Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Anuj Rathi is the Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Jupiter Money, where he leads product management, marketing, design, growth, and analytics. Before Jupiter Money, Anuj served as the Senior Vice President of Revenue and Growth at Swiggy, VP of Product at SnapDeal, a Senior PM at Walmart Labs and the first-ever PM at Flipkart. He’s also one of the most beloved and respected product leaders in India. In this episode, we discuss:• How product management is different in India• How to rethink your approach to new users• How Anuj operationalizes the “working backwards” framework• Why Anuj thinks PMs should be more full-stack than they are• How to use Anuj’s “4BB” framework to get better at product strategy and prioritization• Advice on developing innovative roadmap ideas• The three essential skills of a successful PM• Three reasons why leadership fails• Why OKRs don’t work in marketplaces—Brought to you by Sanity—The most customizable content layer to power your growth engine | Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-full-stack-pm-anuj-rathi-swiggy—Where to find Anuj Rathi:• X: https://twitter.com/anujrathi• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujrathi1—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Anuj’s background(04:28) How product differs in India (08:34) When modern product thinking started to gain traction in India(14:01) How Anuj thinks about new-user experiences(15:07) Scott Belsky’s “lazy, vain, and selfish” framework (19:59) Why PMs must understand category consumers(22:30) Anuj’s philosophy on the PM job(23:59) How Anuj applies the working-backwards framework(28:36) The importance of FAQs(30:10) The full-stack PM mindset(33:06) Anuj’s “show don’t tell” framework(36:19) How to use the show-don’t-tell framework(39:14) The impact of using this framework(41:27) Anuj’s “4BB framework” for product strategy(48:59) Contrarian corner(50:49) Anuj’s “framework of 3” for great PMs(52:34) How to develop grit and influence(54:00) Three reasons why leaders fail (56:21) AI corner(57:51) Lessons from building a successful marketplace(1:02:19) How to balance and maintain stability on all sides of a marketplace(1:07:48) Lightning round—Referenced:• MakeMyTrip: https://www.makemytrip.com/• Shaadi.com: https://www.shaadi.com/• Bharat Matrimony: https://www.bharatmatrimony.com/• Flipkart: https://www.flipkart.com/• Ola: https://www.olacabs.com/mobile• Swiggy: https://www.swiggy.com/• Jio: https://www.jio.com/• UPI: http://cashlessindia.gov.in/upi.html• The First 15 Seconds by Scott Belsky: https://medium.com/positiveslope/the-first-15-seconds-9590d7dabc• Jupiter: https://jupiter.money/• How to get better at influence: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-better-at-influence#• Working Backwards: https://www.workingbackwards.com/• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484• In Search of Greatness on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Search-Greatness-Wayne-Gretzky/dp/B07P5X99P5• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow: https://www.amazon.com/Team-Topologies-Organizing-Business-Technology/dp/1942788819• Conway’s Law: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-is-conways-law-acmi• Lessons from scaling Spotify: The science of product, taking risky bets, and how AI is already impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström (Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-scaling-spotify-the-science-of-product-taking-risky-bets-and-how-ai-is-already-impac/• Taobao: https://world.taobao.com/• Alibaba: https://offer.alibaba.com/• Working Backwards: https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-PB/dp/1529033845• How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know: https://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/0195573560• The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands: https://www.amazon.com/Luxury-Strategy-Break-Marketing-Brands/dp/0749464917• The Office on Peacock: https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/the-office• Rise: https://www.risescience.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

There are only three reasons why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. And you can look at a person and you would say either that person can't do, which is a capability issue, or they won't do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do, which is really your problem that you didn't set up the ways of working in org design properly. So as a leader, do you have the right people in terms of capability? And if not, is the right answer for us to coach them or to like really put, them or mentor them and so on or move them to some other place because maybe the capability suited elsewhere. If they won't do, why won't they? Are they not aligned to you? Do they not

agree with your vision? Do they not have enough time? And so on and so forth. So you need to really go deeper there. Why won't they do? Today my guest is Anuj Rati. I've been looking to get more India-based product leaders on the podcast because this podcast has a large audience in India. And when I put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn asking people who I should have on, Anuj was the single most requested person. Anuj is chief product and marketing officer at Jupiter Money. Previously, he was senior vice president of revenue and growth at Swiggy, where he spent seven years. He was also a VP of product at Snap Deal, a senior PM at Walmart Labs, and the very first product manager at Flipkart, where he led the buyer experience team. In our conversation, we dig into

how product management is different in India. Anur's lessons, about building product experiences for new users, how he operationalized the working backwards process at the companies he's worked at, why he pushes his teams to explore three divergent directions before settling on a plan, why he thinks product managers and companies should be much more full stack than they are.

Also a bunch of frameworks and contrarian takes about building product and your career in product. A big thank you to Sayan Mighty and Nikiel Kolkarni for helping me navigate the product scene in India. Look for more amazing India-based product leader to come. With that, I bring you Anuj Prati, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Sanity. Your website is the heart of your growth engine. For that engine to drive big results, you need to be able to move super fast. Ship new content, experiment,

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Go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. get started today. Anuj, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Lenny. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. I haven't told you this, but when I put a call out on Twitter and LinkedIn for people's

favorite India-based product leaders, you were the single most recommended person. And so I just wanted to start with, how does it feel to be the most loved India-based product leader, at least according to my Twitter followers and LinkedIn followers? Well, it feels really good. And I really feel it's come together because I've been doing product management for the longest time. In 2010, when I started the product management journey with Flipcut, I think that that was a time when there were not a lot of products being built for India. So I think one part is just a tenure. And B, I think it's just a lot of people have known that work.

Awesome. You're very modest. I wanted to start with a question about product in India. and I'm just curious just how is product management and product building in general just most different in India? Yeah, I think that's a very interesting question. And I think about this all the time. Like when I look at product management in India and I do have a lot of friends comparing product management versus, say, in the US or even in Europe, versus even in China, Southeast Asia, etc.

