Are you ready to unleash yourself and break into product management leadership? Get the book and the follow along the journey at Gangstavision.com or #gangstavision on LinkedIn. 

Gangsta Vision

CEO and Chief Product Therapist

Fast-growing FinTechs choose Nimi for product and payments advisory and staff augmentation. We specialize in API developer platforms and enterprise web applications.
Whether it is figuring out your product-market fit, or go-to-market strategy, Nimi is the partner who can give you the guidance and tools to set your strategic direction, execute on it.

Nimi

Dilip Ramachandran took the uphill journey to become a product manager, learned as much as he can, and now has reached the level he has wanted to achieve. Dilip is an author and now the Founder, CEO, and Chief Product Therapist of Nimi. Vivek and Dilip will be talking about his journey and the valuable lessons he learned along the way, only here in The Agile Coach.

HIGHLIGHTS

Dilip's Professional Story
The Uphill Journey To Product Management
The Love Of Product Building
The Learning Curve As A Product Manager
Becoming An Analytical Leader
Leadership Through Empathy
Understanding Executive Presence

QUOTES

Dilip: “as you progress in your career later on, okay, my mindset was, well, I've been kind of taking, I've been kind of, you know, you know, benefiting from the system, how am I going to give back, what's the next phase of my life.”

Dilip: “I really thrive in a small environment where I'm building products, and creating products or ideating products.”

Dilip: “When you become a leader, your job is not in creating perfect estimates, your job is not be the person who knows all the answers, your job is to be the guide, your job is to be the person taking the team to the tunnel.”

Dilip: “Empathy is really not sympathy. Empathy is really trying to feel what somebody is going through. And you really can't feel what somebody's going through until you really are in their position.”

Dilip: “Figure out what you're really passionate about, and try your best to figure out your path, your purpose, it doesn't have to be perfect.”

Get to know Dilip and what he’s up to:
About Dilip: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dilipramachandran/
About Nimi: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nimidev/
Nimi Website: https://nimidev.com/

Learn more about our host with the link below:
Vivek Khattri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivekkhattri/

If you enjoy The Agile Coach and are interested in learning more, you can check us out at the link below:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-coach-llc

Passion Led Profession

Dilip Ramachandran began his product-management career in the cloud. Working for a cloud BI company in the early 2010s, he was met with many questions about the very idea of putting data in the cloud. But he was attracted to the innovation and “muscled” his way in as a data analyst, where he struggled to find the right tools to succeed. And so began his quest to create great tools and great products. 

“A product is something that makes someone’s experience significantly simpler,” Dilip says. “And I kind of got hooked on that. I just wanted to do that. And I never stopped. I never looked back. Since then, even now, I am just kind of hooked, addicted to building software products and eliminating Excel. Excel is my enemy.”

With Excel in his rearview mirror, Dilip charted a course to product leadership. Along the way, of course, he’s learned a few things, not the least of which was overcoming cultural and social limitations as both an employee and a leader.

“It’s super-important that you treat people as people and be a bit more human about how you consider them as members of your team,” he says. “Pull them into the fold, then treat them as bodies — I think that’s the default people do with teams out of their culture. They don’t understand them. Then they tend to not treat them as an equal. That’s a big problem.”

Dilip employs his cross-cultural leadership experience in ways that maximize working with remote, sometimes far-flung teams — lessons that have become even more acutely relevant recently.

“One fundamental issue that teams face when they think about remote teams is that they look at remote teams as either body shops or cheap labor, and they don't see them as equal as their own teams,” he says. 

Dilip has developed methods and tools to address some of these issues, including the usage of personal “ReadMe” docs to get to know colleagues’ styles and needs and figure out, together, how to collaborate.

Learn more about Dilip’s advice and for cross-cultural success, as well his thoughts on how to transition from a mercenary to a missionary in your career and his explanation of the title of his new book, Gangsta Vision, on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Cross-Cultural Leadership is Product Management

Episode 7, Leadership School with Kyla Cofer.

How to Turn Things Around

Overcoming Destructive Workplace Habits and Increasing Communication 

Improving Collaboration Between Cross-Functional Teams as a New Manager 

UI/UX and Design

Data

Worked in Startup

Founder

Financial Services / Fintech

Marketing & Advertising

Computer Software

Consulting

Leadership

Productivity

Stakeholder Management

Building and Scaling Teams

Career Growth

Transitioning into a New Management Role

Communication and Collaboration

Working with Product Teams

Team Management

Hiring, Retaining, or Firing

Managing Stress and Burnout

Strategy and Vision

Internal Process Optimization

B2B Expertise

E-Commerce Expertise

Dilip Ramachandran is an experienced product leader and entrepreneur with 15+ years of building teams and shipping delightful + highly successful enterprise software products in MarTech and FinTech at companies like Walmart, Experian, Marqeta and Bond.

At Nimi, Dilip is CEO and Chief Product Therapist helping high-growth FinTech startups with product and payments advisory and matching them with highly reliable and skilled experts in Sri Lanka.

Dilip is currently writing "Gangsta Vision", due to publish in May 2022, a book that's exploring the intersection of finding personal purpose and growing in your product management career. A lot of us hit our glass ceiling due to a variety of reasons ranging from environment, ethnicity, imposed or presumed limitations that hold us back from achieving our true potential. The book is the one he wished he had so many years ago and intends to provide #productherapy and the mindset shift required to help a future leader #unleashyourself and break into senior leadership.

Dilip has a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and resides in Oakland, California with his partner Alla, daughter Ariadna and son Wiley (a papillon-sheltie rescue). The family occasionally travels to Colombo, Sri Lanka for his work with Nimi.

Dilip Ramachandran

About me

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