The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)

25:20Now because you're already talking about GTM you're already thinking about how will you use us 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 video. 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 exact value proposition? What will consumers say? What will the business managers say? What will, how will they respond?

25:52How 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 it in the universe to say that. And you can use it to now go to where we be engineering and say by this date can we build all of this? Now they do not have all the PRDs and everything. But it can give you a sense that this is to 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.

26:26So you actually use the customer quote. We say, I want my customers to say this from marketing and from my pricing team. Can we actually ship this so the consumers will say that? And then from the business owner's quote, 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 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.

26:58So instead of one, you find the other set of all the things that need to come together for the crazies to go live is the real value. The other part that I found interesting here is that I really fully believe in the power of three. So I actually ask my team 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 see another one which says instead of, you know, building a membership, let's build up tiering pricing program which with membership points. And instead of this segment, we'll let's use another segment.

27:37Let's say within these three and they all need to be fully taught 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 road map, it feels like hey, this person didn't, they listened to my interesting point which was valuable but didn't include it. But when you're doing this three PR FAQs, I'm just saying them, I consider this and this added up to a story that eventually is valuable. This alternate dev route, I consider your point of view and I created a story but unfortunately, it's not adding up so we rejected it.

28:19So 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. I've just using the PR FAQ 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.

28:52So the FAQs are also very important to kind of set processes in the system, for example, if now we are Jupyter, we are a financial services app. So every FAQ will mandatively have how are we going to make sure that it is fully compliant? Have you gotten signed off from from ABC people? Have you actually thought about legal aspects and so on and so forth? So for example, you can use the FAQs very effectively here. Was as for example, when it was swiggy and it is a three -way marketplace, you have consumers, deliver executors and restaurant partners. Now any small change that you do on, 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, so I'm just making this up.

29:33But now because of so many moving parts in your FAQs, you're explicitly asking, have you thought about what are the implications on restaurant partners? Have you thought about what are implications on delivery partners? And we in fact, you also have that PR FAQ in terms of, we'll write down the different segments of delivery partners. And sometimes it will have extremely weird correlations because there's a product manager's 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 you a little together to create very crisp products that work for all sides of the marketplace.

30:10When Thread and Pulling out of a few of your stories, so far as you often come back to this like full stack approach to many models. So when 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 gonna 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 flesh on the second.

30:43I think product managers have to be, 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 heavy launch something that works for users, et cetera, that's not the definition of success. They did work in the way that it really changed the behavior of the kind of user that we wanted to. It achieved a business outcome. They build a capability that is important for us. So all of those things combined will not happen if the product manager is only thinking about their part.

31:24So 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. Whether it's such a diverse field, unless you really, and I'm not saying you need to be in authority of that, unless either you, you are very, very good at that or you have built partnerships and have run your ideas or product through those people and got 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.

32:04So this one book, which is range, right? I'm sure like 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 the, that's a big up label for being most successful in product.

32:42I was just watching a documentary on I think it was called Greatness and Ed Wayne Gretzky. And he had exactly the same experience actually when he was young, he played hockey just during winter times during summer, he played other sports in hockey was just like a sport one sport he played. And then eventually started to focus on it and they talked about how people that play different sports in their childhood actually ended up being much better than 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 the roadmap ideas and ideating and building a roadmap backlog.

33:14So you already talked about this idea of going in very divergent directions and seeing if that leads anywhere. There's a couple more I someone shared. One is you have this idea of show, don't tell. What is, does that actually children there is is an idea which is an extension of what we're talking about is from working backwards. And we have many of you 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 in which the product manager starts ideating with the entire experience and they actually create all the collateral together of a user you need to begin with.

33:53If you're working on a single play product which is a single user product. And then you actually start bringing together your marketers and others in terms of what is literally the first screen and how is my user getting here? And it's not as simple as to 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 we'll be talking about personas but we try to go to, all right, no, don't think about a gender accuser. Let's say Lenny, 30 years old doing ABCD things, earning this much, et cetera, et cetera. His relationship with this category of food delivery is X.