I think India has had like a very interesting journey of products in general and hence product management also. I think till about 2010-ish, there were not really many products built for the Indian consumers in the first place. There were a lot of products being built, a lot of technology being built, but largely because it was a back office. So you had a lot of great engineers working in companies which would build products for the American customer or even for the European customer and so on. So once these startups started coming in, which were thinking about building for the Indian consumers, I think we did not really have that talent which you could directly tap into who were trained into product building, forget product management as a field in the first place. There were no colleges which were teaching anything about this, there was no playbooks and

so on so forth. We would go to the internet and look at YouTube and look at SVPG and all of that. But what we would understand would not, kind of you could not port directly to the Indian startups. And the way that they shaped up, I think also shaped up, the way product management field would evolve in India. So it's taken like a bunch of iterations, and I think there are like two or three different waves that have come in,

and we are way closer to how good product management should be done in India. We still have a little bit way to go compared to, say, US. And I also think of it along, like, for example, in US, the product building culture probably started in 1970s, a modern software product building culture. And you didn't only have product manager with the entire ecosystem, if you think about a company, like who is the VP of business and who is the VP of supply and sales and ops and technology and all of that, that group knew how to work with each other to

build software products. They understood how that would be built and what to expect. I think in India, when we were in 2010, et cetera, even those different people who needed to come together to build, like, say, e-commerce, they would come from, say, FMCG or they would come from manufacturing and so on. And what they would have seen in this, journeys in terms of what we expect is a very request response kind of understanding, which is here's machinery. If I give this resources, I expect with a little bit of variability, why predictable output to come.

And that mentality also kind of moved on to what I expect from product managers or product building journeys and so on. So I think over a period of time, a lot of those cycles have happened and a lot more other leaders in companies have now seen those cycles. and kind of understood and he, all right, now I understand software is not machinery. Consumers are not predictable as much as we thought. And that has led to now finally, I think, product management coming of age. You said that in the, I guess, in the Bay Area, things started like 1970 or something like that.

When would you say things started to really ramp up in modern product thinking in India? I think 2010 was kind of when it started because, look, there were a few products that were built before that also. And I think somebody said this clearly that usually when modern consumer internet starts coming in countries, it usually starts with travel. So you do have like basically any country we would start with, which is the first travel company. So I think India started with some companies like Make Metrip and so on like way earlier. There were a few very interesting products being built in India which were solving uniquely for the Indian consumers that were in the Metrimony side, which is Shadi.com and Bhavadmati.mati.com and so on. what do you think about Tinder? Like India is famous for arranged marriages.

So like a product that would really understand that, hey, if you're a parent, if you want to get your kid, you know, up for vitimony, how would you solve for them? And that marketplace of matrimicking, et cetera, started. So a few blips here and there, which was solving uniquely for India. But in 2010 was a decade of time when I can like very clearly imagine. That's where like a lot of people started building for India. So I think then Flipka started that kind of journey.

but in a couple of years, then they were, like, say, Ola, which was, in a way, similar to Uber, what they were doing elsewhere. And then a whole bunch of other startups that started coming in. So, for example, in food delivery when I was working at Swiggy, that came in, like, say, 2015, 2014 in that time frame. And now you see a whole bunch of startups which are trying to do not only things which are, what could an Uber for India look like or what could a Doodash for India look like? Very different.

and also very innovative. So I think now is the time when you see a lot more product building around that area. What are some numbers of just like companies in India, people in India's money spent in India? I don't know, things that would be like, wow, that is a much bigger opportunity than I thought. All right, this is a very white question. So I'll tell you, before the opportunity in India, I think I'll talk about the complexity in India, which is very, which I think a lot of people don't understand. So India has, what, 1.4 billion people?

So there are three waves, really, that happened in India, but also in the globe. I think first wave was like from desktop to mobile. And then even from mobile to smartphones. And from smartphones, there was what we call the geo revolution. There's an Indian company called Sri Lanzio that basically got internet at the cheapest prices for smartphones. So because of this, a whole population came onto the internet, which was hungry for newer products, new or content, completely different ways of interacting with each other and using internet for all sorts of different things.

That was one of the waves. The other part is really what the Indian government really enabled, which is especially in digitization of a bunch of absolute core fundamental citizen-related machinery, which is either through digital payments, which is a whole bunch of Indians now started having a bank account by default and something called UPI. So even if you do not have a bank account or that bank account is linked to your mobile phone number, but now everybody would pay through that

and that brought in like a very different kind of revolution. So even if five rupees, that is basically like, you know, 10 cents or less than that, that would be paid through UPI. And people started moving away from cash and so on. And there's something called the India stack that is like all of these things coming together, which is social security, identity, payments and so on, that a whole bunch of other apps can now use to build their own layers on top of that.

So many interesting cases kind of started coming about. So that's kind of one, which is just a number and the infrastructure. Now, the other thing to look at is India is very diverse. So the number of languages spoken here, even the official languages is so high. And they say there's a quote in India every 15 miles.

The language will change and the people and their culture will change. And it's a huge country of so many people. So your traditional ways of thinking about products also, that whom I'm building for is very different. Are you building for this person or that, et cetera? So a bunch of frameworks kind of break down because it's not even that the same language will apply.

Well, English is a language that is used by the people, at least who have the money and who have the dollar to even give to you. But you have to think way more widely. The other thing about India that is interesting is the price that people are willing to pay. And it generally is, it also looks at like the per capita, you know, money that people have is very low. It's in the $2,000, $2,000 range compared to U.S., which is maybe $30 times more and so on.

So while there's a lot of people who are going to give you, you know, traffic and engagement and so on, but the craft of actually choosing the right kind of paying customer who will actually come and engage and give you money is at a premium. So a lot harder work needs to be done. If you're running e-commerce, who are the people who will pay me delivery fee? Who are the people who will actually buy this expensive stuff? And so a whole bunch of different ways of thinking has evolved in this country. And that's why it's so vibrant and so different than any other global products.

Wow. Fascinating. I could keep going, but I want to talk product. I've collected a bunch of questions from people. that know you or people that have worked with you all about a bunch of different stuff. So I'm just going to kind of go a little bit all over the place. And the first area I wanted to talk about is the new user experience. Apparently you have an interesting insight and kind of a different approach of thinking about new users and new user experiences.

One of the things that I realized once we started working about the products is that product managers and generally companies are too engross in thinking about because they're very close to the product, it's close to their heart and they're looking at it all the time. they're looking at a lot of minor nuances in terms of how this works and feels. And almost inherent into this is a bias that everybody is thinking about this product all the day, all the time, and so on and so forth. Whereas the reality is, most consumers in the country or in your target market, they don't care. And they may have some time heard about your product. The word of mouth is not ever so strong, even if you're the strongest brand and so on so forth.

But that is the customer that you've got to bring in. then serve. So there's a very interesting insight that I heard from Scott Belski, from Adobe, and then now he's doing like very interesting stuff. And that kind of stayed with me, and which was, you know, how to think about users on modern internet consumers having three attributes. So they are lazy, they are vain, and they're selfish. So lazy meaning, I don't have time for this. So blow my mind away. Otherwise I'm not going to pay attention. Wain, which means I have a habit. I'm solving this problem in a particular way.

