2256 - How Creativity Fuels Innovation in Tech with Experion Technologies Inc's Manoj Balraj

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now, it is Manoj Balraj. Manoj, you are the co-founder and president at Experian Technologies. You're found on the web at experionglobal.com. To our friend that's listening, we have the direct link, Manoj, to your website. But before we get going, first off, thank you for being here. Sure, Josh. Thank you very much. Thank you. And before we get started talking about what you do with Experian, I always love learning what guests do when no one's looking or, you know, just kind of the things they're into, they're geeking out on or, you know, kind of the fun hobbies that they have. And you've got a very fun one for, you know, again, someone kind of at middle age, you know.

1:52So tell me what you've been doing for fun lately. So for the last eight years, Josh, thank you for that question. There's eight of us here. Sometimes it's 10 to 12 of them. All of us middle aged men, shameless, we don't know how to dance, but we crash into birthday parties, graduation parties, whatnot, whether they invite us or not, and we dance away. We learn basics of hip hop. We learn basics of crumping, basics of popping, old school breakdance, whatever comes, as long as we look crazy. Right now, we're experimenting with a song called Chicken Banana. Let's see how that shows up. You know what is just so great about this is you got a bunch of middle-aged guys.

2:35I mean, you're the co-founder president of a product engineering consultancy and service. And here you are crumping in your evenings for children's birthday parties and whatnot. No, have you actually, so you performed? So we have the name of the troupe is Crazy Uncles. And you won't believe it. It is named by kids in town here in Dallas because they know we are crazy. We are fun. We provide entertainment. And we are thick skinned. So everything works well. I love that. What value do you get from doing that that has helped you in your day job or helped you in your work? Oh, my, my. That is giving me so much of relief, relief from, you know, let go of steam from all that stress that builds up all the day.

3:26And when we meet, when we meet, everything is parked outside the door. It gives us a chance to vent our grievances through a more creative way. there's so many pluses i can go on and on but but i'm so glad we found like-minded people in the same town and we're doing this for the last eight years but it's been it's been it's been a huge relief and i also do a little bit of filmmaking a little bit of theater and all of that stuff so all this add up it gives me some kind of a second life outside of work yeah oh i absolutely love Love that. And I can imagine, you know, just the ability to not take yourself so seriously.

4:04You know, I know I have to do that. Otherwise, I get too wrapped up in my day job role where I've got my big business boy pants on. You know, it's so much fun to, you know, kind of let loose with that stuff. So I'm so happy to hear that, Manaj. It sounds like so much fun. And again, it's one of those things where you get to bring joy where you go, which just always feels great. Precisely. You said it so well. Thank you, Josh. Well, let's talk about the work that you do with Experian. What is Experian Technologies? So all we do is one thing, and that is building digital products, software products.

4:43And these products essentially help the customers generate revenue. So it's revenue generating products for for customers. And this could be an early stage company, it could be a mid-sized publicly listed company, it could be a large fortune 20 or fortune 10 company, we have built products for them. So that product is essentially mission critical for the customer, it helps them augment their revenues or identify a new revenue stream where we build that software for. Yeah, well, why does the world need you? There we go. So right from day one, the five co-founders, including me, we decided what about doing something that we're really passionate about, building products that are meaningful.

5:28And so we invested in product management, in product design, in product engineering, product usage analytics. So anything related to product, we got obsessed with it and said, let's focus only on this. The journey wasn't easy because who needs an experience? No one's heard about us those days. And then eventually the word spread around that these guys, small shop, or I'd say mid-sized shop, but they seem to be doing well. They seem to be delivering on their promise. It's not just about strategy. You're actually executing and making sure you support that product as the journey evolves. So that's what we specialized in.

6:03And customers noticed that the world got around. We got lucky. And here we are, 19 years later, doing the exact same thing. Wow. Wow. So I'm really curious about the different types of products that you've designed. And, you know, as well, you know, going through where we are right now, we're going through kind of the development. We're in the final couple of weeks of development of a SaaS platform. And, you know, we've got a good team of developers. We're going to be going into beta. but I'm curious like where you fit in and what would be some examples of products and or platforms that you and your team have developed?

