Prashant Mahajan of Zeda.io On 5 Tools That Should Be in Every Product Manager’s Belt

An Interview With Rachel Kline

A good product management tool. I might be biased here, but you need a good product management tool like Zeda.io to tie everything together in one place. Product management tools capture and streamline all your feedback, analyze the data, and help you build better products.

In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, product managers need to leverage the right tools to effectively manage their products and achieve success in the market. In this interview series, called “5 Tools That Should Be in Every Product Manager’s Belt” we are talking to experienced product managers, industry professionals, and thought leaders to share insights from their experience about the most important tools a product manager needs to succeed. As part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Prashant Mahajan.

Prashant Mahajan is an experienced product manager who built successful products and teams across India, Indonesia, USA, and Japan, consulted multiple companies, mentored over 200 PMs, and spoke at 20 conferences. During almost a decade in this field, he realized that product management is broken, so he is on a mission to help product managers build better products in a simpler and smarter way with his product discovery and strategy platform Zeda.io.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to learn more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I actually studied chemical engineering and don’t have a software engineering background, but my father had an internet cafe and mobile shop, so I grew up close to tech and always had a passion for software products.

During college, I started talking to people who were building software products to figure out if there’s a tool you can build without knowing how to code. That’s how I came across product management, and stayed in this field for almost a decade. Over the years, I worked as a product manager for four different companies across four different countries — India, Indonesia, California, and Japan, two of them public and two of them multi-billion dollar companies. That’s how I gained my experience in product management.

During my career, I have worked as a consultant for a couple of companies and have also been a mentor to 200+ PMs and a speaker across 20 conferences or so. While doing all this work in product management, I realized that product management was broken. So, during the pandemic, I started brainstorming on how to solve this problem, and in January 2021, I took a leap of faith with my co-founder and created a tool to help product managers build better products.

It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

One of the funniest mistakes I made at the beginning of my career was sending push notifications to the entire user base of a mobile app. During my first few months as a PM, I didn’t know what the production environment and staging environment were. I sent a push notification to the whole audience base of a mobile app, Hello World, which went out to almost 250,000 people. That was a stupid mistake, but I learned the importance of working with the team. When I did this, I went to my team, admitting I messed up and asking them how we could figure it out together. Then, we worked together and started tweeting and reaching out to people, and it eventually became a viral thing in a positive way. Even though it was very stressful, and I thought I’d get fired, it turned out my marketing head was very impressed with it, so I learned how you can turn chaos into an opportunity with the help of your team.

What do you feel has been your ‘career-defining’ moment? We’d love to hear the lead-up, what happened, and the impact it had on your life.

My career-defining moment was getting laid off during the pandemic in 2020. I was stuck in Bengaluru alone during the lockdown. It was a very stressful environment with all the people getting laid off, no jobs, panic, and the uncertainty of how long the pandemic would last. One moment my career was going great, I got promoted, was paid well, built and led a team… but due to certain issues, I was laid off. Because of that, I started thinking about my life and career a lot and figuring out what really matters. I became more careful about my decisions, and that actually defined my career because I decided not to go for a master’s and to be comfortable with taking risks. I left a well-paid job to build my startup, but I think if the pandemic hadn’t happened or I hadn’t been laid off, I would still be working in some big company and getting a salary and not have my own startup.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

Most recently, I had a hard time during the six months I spent in the USA alone. I moved there from India due to the bad economic situation in India — companies and startups were shutting down, a couple of banks crashed… It was quite lonely in the USA, and I wondered whether it’s all worth it and if I’m wasting my time. I did consider giving up, but I’m glad I didn’t, and I kept on moving. The thing which kept me going was definitely people. People invested their money in Zeda.io, left their jobs to join us, and took a bet on us by letting us help them build successful products.

Ok, super. Thank you for all that. Let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. How do you keep track of your team’s progress and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals?

I think I have a great team. We have a very simple attitude toward what we have to achieve — we meet every two weeks at the leadership level and every month across the company and do Excel sheet tracking, which enables us to track everyone’s progress and ensure everyone’s working toward the same goal. We believe in promptness, so if there’s any challenge, we resolve it then and there and don’t wait for a particular time. The major things are hiring the right people, defining the goal and individual responsibilities clearly, and enabling team members to achieve that goal.

Can you share an example of a time when you used data analytics to inform a major product decision, and what tools did you use to gather and analyze that data?

Even though I have never been strong at data, I rely heavily on qualitative data, which includes talking to people, listening to the sales calls, etc. The tool that I’m currently using to centralize all the data and generate insights is definitely our own tool called Zeda.io which takes data from various sources and uses AI to generate insights on what to build next.

One critical thing for which we have used data heavily over two and a half years is to decide which features to shut down. It’s very easy to keep shipping out new features, but shutting down features is less common. So every quarter, we look at what is not being used regularly and shut it down. Most recently, we decided to shut down a major feature used by only one company within our customer base.

How do you stay on top of industry trends and new technologies that may impact your product?

Definitely Twitter, though I think there are so much information and news outlets out there that it becomes overwhelming. You open Twitter — everyone is sharing something. You open YouTube — everyone has a channel or podcast. You open LinkedIn — everyone is a thought leader. We are building a product for product managers, so I like to be aware of what is happening in product management, but it’s very easy to get lost in all the information. So, I try to be selective about what I dedicate my time to by following one or two newsletters and then watching some good podcasts on YouTube. By limiting the content I consume, I can maintain focus and creativity.

What are some of the key collaboration tactics that you use with your team, stakeholders, and other departments, and how do you ensure that everyone is on the same page?

I love Slack and Notion. We always use public channels to communicate so everyone in the company can collaborate. I am also firm on writing, meaning if we have any discussion in a meeting, we share a document where people can put their thoughts down, and then discuss them during the call.

Other key tactics include always having open communication, documenting everything well, and following protocols you can share with everyone within the company.

How do you track and prioritize customer feedback and feature requests, and what tools or processes do you use to incorporate that feedback into your product roadmap?

Definitely Zeda.io. We use it to listen to customers, centralize information, and generate valuable insights.

Thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are the “5 Tools That Should Be in Every Product Manager’s Belt”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. A good documentation tool. If you document things, it enforces clarity, helps align team members and future PMs, and inspires better thinking and communication. Notion, Coda, Nuclino, and Bit.ai are all good options.

2. A good automation tool. I believe there are so many things which we do manually and which could be automated so we’re more productive, so I’ll recommend automating as much as possible using Zapier or Make. I, for example, automate my emails, tasks, meetings, etc.

3. A good LLM tool. Recently I have been exploring LLM tools like Claude, GPT4, and Bard. These tools help you to write better and brainstorm, improve your communication, and just make you more productive.

4. A focus tool. Product managers have to think a lot about problems and analyze them in depth, so I’d definitely recommend a focus tool like Brain.fm and a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones so you can do deep thinking.

5. A good product management tool. I might be biased here, but you need a good product management tool like Zeda.io to tie everything together in one place. Product management tools capture and streamline all your feedback, analyze the data, and help you build better products.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Yes, it’s Scott Galloway, an NYU School of Business professor. Recently, I have been listening to his podcast, and his thoughts on economics, life, and business are very objective, simple, and insightful.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!