And here you come with your two-puck product and ask me to change my habit. Do you really expect me to do that? That's second, that's their inherent attribute. And the third one is that they're selfishly. Show me what's in it for me. And once you start thinking about users in that way, and if these users are not even using your product,

like suddenly you realize, oh my God, it's quite difficult. How do I attract this kind of customer? And if my marketing team has done a good job at bringing this user to my product, how do I actually empathize with this lazy, selfish and main customer and build my product in a way so that I can make this where on your side. Like this is the thing that you have to use. The way you write your copy, the way you build your onboarding,

the way you do your first warm welcome, it's going to make the biggest amount of change in terms of a product success than your core product features that you're going to build for your. loyal consumers. So that one insight, and I've seen and applied that multiple times, not only the companies that I've worked with, the companies have consulted and spoken with, most neglected. Well, they kind of get user onboarding is important, but just how important is that is one. And B, this is a craft of thinking like a user who is lazy, vain, and selfish, and basically rejecting all your products. This does not work for this kind of customer. It's extremely hard.

It's very hard, but it's totally worth it if you put that lens on. And is there an example of you're using this framework on a product you worked on where you just like, here's the thing we really did. I don't know how to big impact or really surprised everyone? So we use it in like two different areas. So one is, of course, products where I worked on. So I worked in Swiggy for the last seven years. And really when we started working towards this user, instead of thinking about everybody as, as, you know, this is what our onboarding experience looks like. And this is what our product is.

So essentially we used to basically say that it's, we are a food delivery app, we have a grocery delivery app and we have like these bunch of things. Instead of that, we just started reframing it from the point of view of what would you want and how could you use us and what is it in it for you? And we started connecting all our marketing messages along with the onboarding. So even going out market and thinking, where do you actually find us? How did you know about us? It's a reasonably large brand.

Why have you not already downloaded us and used us? Have you used us and rejected us in the past? So kind of building that entire mental model and looking at a user from the point of view, let's assume that you have heard about us 20 times. And what was that exact situation that brought you to download this app? So right from the entire journey of you hearing us, what was a trigger? And what was a marketing message and what was the promotion that we were running? And how do we continue that journey on your onboarding from your splash?

that 200 rupees of X rupees if you buy from us continuing that entire journey in the language that they understand and with the user experience that is continuation from the marketing to product are the thing that we started focusing on a lot more and it instantly

started showing us results but while I'm talking about just a very simple example and everybody should be doing it that is true even for when you have a particular app which has multiple products and many product lines. The same principle that applies there. And that's where I think the largest amount of delta that happens

that people don't know really why are we not able to cross pollinate or cross sell and so on so forth. Right now I'm working with a company called Jupiter, which is a financial services app and it's a neobank. So we care for personal finance. And it has a bunch of offerings. There's a personal account or savings account. There's a credit card. There's mutual funds. There is investments in, say, gold and FB and so on, so forth. Like, it's a bunch of things. But when people think about, why are using us only for one service and just go away? Actually, the key is to recognize that this user has found value in here,

and they are not interested in all the other things that you talked about. So be able to empathize with that user and now thinking about, like, the behavioral science aspects in terms of how do I convert this user from one to the other. That I think is extremely important. So a couple of things I'm hearing here. One is the importance of focusing on not people currently using your product, but this idea of maybe the marginal user or the adjacent user, like the next state of users is who you should be thinking about

when you're trying to optimize onboarding the user experience. And then two is something it sounds like you've had a lot of success with is picking one value prop, maybe one positioning statement, and then following that through their entire journey versus like, here's all the things we do. That's right. That's absolutely right. Let me give an example of this one.

And one of the reasons why I really feel product managers must, if not better, but equally understand category consumers, which are not in market or which are not really looking or which are not buying your products just yet, as good as the marketer or the brand expert in your team does. Because they really are tasked with what is that one message that I can say that will make the user take attention or get to like, oh, this interesting and direct attention towards your product. And if the product managers are able to do that, then they will choose that positioning and essentially understand what is my hope product and what is the hook that

will at least get them to try my app or any of those things, right? So if they understand it as well as a marketer and then understand over a period of time, what is the right time when I introduce them to this other one rather than being, you know, very greedy about like letting the news try everything. So that's one. The other thing that I feel is a lot of product managers don't do right is forget about everything. Here's my app go figure is how most of the products are designed unfortunately. That automatically these things will happen without any intervention. I have created something which is so beautiful. And once you tap that icon, everything inside that is my product that is so. working perfectly, but they don't really think about at what moment do I actually get this user here, and why will they use it? But this user is less vain and selfish. That phrase reminds me of something I always think about with Mark Andreessen and had this great quote that your user's time is already allocated. They're not like looking for more apps to download. They already have a plan for the day, basically. They have things to do. They're not like, what's another iPhone app I'm going to

check out right now? And so somehow you have to convince them, this is worth your time. And I like this framework. Is there like an example of like a phrase you found really effective in either Swiggy or Jupiter or anything? Just like here's a really quick example of something that had a big impact on either simplifying the value prop or if you don't have an example at top of mind. What was kind of the impact you saw from implementing some of these ideas? I'll talk about like a phrase that now I use with product managers a lot to kind of simplify

how they should be thinking. I think one thing is and that's not only for the consumers, but even like how we operate. operate. We are product managers and we are in the business of influence. Users are doing something and now we want them to do something else. Our engineers are doing something and now we want to influence them into building

something fast. Our leadership has some plans where to influence them to essentially look at a plan and like basically sign off and do something else. We are in the business of influence and you are doing this all the time internally otherwise you are anywhere not successful

even in shipping. Now we have to extend this to our users and really think about it from that point of view. And so you are a full stack influencer and not only an external influencer. So you've got to think more like sales, more like marketing, more like influences. One of the most important skills of product managers influencing people on their team. And I like the point that you're also trying to influence your user. That's interesting. Just more reason to get really good at influence.

So I actually have a newsletter about how to get better influence based on Frodo Baggins and Ler of the Rings. We'll link to that in the show notes. Okay, let's shift to a different topic. You have a really concrete way of actually implementing the working backwards process. We had one of the authors of the book Working Backwards on recently, and I'm excited to just hear what you've learned about, how to actually put this into practice. It's easy to hear about let's work backwards,

but doing it as a different beast. And so I'd love to hear what you've learned there. So I think the people who invented working backwards is clearly Amazon. I think they started this entire process, which are like, hey, why don't you write a press release? And with that press release, we'll work backwards from that one. And I thought that was a very cool idea. And I was trying to dig down into like, hey, why does it work?

My insight, or at least the way that I thought about this one, is it's not working backwards only from a customer value proposition. Will our customers love it and will they pay for it? And is it noteworthy and is it something that we should even be working? while that is one of the most important things that the working backwards framework teaches us. But essentially what you're working backwards from is an entire machinery at a particular day

that is working for that date of GTM. What do we need to do from here till that particular day so that that GTM is successful, but also what will be the machinery we would have created so that this product is successful? Now, because you're already talking about GTM, You're already thinking about how will users love it. What is the money that we'll spend?

