. The customer has a vested interest in making an app better if they are a frequent user.
Can you tell us about your biggest success so far?
My biggest success comes from helping my organization inside Microsoft save millions of dollars. We all want to save money, but my big success comes from optimizing Azure resources by creating apps and shipping products that help customers do so. You’d be surprised how many places you can save money inside a big company. It comes down to coming up with cost-saving initiatives. Sending out cost optimization initiatives can help save millions, and it helps justify our salaries. Organization saves dollars, and that saved money can help fund innovative projects, for example, in the AI space, that might not have money at the start of the fiscal year. Funding these types of projects accelerates innovation and product development.
Why is innovation important to the product management role?
For any new tech company, investing in technologies such as AI is important. Most companies want to work on anything new as fast as possible. It’s a race for innovation. Soon we will see AI everywhere in our daily lives. For the next few years, it will only help innovation. The government is investing in AI. For product managers and young ambitious people in tech, we always want to be working with cutting-edge tech. The goal is always to make our lives better, and more efficient. Every product manager wants to make their products better. AI tools are making our lives easier, helping us focus on big decision-making, rather than menial tasks.
You co-founded something called the Aspiring Product Manager, can you tell us about that?
Yes, two of my friends and I co-founded the Aspiring PM as a Substack, LinkedIn, and Medium project to help young product managers break into the industry. We currently have 1,700 followers. I started it with two other product managers in 2021, right after graduating college. It is a role that is hard to get as a new college grad. The Aspiring PM has become a resource for those who want to become product managers. Many startups don’t hire product managers unless there is a team of 35 or 40 employees. New roles have started opening up for even smaller startups, and we wanted to help other college students understand the interview process. My peers had connections in the industry, but not everyone has. The most common question we are asked is what should students be studying to prepare to become a product manager. I say, study computer science and data science and take classes in entrepreneurship and psychology to figure out how people work and think. This way you can help out future customers and users and be technically adept.
As someone who has a dream of becoming an entrepreneur, what type of company would you create?
I would create something for the food and beverage industry, specifically coffee shops. In New York City, there’s a new chain called Blank Street Coffee. They’re a tech-enabled coffee shop. They’ve raised VC funding. I would use my experience to create a tech coffee space to bring people together. Scale the coffee drinks that I make every day. I would use it as a vehicle to create community in larger spaces, so people can sit and talk about ideas and life. It’s a way to use a singular approach to build community. It’s an extension of something I have already started. In May 2023, I started a simple housewarming party, a coffee party called Customs, to share coffee drinks from around the world. Ever since then, my friends have told their friends about my events and they keep getting bigger. I’m currently hosting these out of my apartment in Manhattan. My next step is hosting a coffee event in a public space.
Check out his website https://aveneel.com/ and on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/aveneel/