34:32These are the things that he has done in the last month. In the last three days, they were the needs, the aspirations, fairs, frustrations, et cetera, et cetera. Now we take, 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 part around that part. And then when we say, all right, then this app would 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.

35:08So that's kind of showing the entire journey rather than just staying 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 user, simultaneously something is happening on the other part if it is symbolizing, if it's a real time market place 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 minutes time when a delivery executors will come to the user with food.

35:45What is happening? What's the emotional state of the user? And let's plot out the 30 minutes 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. 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 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.

36:19So 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 SWIGI and that was a really impactful way of building the product. Yeah, I think this is not really like one way at SWIGI. I think like I recommend this, every product manager to do a showroom television of their current version. And at the same time, there's a new version all the time.

36:51So they can compare contrast and very easily kind of explain everyone why they're 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 leaders version of doing this, Lenny, which is a sort of strategy on a page and a lot of people call it like growth loops. Like don't show a user's journey.

37:20Now 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 pollination to different sections? Do we need a membership program? Are there any different levers which we'll press more or less and so on? So that also is like a showroom tell, and not only one, but usually I like to create three of them as well. And why would we choose a strategy versus the other?

37:54And that for example, is like a very good way for product leaders to kind of get to one strategy that their CXO's align with and something that they can essentially tell the entire product and other teams. This is what we're going to follow. This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio. Your agency has just landed a dream client. You already have big ideas for the website, but you have the tools to bring your ambitious vision to life. Let me tell you about Wix Studio, the new platform that lets agencies deliver exceptional client sites with maximum efficiency. How? First, let's talk about advanced design capabilities.

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39:09Find out more at wix .com slash studio. 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 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 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.

39:50I can understand the marketing team that understand the best why we are acquiring those users, but they don't 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 them being able to understand why I'm doing in which part of the entire picture I am working on, and why others are working on, so that I can actually work with them to solve that part.

40:29That's one. The other thing that it helps, Lenny, it also helps in choosing directions. Like I said, it's because we are not doing one, but three of them. And why I'm choosing one alternative was 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 than 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 and Amazon's whole written down memory approach is it forces you to crystallize ideas and not stay superficial, because there's so many good ideas in theory, but then when you have to get really concrete, that's actually a terrible idea.

41:16Like basically it's the same benefit in a lot of ways of like get very concrete. What are you actually gonna do? And that'll help you identify, okay, and this isn't gonna work, what are we even thinking? And so, so I like that awesome. Okay, another framework that you have is something that you call the 4BB 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 board. There's always like, hey, I should be investing in tech debt or like building core platforms that will really help my product in the long term.

41:52And 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's basically saying, I want to do featured enhancement, buck fixes, my version tools, you know, a few areas, experiments, and so on so forth. That's a, a regular product backlog that would work on on Sprint -Bus -Print. Then there's this leadership which will say, you know what, now we have a suite of products. Now, I want to take like a large, you know, delta bet that may work. It may not work, but we need to make sure that it works. And but I need work across teams.

42:29And it's not only one person that needs to do it. Any 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 their pivoting, which is 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 isn't in these four of these buckets. And what really happens is it gets down to product managers eventually prioritizing between these four.

43:05So 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 BBs, brilliant basics. At the rear might we call it BB, brilliant basic. You need to brand, you cannot brand it as thick debt. So it feels like very off. Because these are brilliant. These are important.

43:41That's where the company's built on and the company's soon went to invest in that. So that's one. The second one is bread and butter. So that's your battle also. If the product managers had no big ideas and 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. And they're big bets. 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.

44:25And breaking bad essentially is a different world altogether. That's where you want to redefine your company. You were doing, for example, in Srisky, we were doing food delivery. Now we wanted to grocery delivery as well. It's like 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. Like I said, we got cheesy. But the good thing that happens is now what you can do is along with your leadership take stop. And the head of product essentially can say, you know what, I can, in this, in the next year, I can invest a lot less on my brilliant basics.