What are the alternatives that we will routes that we have explored, that finally we have zeroed in on and all of those. So they are all going to be a part of a PRF. If I take a slightly open stance on this one, what is a press release? A press release is you have a one-pager which talks about what are we building, what is a particular date, why, what is the exact value proposition, what will consumers say, what will the business managers say, what will, how will they respond, how will they use it.

But the one thing that comes out from this framework is that you can use it for a whole bunch of other things. You can use it for negotiation, for example, because you start with a date. And then you say, this is the one page of that I need to ship. And I want consumers to say that. And you can use it to now go to VP engineering and say, by this date, can we build all of this? Now, they do not have all the PRDs and everything. But they can give you a sense that, you know, this is too aggressive or this is not and so on. You can also use the quotes here to actually find alliances or find like people who are going to actually derail this.

So you actually use the customer court. I want my customers to say this from marketing and from my pricing team. Can we actually ship this so that consumers will say that? And then from the business owner's court, you actually say, this is what we are shipping. But what are your goals? Can you say that within three months we would have achieved this much? and so using that to kind of build one entire picture is one way that I've found it really powerful because if you find disagreements here then say I can't ship it then you change the date

and then you change the goals because all of these things are changing together so instead of one you find the other set of all the things that need to come together for that press release to go live is the real value the other part that I've found interesting here is that I really truly believe in the power of three So I actually ask my teams to write three plus releases. Alternative and divergent. Like what if we, so suppose you're launching a membership program. So instead of two tiers, let's do three tiers.

Or for example, let's seek another one which says instead of building a membership, let's build a tiering pricing program with membership points. And instead of this segment, let's use another segment. Let's say within these three, and they all need to be fully thought through. And that kind of helps the leadership choose. So the two things that help that work here, when you are in the product discovery phase, you would have heard from a lot of folks.

And finally, if you show them just one roadmap, it feels like, hey, this person didn't, they listened to my interesting point, which was valuable, but they didn't include it. But when you're doing this three PRFQs, I was saying them, I considered this, and this added up to a story that eventually is valuable, this alternative route, I considered your point of view, and I created a story, but unfortunately

it is not adding up, so we rejected it. So now people can compare and contrast, and that's a very powerful leadership tool. And that actually is a very powerful tool, even for CXOs. When they say, let's build this, and say, here are three ways we can build this. And here's the reason why I'm not building what you said, because you would like these two more. That's a really cool idea of just using the PRFAQ and working backwards process to think very differently, partly to make sure you've explored all the options, partly to just like think through things that are kind of in the back of people's minds and see if there's something there before committing to the one direction. So the FAQs also are very important

to kind of set processes in the system. For example, if now we are Jupiter, we are a financial services app. So every FAQ will mandatorily have how are you going to make sure that it is fully compliant? Have we gotten sign off from ABC people? Have you actually thought about legal aspects and so on so forth. So for example, you can use the FAQU very effectively here. Whereas, for example, when it was Swiggy, and it's a three-way marketplace, you have consumers, delivery executors, and restaurant partners. Now, any small change that you do on, say, delivery partners,

for example, if you're working on optimizing their earnings per hour, which will lead to some changes in cost per delivery, but that may have a completely different impact on delivery fee. I'm just making this up. But now because of so many moving parts in your FAQs, you'll be explicitly asking, have you thought about what are the implications on restaurant partner? Have you thought about what are implications on delivery partners? And we, in fact, you also have that PRFQ in terms of, we'll write down the different segments of delivery partners.

And sometimes it will have extremely weird correlations because just the product managers on one side of the equation has started thinking or at least consulting the other part of the marketplace. What could this mean for you? And just it gets everybody together to create very crisp products that work for all sides of the marketplace. One thread I'm pulling out of a few of your stories so far is you often come back to this like full stack approach to many models. So you talked about how PM is like an influencer, but also they're influencing users. It's a cool way of thinking about it with this working backwards process.

You can use it to think about the full stack of launch, not just what features you're going to build. I know you also have some strong opinions about product managers and they should be much more full stack than most PMs. Does that ring a bell? And if so, can you talk about that? Yes. No, I think it's the same thread that is connecting the first and the second.

I think product managers have to own outcomes and not only features and parts of the problem. Well, they will own some parts of the problem fully. But if they need to work with everybody to make sure that eventual product that they launch is successful. And not only successful from the point of view of, hey, we launch something that works for users, et cetera, not the definition of success. Did it work in the way that it really changed the behavior of the kind of user that we wanted to achieve a business outcome? They will build a capability that is important for us.

All of those things combined will not happen if the product manager is only thinking about their part. So they have to think about external users. They have to think about competition. They have to think about other product managers and product leaders about engineering, about marketing and so on. Because it's such a diverse field. unless you really, and I'm not saying you need to be an authority of that,

unless either you are very, very good at that, or you have built partnerships and have run your ideas or product through those people and gotten weighted from them. And finally made a decision around that part. I don't think you'll be very successful. So in my opinion, the full stack product managers are the ones who are going to be more successful rather than product managers who are doing very good at one particular area only. So there's one book which is range, right?

I'm sure you may have heard about it, right? Even the first chapter, what they talk about is they take two examples. One is the example of Federer, Roger Federer. So with Roger Federer, for example, I think I'll just continue that. That till 18, he played like a bunch of racket sports and this wasn't even tennis. But then you bring in, you know, ideas from one racket sport to the other and second to the third and so on and so forth. And now you have such a range of ideas

that you can connect a lot more dots and actually ship it. Like I think that's a better playbook for being more successful in product. I was just watching a documentary on I think it was called Greatness and Edwin Gretzky and he had exactly the same experience actually. When he was young, he played hockey just during winter times and during summer

he played other sports and hockey was just like a sport, one sport he played and then eventually he started to focus on it and they talked about how people that play different sports in their childhood actually ended up being much better at that one sport they chose. So a lot of parallels. I know you also have a lot of interesting ways of thinking about coming up with a roadmap ideas and ideating and building a roadmap backlog. So you already talked about this idea of going in very divergent directions and seeing if that

leads anywhere. There's a couple more. Someone shared. One is you have this idea of show don't tell. What is that? Actually, show don't tell is an idea which is an extension of what we were talking about is from working backwards. When we're talking about working backwards,

one is a PRFQ, which is like a written documentation of what we're trying to achieve. Show, don't tell, is essentially a way and where the product manager starts ideating with the entire experience, and they actually create all the collaterals together of a users you need to begin with. If you're working on a single-player product,

which is a single-user product. And then you actually start bringing together your marketers and others and themselves, what is literally the first screen and how is my user getting here? And it's not as simple as we imagine somebody who will be doing this and reaching

here. We try to recreate an exact situation. There's a concept of person, not personas. So while we talk about personas, but we try to go to... Don't think about a generic user. Let's say Lenny, 30 years old, doing ABCD things, earning this much,

etc., etc. His relationship with this category of food delivery is X. These are the things that he has done in the last month. In the last three days, there were the needs, desires, aspirations, fears, frustrations, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, it's 11 o'clock. What's happened?