6:42Okay, so I can give you an example. So when we talk to a customer, we want to understand very clearly what is the vision of your product? What are you building this for? Who are you building this for? What do you want out of this? It sounds like an easy conversation but then both parties realize we are learning a lot here including the customer who thought up about this product in the first place or the concept in the first place and then we break it down into strategies what are those strategies that support that vision then you break down the strategies what are those goals that drive that strategy so it's fundamentals of product management so you tease the customer into speaking more and revealing more about what his thought process and he realizes that wait a minute i need to think through a lot more details i thought i got all this down but there's more and that realization comes through that discovery phase once that that process is complete we go into the tactical details like how many releases and and what epics and features and user stories that way the roadmap is made absolutely clear prioritized both sides shake hands and understand this is how the prototype should be looking like and then get into engineering the product.

7:57So it's a bit of a journey, but we have seen good results come out of it in automotive, in healthcare, in manufacturing. And one of the use cases I can talk about is one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world. They need an electric vehicle charging platform and they contracted us and they weren't sure how this all going to pan out. They had enough big companies out there supporting them, but for some reason they reached out and said, can you help us out? because we heard some things about good things about you let's talk and today one of the world's largest manufacturers uses our team and they continue to do that building products for them which through which they monetize and that platform is used by some of the leading luxury car brands that you see out there as well as some regular brands the ev versions of regular brands So that's one way of building a product for a customer where the customer is able to monetize that product.

8:54And we keep evolving that as we go forward. Yeah. At what stage should someone be when they come to you? It will be the best situation is where they come in and say, we are just about beginning to think about, we're on the drawing board stage of building a product. And can you come in and let's talk about kicking off some conversations? That's one. The other scenario is where an existing product needs to be digitally transformed and they need help with that. While they're continuing to relying on the existing product, we make sure that continues while we build a new one in a new tech stack and roll it out without ever disrupting the business.

9:36That's our responsibility. So, yeah. Yeah. And I know one thing that it seems like is pretty embedded in how you operate is agile. Is that correct? It is absolutely agile centric. Yeah. Do you mind maybe just, you know, for someone who's not familiar with what that means? Yeah. Can you describe that? Right. Sure. So a lot of that engineering work can be made agile where you chunk it down into smaller piece of work. you have your sprint plans drawn up you know exactly what is coming out from those two week sprint plans sprint is a two week duration where the team says i'm going to give you this much by the end of two weeks by the end of four weeks you get a little more by the end of six weeks you get a little more so it's you don't wait for something big at the end of three months six months nine months it is incremental as we progress through that development phase there are no surprises there's more transparency there's tools used everybody on both sides know exactly what's going on with respect to the status of that product being built no surprises so that's the whole intention now can you be truly truly truly agile in the 100 percent sense no but we get there as far as we can and make sure it's easy so customers so far have said we love the way you've structure the whole engagement and we are experiencing agile practices at its best, it may not be perfect, but we're good.

11:11So I'm going through your case studies page here, and I see that you've done work in insurance claims, retail, health, learning management, education, finance, fleet management. I think you've worked with, as I'm going through here, I think you've worked with about everybody. There's retail, transportation, logistics, automotive manufacturing, a little bit of insurtech, not a little bit, actually a good amount of insurtech, as well as financial services. So those are some sectors we've worked in. We didn't choose them, by the way, Josh. We didn't choose them. It just so happened over the years, other customers stepped in or prospects stepped in and said, we've heard about this.

11:54Would you want to work with us? Or we'd love to work with you and so on and so forth. We've also done some work in life sciences space. We never chased them. but we got so lucky that they heard about us, they reached out and we said, let's do it. I dig it. And so if someone has never worked with, let's say they have an idea, they've got funding, they need to make this a reality. Is everything, just to make sure I'm clear, everything you do, is it just software or do you get into, let's say like an IoT device? Yes. So there have been instances where the customer says, we need to get into IoT. There's sensors involved in this, or there's some bit of hardware integration involved.

12:39Yes, the answer is yes. Okay, you do it all. For someone that is in, like, let's say that, you know, over the next six months, they definitely want to bring something to market. any general advice to a room full of CEOs and founders of like what you would recommend, like how to be an amazing client for you, like what stuff should they be doing today so that they can show up and you're like, from your perspective, you're like, oh, you guys are absolutely perfect. This is going to be a great connection. If they've come in with good market research done on, I'm sure they've done most of the cases we see that.

