Yes, you read it correctly. Personally, 2020 was an awesome year and hope the momentum continues into 2021. It was blessing in disguise for me. Let me first start with a picture which summarizes the year then I will discuss the key milestones.

Professionally, 2020 was a satisfying year backed with some solid deliveries, positive feedbacks and good team synergies. But let me focus on the personal development that took place in 2020.

• Overall well-being
  • Weight management
  • Art of living
• Deep dive into Product management
  • PSPO-A certification
  • Product management blog – pankajbisht.com
  • LinkedIn connections
  • Agile-O-Thon
  • Agile meetups
  • Let’s connect platform (internal meet-up)
  • PM school challenge

Let me start with weight reduction, I started the year with 95 KGs and now weigh around 81KGs. I have covered the journey under my earlier blog.

The covid-19 situation helped me as I was working from home and had a lot of free time to explore the product management universe. I was fascinated with the customer discovery aspect of the journey.

Hence, I started reading a lot of books, blogs ranging from Lean startup to Agile software development to Jobs to be done theory. Extensive reading broadens my horizon which was earlier limited to just Scrum Product Owner role (or, the delivery aspect of the product lifecycle).

During 2020, I also passed the Professional Scrum Product Owner (Advance) certification. Learning was further enhanced when I connected with more than 1500 like-minded professionals on LinkedIn.

I wanted to help other fellow professionals, thus started with my blogpost(pankajbisht.com) in Q1 2020, same has now registered more than 3500 hits (vanity metrics?) from people across the globe.

I also participated in Agile-O-Thon event where we had to present seven solutions spanning across seven sprints. I secured good positions in two of them.

Let me also mention that I attended several Agile/product management meetups in 2020 and got a chance to listen to industry stalwarts like Gunther, Roman pichler, Tobias Meyer, Geoff Watts, Daniel Vacanti, Jeff Sutherland, Dave West, Nagesh Sharma and many more. I must say listening to them was an enriching experience in itself.

Finally, towards the latter half of 2020, I started getting my hands dirty with customer and product-centric case studies and also participated in the PM School weekend challenge and presented a case study on Netflix India, I must say it was received very well.

I wish to start 2021 in the same spirit with a focus on continuous learning.

Merry Christmas and a very happy new year 2021.