Why is this user open or what triggered this particular app? And then what happened? So you literally start from there. And I think 50% of my product reviews are around that part. And then when we say, all right, then this app got open. do we have the right kind of way forwards for Lenny to actually achieve what he came here for

and literally each pixel and each copy and each word is going to be in service of that part. So that's kind of showing the entire journey rather than just saying and assuming. So that is something that I've found really powerful with respect to even designing products or even thinking about why are we building something. What it also helps is when we are building complex products

especially in marketplaces. Because once you're building this for the the user, simultaneously something is happening on the other part, if it is simultaneous, if it's a real-time marketplace or something like that. So you're building something for the user and saying, all right, if this guy ordered, now there's a 30-minute time when a delivery executives will come to the user with food. What is happening? What's the emotional state of the user? And let's plot out the 30-minute's time. And let's create like various scenarios. He's like, hey, maybe he went to the restaurant and the food is delayed. Or the dude on a bike,

his bike got punctured, et cetera. And what is the consumer thinking at this time? So you show all of those things in real time, and that cuts out a whole bunch of, you know, random ways in which the product could have looked like if you're creating even a chatbot. So just having that showcase of all journeys coming together helps a lot in building your products in the right way.

So essentially just getting very detailed and very concrete with the product experience that you're building, thinking about the user experience. Sounds like a lot of work. I can't imagine you do this often. Is the advice here to do this once a year or once and just kind of keep it updated?

Sounds like you did this at Swiggy and that was a really impactful way of building the product. Yeah, I think this is not only like one way at Swiggy. I think like I recommend this every product manager to do a show don't tell version of their current version. And at the same time,

this is a new version all the time. So they can compare and contrast and very easily kind of explain everyone why they are doing something. In fact, that wall, it's called the wall. It also becomes one common place where you can get all the stakeholders in because it becomes, instead of just doing the elevator pitch, you can

actually do detailed discussions on why I'm choosing this versus something else and so on and so forth. That's a product manager's version of doing this. There's also product leader's version of doing this, Lenny, which is which I call strategy on a page, and a lot of people call it like growth loops. Don't show our user's journey.

Now, let's see the entire strategy of the company together on one page. All right. This is what the market looks like and why will we get what kind of users and what is our activation budgets and how many of them are we going to get to this next stage and get them to use it? How will we get them to cross pollinate into different sections?

Do we need a membership program? Are there any different levers which will press more or less and so on? So that also is like a show don't tell. Not only one, but usually I like to create three of them as well. Like why did we choose a strategy versus the other? And that, for example, is like a very good way for product leaders to kind of get to one strategy that their CXOs align with and something that they can essentially tell the entire product and other teams.

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What kind of impact have you seen from implementing something like this? Or is there an example of something that came out of this that was a big unlock? And, you know, again, it's probably a lot of work for someone to put together a whole board keep it updated, screenshots, marketing, funnels of where people are coming from. What sort of impact do you see from doing this, either on growth or what people think? I think the largest impact that happens here is on alignment. So how CXOs are thinking, if that is not very clear, and that can be a document and so on so forth. But for a lot of people, it's not very clear on, I can see one part of the funnel.

I can understand the marketing team can understand the best why we are acquiring. those users, but they don't kind of fully see the picture of if I attract this kind of users, why will some these users become loyal and what does that entire thing look like? Or say, some of the team, which is building a part of the product, where do I come in and so on? So I think the largest impact that the show don't tell has is on basically getting the entire company together on the same page and then being able to understand why I'm doing which part of the entire you know picture I am working on

and why others are working on so that I can actually work with them to solve that part that's one. The other thing that it helps Lenny is it also helps in choosing directions like I said like it's because we are not doing one but three of them and why I'm choosing

one alternative versus the other and sometimes these strategic discussions they can get going like all sorts of different ways and maybe you'll talk about one particular unique point and go deeper, rather look at the entire picture together and say, this is good because of all of these five points that we presented in page one versus the other one. I think the other benefit just, like, one of the benefits of working backwards in Amazon's

whole written-down memo approach is it forces you to crystallize ideas and not stay superficial because there's so many, like, good ideas in theory, but then when you have to get really concrete, that's actually a terrible idea. Like, basically it's the same benefit in a lot of ways of like get very concrete. What are you actually going to do? And that'll help you identify, okay, and this isn't going to work. What are we even thinking?

And so I like that. Awesome. Okay. Another framework that you have is something that you call the 4B framework for product strategy. Can you talk about what that's all about? We essentially saw that, you know, if a startup actually usually wants to do like a bunch of things across the border.

There's always like, hey, I should be investing in tech, debt or like building core platforms that would really help my product in the long term. And that's super important. And that's my engineering managers and largely people asking for that bandwidth. And then there is the product manager themselves who is basically saying, I want to do feature enhancement, buck fixes, my version two's, you know, a few areas, experiments and so on so forth. That's a regular product backlog that would work on sprint by sprint.

And there's this leadership which will say, you know what? now we have a suite of products. Now, I want to take a large, you know, delta bet that may work. It may not work, but we need to make sure that it works. But I need work across teams. And it's not only one person that needs to do it. I need contribution from four or five of you that come together and deliver that. Or there are places where a company is like just reimagining their identity or they're

pivoting. It's just like, all right, we were doing X. Now we are doing X plus Y. That's how we want to be known. or we were doing X. Now we want to do very little of X because current consumers, okay, we will take care of them. But now we want to pivot into Y.

So it usually is in four of these buckets. And what really happens is it gets down to product managers eventually prioritizing between these four. So I don't think it's a tactical prioritization product manager call. It really is a product strategy call. And the conversation that needs to happen is between, say, the head of product and the CEO or even like the leadership. If I gave you 100 focus points,

how much will you put in each of these buckets? And what are those four buckets? Those are the four BB buckets. So what are the ones? So we call them first BB's brilliant basics. And the reason we call it brilliant basic. You need to brand, you cannot brand it as tech debt. So it feels like very off because these are brilliant.

These are important. That's what the company is built on. And the company needs to invest in that. So that's one. The second one is bread and butter. So that's your backlogs. If the product managers had no big ideas and if they just were left on their own, what would they come up with?

