Mohammad Shakir - Starting In a Start-up Environment With a Lot of Responsibility Made Me More Confident (Product Strategy & Marketing, ByteDance)



I don’t jump to instant decisions or conclusions as I used to before. I take a step back, think and structure my thoughts and then make a decision. Structured thinking has helped me get to the right and desired solutions.


1. Tell us about your upbringing, and early career days.

I was born in Nagpur in a middle-class family and have a younger sibling. I have been away from home post 10th class in various cities of India. Post my mechanical engineering from BITS, I didn’t want to continue in core engineering and thus decided to give non-core a try. Started my career with JP Morgan and after working there for a year, realized that I didn’t want to end up in banking and finance in the long term and thus switched to Marketing and tech and since then fell in love with marketing and have been pursuing it till date.

2. How did you rise to the highest echelons in your career and what advice do you have for our readers?

Starting in a start-up environment with a lot of responsibility made me more confident. Gradually learning to build things from scratch to taking care of larger portfolios helped me get a holistic picture of how business works. My only advice to readers would be to take calculated risks in the early phase of your career and learn as much as you can.

3. How do you analyze whether your marketing activities reached your intended TG and communicated the right messages?

There are two important things that I have in my mind while evaluating any marketing activity - The objective and the KPI to measure it. One should have the objective of any marketing activity crystal clear before even starting the campaign/activity. Based on the objective only, one should start designing a marketing campaign. The next important thing is the right KPI that you will use to measure the campaign. If you measure the right metric for your campaign, you will always head in the right direction.

Hence, measuring the right success metric be it reach, be it attaining a goal, or be it anything, is the right way to understand whether your campaign has reached your TG or not. 

4. How do you think marketing will evolve in the future and how are you preparing for that leap?

There is and will be a huge amount of data available. Entire marketing will revolve around data. Be it offline or be it online, every advertiser will reach out to their exact TG using data. Digital marketing will play a huge role for any advertiser in the future. There has already a shift started in marketing budgets from offline to online because of data availability. Learning digital marketing is essential for any marketer in the future.

5. What would be that one thing that you would do differently now than before?

I don’t jump to instant decisions or conclusions as I used to before. I take a step back, think and structure my thoughts and then make a decision. Structured thinking has helped me get to the right and desired solutions.

6. What are your future plans?

Technology keeps evolving, so you never know what will come up in 7-8 years. Hence, focussing on getting the basics right is my priority for now. Building the necessary fundamentals of marketing is of utmost importance as they will not necessarily change.

7. Which is your favorite book and why?

I love reading about autobiographies of Cricketers and sportspersons as I am a die-hard Cricket fan. My favorite book is AB De Villier’s autobiography - AB. It really showcases how passion, focus, and hard work can take you to places!


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