45:02And we should as a company focus a lot on this breaking bad because that is existential. But then we should not look back and say, why would tick systems a little bit broke in this time? Why were, you know, we had a little bit more down times. And you can basically blow it out and almost showcase what to expect. Of, for example, if we are just working on a whole bunch of bread and butter, so you're starting a lot fewer bugs, customers will be a little happier. You work the lot more really basics, tick systems are nice, but you didn't create any differentiators. Well, none of your bits went out and your competitors are catching up.

45:39So does that sound like a bit of future? These are hard questions and these prioritization questions. I don't think product management questions so much as product strategy questions. But in a lot of cases, executives don't know what they're trading off against. So if you are able to create the conversation around which buckets do we want to put in and create the alternatives, I have kind of try to do that a bunch of times, let's look at strategy A and this see how 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 they 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, but we will get a shot at like changing the game.

46:29Is that a future that is that sounds better or something else, which is like, because you're paying also by a lot of bugs and you know, constant down times. So which is more secure, but we won't build 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 have been signed up for a big bit, then they will need to contribute to the PRFQ, they will need to contribute to the actual, you know, working out that irrespective of what their product was, but now they are part of something bigger.

47:03Awesome, I love it. Okay, so just to summarize, 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 to like hygiene almost. Bread and butter is essentially optimizing the product, existing product, big bets or big bets. And breaking bad are just like future big rocket, like moonshots, just like transformed the way the business works. And that's it. I love it. It's also interesting in other thread that can comes up again and again in your advice is exploring all the options before committing to one. Like you always, I think sounds like you always try to recommend three.

47:41I 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 or do you see some hundred percent? 100 % so when you have explored the three, you essentially have that the work one that I have covered all bases and also crystallize them into into an 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.

48:17Now 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 there are like, if you're 80 % right, you can actually use elements of strategy to end strategy three to bring into one. So that's always the way that you're thinking 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're the one who is going to champion this. And that's where the other leadership element of Amazon comes in which is disagree and commit.

48:52So but once we have aligned on this one, we'll all come into launching this and then the leadership should not go back and forth on that part. Awesome. I'm going to go in a completely different direction. It feels to give a lot of contrarian opinions 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?

49:27In 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 we had a lot of company time. If you had smart people who could do meta thinking, a lot of experiments would just not even be live. It's not a rule, but it's a preference. I think a speed and excellence are two different access. Ideally, you should be better at both, but if you had 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 I've kind of interacted with in product.

50:20Most 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 I'm going to work your way upwards of that one. But 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 for there that'll tell them you probably shouldn't be a product manager, either it's motivation or skill set or background or anything?

50:55No, I don't think about like particular domains that you come from. I have like a simple framework of three. I think the first thing is essentially raw sharps and that can manifest itself into problem identification and problem solving. That's one. I'm also hairlotizing 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. Consume a 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 that is influence.

51:33You're on the business of influence. And if you can kind of see yourself that I'm build 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 PDs are four. I wish I could come present three. Yeah. There's too many things to do there. Essentially, maybe your perspective on the most important PM skills. A good way to think about it, influence grit and just being smart. And I think what you said here is not like you have to be amazing at these to get into a product and do all it's you need to be excited about getting better at skills.

52:11That's right. Well, I think it's not as if that everybody is born with like a lot of influence. Of course, you can get better at it. But it's 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 successful product manager because most likely you will know. 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? But what you've seen most helps people develop at these skills other than just doing the job for a while.

52:47And starting to get better at this. Yeah, I think even smartness, I think 80 % of that's 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. And already take you there, but 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.

53:20Drive, I think, is probably the hardest to coach, probably the hardest. I've 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, like there's no negotiation, there should be need to really think that I have to be good at this one. There's another framework that Lenny I wanted to talk about. And when I look at the product leadership engine and how do you think about different people and so on, why is it a product manager problem or your problem or the company problem?