And in terms of just improving that line of business that they're given, then they're big bits. Now that's where you're larger ideas that have come together. But how many big bets should we take? Or is this big bet even a big one? That's where you're working backwards. Or PRFQ start becoming even more important. because those are the kind of bets that cannot be taken without everybody basically signing up working backwards and saying we will all make this successful. And breaking bad essentially is a different world altogether.

That's where you want to redefine your company. You are doing, for example, in Swigy, we were doing food delivery. Now we wanted to grocery delivery as well. It's like a these are two companies working together or from a food delivery company we wanted to become a convenience company. So that's almost breaking bad. Again, like I said, we got cheesy. But the good thing that happens is now what you can do is, along with your leadership, take stock.

And the head of product essentially can say, you know what, I can, in the next year, I can invest a lot less on my brilliant basics. And we should, as a company, focus a lot on this breaking back because that is existential. But then we should not look back and say, why would tech systems a little bit broken this time? while we had a little bit more down times. And you can basically blow it out and almost showcase what to expect. For example, if we are just working on a whole bunch of bread and butter, so you'll start seeing a lot fewer bugs.

Customers will be a little happier. You worked a lot more drill in basics. Tech systems are nice, but you didn't create any differentiators. Well, none of your bets went out and your competitors are catching up. So does that sound like a better future? these are hard questions and these prioritization questions, I don't think are product management questions so much as product strategy questions. But in a lot of cases,

executors don't know what they are trading off against. So if you are able to create the conversation around which buckets do we want to put in and create three alternatives, so I have kind of tried to do that a bunch of times, let's look at strategy A and this you have to be divergent. Suppose we were putting a lot fewer, focus points in brilliant basics and a lot more on for example big bits then there will be a risk that they will be like we won't have any experiments or very less experiments we won't have your

bugs will stay bugs we won't but we will get a shot at like kind of changing the game is that a future that is that sounds better or something else which is like because you're pained also by a lot of bugs and you know constant down times so which is more secure but we won't build so something amazing, so which sounds better. Because you are able to drive that, now the clarity to the product managers is way clearer in terms of what will they do. And also they would know that if they are, they have been signed up for a big bet, then they will need to contribute to the PRFQ.

They will need to contribute to the actual, you know, working of that, irrespective of what their product was, but now they are part of something bigger. Awesome. I love it. Okay. So just to summarize, so people can have a, just a very short definition of this framework. Brilliant Basics is essentially tech debt and like things that just have to do like hygiene almost. Bread and butter is essentially optimizing the product, existing product.

Big bets are big bets. And Breaking Bat are just like future big rocket like moonshots, just like transform the way the business works. And that's right. I love it. It's also interesting another thread that comes up again and again in your advice is exploring all the options before committing to one. like you always, I think it sounds like you always try to recommend three. I guess let me say what I always find is important there is I think it's important for the product manager to recommend one along with that.

It's not just like, here's three, you tell me which one you do. It's like, here's three, here's my recommendation. Why is that your advice to you or do you see something? 100%. 100%. So when you have explored the three, you essentially have done the work on that I have covered all bases and also crystallized them into a concrete option. and now I'm choosing one on the company's behalf

on the basis of whatever I know about the market about the company, about our strategy and about how we will make it successful. Now if I miss something, it's also a time where you can actually work with leadership and other product managers to essentially get that knowledge complete or if you're 80% right, you can actually use elements of strategy two and strategy three

to bring into one. So that's always the the way that you think that one very concrete option, but because you have these other two so that you're not missing and bringing it together, but ultimately you are the one who is going to champion this. That's where the other, you know, leadership element of Amazon comes in,

which is disagree and commit. So, but once we have aligned on this one, we'll all commit to launching this, and then the leadership should not go back and forth on that part. Awesome. I want to go in a completely different direction. It feels like you have a lot of control, opinion about how to build product and how to build teams and build companies and things like that.

So I just want to start broad. What are some things you have contrarian opinions about, things you believe that a lot of other people maybe don't believe or see differently? So one, for example, excellence and speed. There's always like a question around that, hey, would you rather ship faster or would you rather ship better? In my opinion, when you have to make a choice, think more and ship better. Most experiments should be thought experiments. They should not even be tried out because they're obviously going to fail.

Which is contrary to, let's try it out and then let's see. I think that it's a lot of company time. If you had smart people who could do meta thinking, a lot of experiments would just not even be like. It's not a rule, but it's a preference. I think speed and excellence are two different axes. Ideally, you should be better at both, but if you have to choose one, choose excellence.

There's another contrarian opinion, which is I think most product managers, and again, I'm probably talking a little bit of the kind of people that I've worked with and have kind of interacted with in-product. Most product managers should not even be product managers. They should think a little bit more around whether this is actually the right field for them because I think a lot of people from other areas have entered the field without fully realizing what it takes. So there is definitely a way in which you can coach yourself and,

and, and, I'm going to work your way upwards of that one. But it's, it can make you quite miserable if you're not kind of, if it's not right for you. Is there something folks should look forward there that'll tell them you probably shouldn't be a product manager,

either motivation or skill set or background or anything? No, I don't think about like particular domains that you come from. I have like, again, a simple framework of three. I think the first thing is is essentially raw sharps and that can manifest itself into problem identification

and problem solving. That's one. And also higher order thing in all of that. I think that is super important. The second one is what I call drive or grit because I think with that comes a whole bunch of qualities around curiosity, learnability, never giving up, consumer backward thinking.

I really want to solve this and all of that that comes with that. Third, which is a little difference we talked about, is influence. You're in the business of influence. And if you can kind of see yourself that I'm built this way or I want to really get better at these, that's when I think this field is

going to serve you well. I love that everything is three. How handy. Only the babies are four. I wish I could compress in three. There's too many things to do there. Essentially, these are your, maybe your perspective on the most important PM skills. A good way to think about influence grid and

just being smart. And I think what you said here is not like you have to be amazing at these to get into product and do all. It's you need to be excited about getting better. Yes. That's right. Because I think it's not as if that everybody is born with like a lot of influence. Of course you can get better rated. But just a prospect of that, hey, I will need to be influential to succeed at this job.

That should excite you and not scare you away. And you should not think that, hey, you know what, I can get away from this and still be a very successful product manager. because most likely you will not. Maybe spending a little more time here so smart, you're probably not going to be able to do a lot about in terms of grit or influence. Is there anything you can share about what you've seen most helps people develop at these skills

other than just doing the job for a while and then starting to get better at this? Yeah, I think even smartness, I think 80% of that smartness, I think is something that's very achievable. You don't need to be outstanding at that. Domain knowledge, for example, is something just like,

an average smart person with no domain knowledge versus you with armed with a lot of knowledge around domain and so on, can already take you there where you can take better decisions. I think first one is more about decision making, problem identification, problem solving and all of that. So I think that really can be developed at least to a level where you are very effective. Drive, I think, is probably the hardest to coach, probably the hardest. I have not seen people with less drive actually eventually turning out with a lot of drive, etc. But they can be inspired. And I think you need to be a person who can think about it that way.