13:22They've done their homework on their user and they need help with execution they need help with technology choices they need help with the product management side of things where we will bring in our product owners those are areas we will be able to help them they don't need to be enormously prepared with a ton of documentation as long as they're available to do a decent set of discovery calls when both sides talk and validate a lot of the assumptions get into some details and make sure both sides understand what's going on some founders come in wondering if they really are technically sharp enough to document we say don't worry about that part that's that's something we'll take care of some of them worry about if they can handle with the kind of limited bandwidth they have in some cases we recommend if you need a cto bring them on maybe as a part-time cto but otherwise you can fall back on experion team and we will guide you through that whole process and ensure and also walk you through some examples we did with some other customers talk to them get a feel directly you know from them on a one-to-one call as to what was their experience when they built the product with us so we have done this for about 85 early stage companies over the last 19 years just on the early stage side of things and we've seen all kinds of scenarios most of it was imperfect meaning not all information was available with the customer all the time, but we helped them.

14:50We created that for them. So nice. Um, Minaj, I know you've got, um, some, some resources on your website. Um, and by the way, would you mind, um, sharing just a little bit about the company itself? Like it seems like you have a pretty big team. You've, you do a lot of big projects. Um, like who is Experian Global? And by the way, you're doing quite a bit of hiring as well. Yes. We are about 1 ,600 full-time employees now. Wow. And spread between different locations, spread between U.S., India, Australia, and U.K. We work with customers in those geographies as well. Our dev centers are in India.

15:32And all of these people that we talked about are trained and focused on this one aspect, product engineering as a skill and then product digital product experiences as well so these these capabilities are offered to customers in these markets that i just talked about but i want to make sure that i say this also we were privately held 100 percent organically we grew it ourselves bootstrapped so we learned the art of building that business with discipline focus rigor and all of that last year um something good happened where one of the last world's largest piece stepped forward and said we'd love to connect you with one of our portfolio companies you guys are good in product engineering they're good in data engineering and qe engineering why in your club and team up and do some bigger stuff together and we said why not so after 18 plus years we said yes to a p they don't interfere in our day-to-day operations we have all the freedom to do what we need.

16:29So we have more scale, more access, more network. So that's Experion. Five co-founders, close to two decades of working together, building the specialized focus in product engineering is what we excelled in. So that's Experion in a nutshell. Wow. Last question, Manaj, to our friend that's listening, where do they go from here? Maybe I would imagine you do discovery calls and you probably would just get to know someone, kind of talk out their project and decide if there's a good fit of working together? Yep, we do that. Those discovery calls allow both sides to judge. Is this the team that I want to go with?

17:09Is this the founder that we want to go with? Because there might be mismatches in some cases in terms of expectations. As long as both have that wavelength that we can work together for the long haul, why not? We go ahead and do that. And we have seen many, many successful stories. And to your question, we want to continue doing the exact same thing for another couple of decades, if possible, if you're still around. But that's the journey we focused on because we love what we're doing. And I think we can do much, much more than what we've done so far. Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting. And, Minaj, I would imagine, have you performed for the company yet?

17:48Have you performed on a, have you had an all-hands meeting where you've danced? I can't count the number of instances where I've been a goofball in front of our company audience. And I enjoy doing it. I don't care if I'm judged. I don't care if I'm laughed at. But I continue being a goofball every little opportunity I get. Good for you. What a great inspiration it is. I think we all like to work with fun people. At least I hope so. I do anyway. Absolutely. Well, Minaj Belraj, again, your website, ExperionGlobal.com. When somebody goes to the website, I'd recommend you look at the case studies so you can see all of the work.

18:33But right on the webpage, you'll find an opportunity to connect, engage, grab a call. congratulations Minaj on all of your success your longevity and all of the great work that you do in the marketplace Minaj it's been a great conversation thank you for joining us thank you very much Josh your enthusiasm is infectious you continue doing exactly this thank you so much for doing this

19:04thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show if you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:45I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

20:27I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.