54:00The 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 our design properly, or we are focused on just success and so on and so forth. So as a leader, it's almost the opposite of what, like what we talked about, grit, influence and raw shops. Like, have you, do you have the right people in terms of capability?

54:39And if not, is the right answer for us to coach them or to 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? Like, are they not aligned to you? Do they not agree with your vision? Do they not 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 setup issue, and at least I have realized that apart from what product managers can do, almost 70 % of problems, why things don't happen are a setup issue.

55:18Product leaders or other leaders are not thought through what OKRs are doing to my company. They're not really fully thought through around org design. If you have read the book called Team Topologies, 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 would be able to say, what was the org design that led to this product? I've heard that book mentioned a couple of times recently.

55:53I got to check it out. Just the three you just shared, which is another three out of it. Can't do won't do. What was the third one you didn't do? Not setup to do. Not setup to do. That one'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. Like, can you do 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. OK, let's go to AI quarter, 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?

56:31Yeah, 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 rate of 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 for it. Instead of that, you can think about how do I get AI to work with AI? And again, it's connecting back with and this is something that we see or Huchpa invented this term called HIs just to make sure that everybody understands.

57:13Artificial 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 the great UX, 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 are building something which is like completely back in with no human interventions that would consume the product largely.

57:51You've helped build some of the most successful marketplaces in India and in the world. I'm curious just what may be a less than 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 two, it multiplies. And we're thinking about three way marketplaces, you almost 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, kind of start feeling. So a bunch of usual suspects will not work.

58:29Let 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 a puzzle between different teams where you can get into 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.

59:05So if you have, if you have an example of, on the consumer side, we need to collect more delivery fee. Or what does that really mean for those other two and on the restaurant side, we need to get more commissions, which profitability is a goal. And on the delivery partner side, it means pay them less or optimize a little bit more. So but once you start moving one lever, those two are already stressed towards the other direction. So 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.

59:41It's almost impossible to do that. So I've seen OKRs feel multiple times when you're running this kind of a marketplace. Big bits work much better. That's when you say, he will want to take this bit. 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 this is the entire story of, let's go make this profitable by making delivery fee higher. But maybe not touching things for R, or maybe not touching restaurant commissions, things like that. So I have at least found that's a, that's a better way to, choose strategically which direction we have to go.

1:00:18The other thing is managing multiple empathy together. That's not straight forward. So again, Swiggy being like a real -time hyper -local 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 the 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 the user to manage their emotions? So she needs to manage a whole bunch of these things together. And product management here, you cannot have the delivery executive product manager only cared about that side.

1:00:58They also need to be a champion on the consumer side and vice versa. Yeah, I find with marketplaces, Uber went through this, Lyft went through this for the, like the supply often just gets squeezed because they need to deliver for the customer. So drivers end up getting housed. Airbnb hosts kind of get pushed to do things they may not want to do. Imagine delivery people same thing. Not that you mentioned Uber, for example, one of the things that companies which were running taxi businesses. If you have just one limited pool of money, for example, and you want to get the marketplace humming with respect to the number of orders per day, how do you decide should I incentivize my users?

1:01:38For example, for the first ride, first 10 rides and so on, or put zero money in there, but incentivize my drivers 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 or so, AB experiments also don't work. And that's the way you need thing about marketplaces. It's 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 AB experiments on your driver side, if you put half -rives on A versus half on B, but there is network effect between the both of them.

1:02:19When 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 like focus on the customer in index towards their happiness versus the supply versus say delivery person? There's one thing that every 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. Once we have established that, then after a stable market place, then we say that which are the kind of customer that we're in the service of, which are the customers that we will really focus on.

1:02:56For 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. But for example, if you look at, say, Taba 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.

1:03:34So you really need to derive from the company's vision. I think the way we had thought about it, actually, that we had to clarify 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 consumer comes first, the end consumer, which is actually eating food, because we are 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, Swiggy and the delivery, we both are in the service of the customer.