But the third one influences, I think there's no negotiation. You need to really think that I have to be good at this one. There's another framework that Lenny I wanted to talk about. When I look at product leadership in general and how do you think about different people and so on? When is it a product manager problem or your problem or the company problem? There are only three reasons again why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. And you can look at a person and you would say

either that person can't do, which is a capability issue, or they won't do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do, which is really your problem, that you didn't set up the ways of working in an org design properly, or your okay structure sucks and so on and so forth. So as a leader, it's almost the opposite of what what we talked about great influence in raw shops

like if the have you do you have the right people in terms of capability and if not is the right answer for us to coach them or to like really put them or mentor them and so on or move them to some other place

because maybe the capability is suited elsewhere if they won't do why won't they? Are they not aligned to you? Do they not agree with your vision? Do they not just have enough time? and so on so forth. So you need to really go deeper there.

Why won't they do? And there are different answers for that. But if it's a set-up issue, and at least I have realized that apart from what product managers can do, almost 70-80% of problems why things don't happen are a setup issue. Product leaders or other leaders

have not thought through what OKRs are doing to my company. They've not really fully thought through around OG Design. If you have read the book called Team Topol that's like one interesting book, which starts with Conway's Law and essentially saying, show me an engineering architecture, and I will actually tell you what the org design of this company is. But that also manifests itself in products.

You can basically look at a product. In most cases, you'll be able to say what was an org design that led to this kind of product. I've heard that book mentioned a couple times recently. I've got to check it out. Just the three you just shared, which is another three. I love it. Can do, won't do. What was the third one again?

Didn't do? Not set up to do. Not set up to do. That one's a long. That's a long one. I think what's cool about these are, they're essentially ways to measure performance. Maybe you have a product manager, like performance reviews.

It's like, can, did you have the skills to do this? Did you have the motivation to do this? Or did something not set up for you, like you weren't set up for success, basically. Okay. Let's go to AI corner, something I'm trying to do with every guest. Is there anything you've learned about working with AI that you think? might be helpful to listeners.

Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think working with AI, many, many, many teams and companies get too excited about AI and the possibilities and so on. And it's almost like a solution ready to find a problem within their companies, which also is fine because now you're thinking about possibilities on what this particular technology can do for my company. So it's a good way to start. But many people don't actually use it in the best way possible.

and force-fitted. Instead of that, you can think about how do I get AI to work with H.I. and again, it's connecting back with, and this is something that Svigseo, Herscha, invented this term called HAC just to make sure that everybody understands. Artificial intelligence is important as much as human intelligence. And if you're not humanly intelligent, you're not going to be artificially intelligent or AI really helped your company a lot. So literally any product that you're building, even when it is technologically, you know, quite interesting and exciting and so on, it needs to be balanced out and work together along with a great U.X, along with behavioral science.

And the combination of those two will actually make sure that you're getting the best outcome of that, unless you're building something which is like completely vacant with no human interventions. I'm talking about consumer products largely. you've helped build some of the most successful marketplaces in India and in the world. I'm curious just what may be a lesson or two about building a successful marketplace. One thing that I would definitely want to talk about is when you're thinking marketplaces, it's not as a one plus one equals to two, it multiplies. And we're thinking about three-way marketplaces, you almost not need to think like it's a two-dimensional plane going into three-dimension. Like it becomes that amount of complexity.

and your regular product management and leadership principles and will start failing. So a bunch of usual suspects will not work. Let me give an example. OKRs will not work. Why not? So fundamentally, OKRs are a way to think about objectives and key results, but the fundamental assumption here is that it is solving for a kind of user.

And that kind of user you can divide and conquer. And of course, there will be like a little bit of tussle between different teams, but you can get them to work with each other. But if it is working for three different kind of users, then all the goals will all the time be in conflict with each other. And what are examples of the three users? There's like the delivery person, the restaurant. And user. So if you have, if you're an example of, on the consumer side, we need to collect more delivery delivery fee. Or what does that really mean for those other two? And on the restaurant side, hey, we need to get more

commissions, because profitability is a goal. And on the delivery partner side, it means pay them less or optimize a little bit more. But once you start moving one lever, those two are already stressed towards the other directions. They are not independent levers in the first place. And

the way to even model them out, how will it work out if we choose X versus what Ys will change, Y and Z, Z will change, it's almost impossible to do that. So I've seen Okaasville multiple times, when you're running this kind of a marketplace. Big bets work much better.

That's when you say, hey, we want to take this bet, but it's all going to be, it's all going to come together as if we pull this lever, then something else will change. So here's the entire story of, let's go make this profitable

by making delivery fee higher, but maybe not touching earnings per hour, or maybe not touching restaurant commissions, things like that. So I have at least found that's a better way to, you know, choose strategically which direction we have to go. The other thing is managing multiple

empathies together. That's not straightforward. So again, Swiggy being like a real-time hyperlocal marketplace and we discuss about that, right? As soon as the order comes, what happens between when user does this and when delivery executive is doing something else and what are absolute different kind of scenarios that are going to be faced by the delivery executive?

And at the same time, how will I really work with user to manage their emotions. So you need to manage a whole bunch of these things together. And product management here, you cannot have the delivery executive product manager only care about that side. They also need to be a champion on the consumer side and vice versa. Yeah, I find it with Marketplaces.

Uber went through this, went through this where the supply often just gets squeezed because they need to deliver for the customer. So like drivers end up getting hosed, you know, Airbnb hosts kind of get pushed to do things may not want to do. Imagine delivery people, same thing. Now that you mentioned Uber, for example, one of the things that companies which were running, you know, taxi businesses, if you have just one limited pool of money, for example, and you want to get the marketplace humming with respect to number of orders per day, how do you decide should I incentivize my users, for example, for the first ride, first 10 rides and so on,

or put zero money in there but incentivize my driver? that you need to come here. So you have to think about liquidity also in very different ways. And sometimes you need to pull the lever completely towards the other side. So the experiments also, A, B experiments also don't work. And that's a very unique thing about marketplace. And not work, I mean, not work the way that you would expect them to work because there are network effects all over.

So if you have to run A-B experiments on your driver's side, if you put half-drivers on A versus half on B, but there is a network effect between the both of them. When you're trying to decide which side of the marketplace to focus on and prioritize, do you have any kind of lessons or rules of thumb of just focus on the customer and index towards their happiness versus the supply versus, say, the delivery person? There's one thing that I think marketplaces need to realize is that, A, you need to be operating in a stable marketplace.

