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Episode 165 - From High-Frequency Trader to Investor in Good Ideas (with Pooja Parthasarathy, Head of Product @ AbstractOps)
Episode 165: From High-Frequency Trader to Investor in Good Ideas
Pooja Parthasarathy, Head of Product @ AbstractOps
Listen here!
About the Episode
Pooja Parthasarathy is a product leader who started out her career in the high-pressure, high-volume world of high-frequency trading. She took some time out with me to reflect on her unconventional career journey, what it taught her, and how to make an impact as a product leader.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor Path
This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:
High-frequency trading is as stressful as you'd imagine, but it has lessons for early-stage product managers
Working with traders teaches you to think on your feet in volatile environments, think three steps ahead & build a thick skin. These are all valuable traits for PMs.
We should all be comfortable asking basic questions
Working in a variety of jobs has helped her get comfortable with first-principles thinking and asking even the most basic questions. It's important to model this behaviour for your team.
Be kind to yourself and the stories you tell yourself
Pooja was hard on herself after her first child and wondered if she could make a success of work after going back. She learned to appreciate the job she was doing and be her own champion.
The job of a product person is to be an investor in good ideas
A PM's job is not to have all the answers or all the best ideas, but to be the Socratic Police Officer and ask good questions to get those around you to bring their own insight to the table for you to tie together
The CEO & CPO relationship is the most important in the company
It's important to create leverage with the CEO, by having the right motivations, setting clear expectations about who owns what for what time horizon, and being comfortable delegating to other leaders.
Contact Pooja
You can catch up with Pooja on LinkedIn, although she's about to have a baby so maybe wait a bit!
Related episodes you should like:
- The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
- Building High Performing Cross-Functional Teams as a PM (Hanne Ockert-Axelsson, Senior Product Manager @ accuRx)
- Leading & Evolving Product Teams Through Hyperscale (Brian Shen, Product Director @ ClickUp)
- May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
- Chris Butler's Hot Take - Product Managers DON'T Need to be Technical (Chris Butler, Staff Product Operations Manager @ GitHub)
- Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
- Commercialize! Get your Productized Services to Market (Eisha Armstrong, Author "Commercialize")
- Jas Shah's Hot Take - Product Management isn't as Glamorous as People Think (Jas Shah, Fintech Product Consultant)