1:04:15So you will 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 a hundred more frameworks and processes and acronyms we can talk about, but I know you got to go, is there anything else you wanted to touch on or is anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Just last few words that that's what it was, work backwards from an amazing future. So the 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.

1:04:58Only the paranoid survive great advice to leave people with. We reach 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 is shaped, my beliefs a lot is called How Brands Grow. That's where Professor Karl Bandshap, the two parts of it, How Brands Grow 1 and 2, that's both very good. The other book which I really love is and recently Konal Shah, who's the founder of Kred and Indian startup, he suggested is the luxury strategy.

1:05:35And the reason why I love that book is because it gets into the depth of the human psychology behind hierarchies and how lots 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 the favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed? I really like to do reruns of the office. So it's, I was trying to think about this is, what is the recent movie that I was like no, I keep on going back to the office in some other episode and try to do a lot of, you know, surveys from Michael Scott. And the, okay, the US one, not the British one, or do you watch both?

1:06:16No, I watch 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 managers, specific? Which other products where you decide speed is more important versus which other products where you decide excellence is more important? And I think that gives me like a good understanding of their frameworks and why they're designing what? And then we go back into complete examples where they chose one versus the other and then take it from there. And then where do you look for in a good answer to that question?

1:06:49I look for essentially their assessment of risk, their assessment of how important have the, or how will have they assist the market and the competition or the competitive products in that market. And if they, if they're answers, 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 this shibbol speed, is not read 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.

1:07:27It 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, there's a very clear competitive differentiation that we can find. There was a clear market gap. I wanted to learn something even if it is hot, paid, no problem. I want to go take it out, get user feedback, iterate and so on. So understanding of the market, but we also understanding of their core orientation. It comes back to your ongoing advice of being full stack in a lot of ways.

1:08:04In this case, being a full stack, I'm thinking about marketing, launching, adoption, all those things. Next question, what is a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like? The very recent product that I like is called Ryze. It's a sleep tracking app. And because I am kind of in half insomnia and for the longest time, I was thinking about how can I track this? So what am I doing? And how can I actually get better at this? So really like the way that they actually help their user. It's just the weeks since I've started using it. But recommend it. Is that helped your sleep yet?

1:08:43Or do you seem to say? It's helped me track my sleep. So it's, and now it's getting into the zone where it is actionable. But I like it. 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? What quality life motto as much? But one of the things that I keep telling my people who work with me alongside me and so on is stop externalizing. That's one, which also means the more artisty we do 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.

1:09:23But if things go wrong, if that leadership meeting didn't happen in 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 in half skill. But over a long period of time, if it's only luck and you're feeling and feeling and feeling you have to go and look back at your skill. So yeah, you have the reason for your own misery. I love that advice. Be very empowering and be responsible. Final question. I was talking your LinkedIn.

1:09:57You host an event called the secret, secret suare. 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 -cali of mind shuvangi. So we essentially wanted to meet cool people around. So that's how it started. Like interesting people 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 on to many, many more interesting things that we are bringing in in terms of cohorts and which would be team -based.

1:10:38So it could be around product management, around marketing, around growth and so on. We are strictly giving it not for profit for it leads the next year. But what a long way to go. Amazing. And so for listeners, there's 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 suare once they expanded. No longer secret. Okay, cool. And then I guess it's just following on LinkedIn, right? That's how they can keep up to date with these sorts of events. Okay, cool. Yes. On LinkedIn as well as on Twitter. Awesome. And Nougat, we've gone through so many topics that we've talked about breaking bad and full stack product management, full stack thinking, working backwards, better and better, rule of three is I don't know, so many things.

1:11:26Two final questions. We're confused, finding 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. So 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 as docs. So I keep on posting on Twitter. We can find me there. Amazing. And Anuj, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much, Lenny, for hosting. It's my pleasure. Bye, everyone.

1:12:05Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.