So all sides need to be stable enough so that they're not going to go away. So I think that's a starting point. And that's an important point. Because once we have established that, then after stable market market market, then we say that which are the, which is the kind of customer that we're in the service of, which are the customers that we will really focus on.

For example, Amazon is very, very clearly a customer-centric company. And if they have to make a choice, they won't because they need to have a stable market place. So sellers also are very as important, but slightly more important in the customer. For example, if you looked at, say, Taubo or in Ali Baba, their way of thinking is their aim in life is to create life-changing experience for 10 million Chinese sellers. And they will create a market place from the point of view of sellers which can actually sell. Again, they will have the same consumer app and a seller work and so on.

They are in the service of sellers. So you really need to derive from the company's vision. I think the way we had thought about it at 3 that we had to clarify in our values that the first value is initially it used to be customer comes first but that was very confusing because everybody is a customer restaurant is a selling customer and so on

we had to clarify the consumer comes first the end consumer which is actually eating food because we're a convenience company that delivers to the end consumer and when you're thinking about restaurants or delivery partners and we work with them because we both are when you're talking with the delivery partner

Swigi and the delivery partner we both are the service of the customer. So you'll build that app also from that perspective and even the restaurant side also from that perspective that, you know, we both are together in the service of the end customer. I feel like you have probably 100 more frameworks and processes and acronyms we can talk about, but I know you've got to go. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on or is there anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Just last few words that want to revise work backwards from an amazing future. First thing is creatively imagine a future and then work backwards from that and essentially think what will make that successful and be paranoid about that everything is going to go wrong.

And hence, I need to just make sure that it all comes together. Only the paranoid survive. Great advice to leave people with. We've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? Yeah. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

one book is working backwards. We covered that. The other one that has shaped my beliefs a lot is called How Brands Grow. It's by a professor called Barron Sharp. There are two parts to it, How Brands Grow 1 and 2. That's both very good.

The other book which I really love is, and recently Kunal Shah, who's the founder of Kred and Indian startup, he suggested, is the luxury strategy. And the reason why I love that book is because it gets into the depth of the human psychology

behind hierarchies and how old. lords and kings and you know those kind of social hierarchies have shaped how people think about aspirational products and so on so highly recommend it what's a favorite recent movie or tv show that you've really enjoyed i really like to do reruns of the office so so it's i was trying to think about this is what is the recent movie that i was and like no way i keep on going back to the office in some other episode and try to drive a lot of um you know sores from Michael Scott. And the, okay, the US one, not the British one, or do you watch both?

No, I've watched both, but the US one has like a lot more seasons. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing product manager specific? Which are the products where you decide speed is more important versus which are the products where you decide excellence is more important? And I think that gives me like a good understanding of their frameworks and why are they deciding what? And then we go back into concrete examples where they choose.

was one versus the other, and then take it from there. And then what do you look for in a good answer to that question? I look for essentially their assessment of risk, their assessment of how important or how will have they assess the market and the competition or the competitive products in that market. And if their answer, let's ship something and we'll find out and so on, that also gives me basically a point of view that they really don't understand that. this product what they're talking about with the shibble speed is not reach the the V part of the MVP.

It's not viable or it's not or I don't know how do you call the MLP or like whatever. But it's not differentiated enough that it can be marketed. It is not worth enough where we can take it to user. It's not going to work for a lazy, even and selfish user. And maybe that's not the answer towards speed versus excellence. versus, for example, there's some product which there's a very clear competitive differentiation that we can find.

There was a clear market gap. I wanted to loan something even if it is half-bate. No problem. I want to go take it out, get user feedback, I trade, and so on. So understanding of the market, but B, also understanding of their core orientation. It comes back to your ongoing advice

of being full stack in a lot of ways in this case, being a full-stack. I'm thinking about marketing, launch and adoption, all those things. Next question. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really like? The very recent product that I like is called Rise. It's a sleep track app.

And because I am kind of an half-insomniac, and for the longest time, I was thinking about how can I track this? What am I doing? And how can I actually get better at this? So I really like the way that they actually help, healthy and user. It's just been a week since I've started using it, but recommend it. Has that helped your sleep yet or too soon to say?

It's helped me track my sleep. And now it's getting into the zone where it is action-even, but I like it. Okay. Okay. We'll see. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, like to share with people, kind of think about in either work or life? I would call it a life motto as much, but one of the things that I keep telling, like, you know, my people who work with me alongside me and so on. Stop externalizing. That's one, which also means the more artistic way to say that is you are the reason for your own misery.

So that's something that keeps using a lot more in a fun way. But if things go wrong, if that leadership meeting didn't happen that way, if my product bombed and so on, go back and let's ask ourselves, what could we have done better, what I could have done better and so on. And of course, because I'm also a poker player,

So in a way, I understand there is half luck involved and half skill. But over the long period of time, if it's only luck and you're failing and failing and feeling, you have to go and look back at your skill. So, yeah, you are the reason for your own misery. I love that advice. Be very empowering and be responsible. Final question. I was stalking your LinkedIn.

You host an event called the secret sororé, which is not that secret because you post about it. But I'm curious just what is that all about and what got you to do these. sorts of events. So we just started like me and an ex-cleal of mine, Shivangi. So we, we essentially wanted to meet cool people around. So that's how it started. Like interesting people, uh, without agenda, who can come together and discuss interesting stuff about entrepreneurship, about startups, about products, about connections and so on so forth. So it just started like that. And now we are, we are on to many, many more interesting things that we are bringing in in terms of cohorts. and which will be theme-based.

So it could be around product management, around marketing, around growth, and so on. We are strictly giving it not-for-profit for at least the next year, but a long way to go. Amazing. And so for listeners, this is something that could join? Who should look at this? Who is this for?

Absolutely. At that time, probably we'll not call it the secret, sorry, once they have been expanded. No longer secret. Okay, cool. And then I guess they just follow. on LinkedIn, right? That's how they can keep up to date with these sorts of events. Okay, cool. On LinkedIn as well as on Twitter.

Awesome. Anuj, we've gone through so many topics. We've talked about Breaking Bad and Full Stack product management, full stack thinking, working backwards, bread and butter, Rule of threes, I don't know, so many things. Two final questions. Where can folks

find you online if they want to reach out and follow up on anything we've talked about? And how can listeners be useful to you? Yes, so I'm on Twitter. It's on Twitter.com slash Anujrati. And LinkedIn, you can just search my name. I'm pretty active on both of them. I do a bunch of, you know, not podcasts all the time like you host Lenny,

but a bunch of other events as well as talks. So I keep on posting on Twitter. We can time with that. Amazing. Anish, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Lenny, for hosting. It's my pleasure. Bye, everyone.

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