I first heard of Punit Soni when Flipkart decided to hire him as its Chief Product Officer. Since then I have been following him; first to see what changes Flipkart did to their product & then later to listen to his views on Product Management.
Punit Soni was speaking at an event hosted by Venture Catalysts in Mumbai and it was an opportunity to directly listen to him. Listening to a message and listening to a messenger deliver the message are two different things; else I could spout Salman Khan dialogues and be paid for it [1].
Below are some of my notes & interpretations from the talk; anything that is found interesting below can be attributed to Punit Soni (referred to as “PS” below for the sake of brevity).
- “Anything in quotes is a direct statement from his talk”
- Plain text is my interpretation
3. Key points made by PS in his talk are highlighted like this
On Hiring
1. Importance of waiting to hire the best instead of filling in numbers.
There is an oft repeated theory of hiring only the best, of hiring A-listers who have capabilities beyond good. In engineering for example, there is talk of 10x engineers who create solutions which are otherwise thought impossible [2]. In a service-oriented industry, hiring in numbers is directly linked to growth. In a product-oriented environment though, the number of people are not linearly linked to growth.
Based on personal experience, a reduced number of people also side-steps various management problems which are inherent byproducts of larger teams. Remove this and most of the time can be spent productively in attacking problems that really matter.
2. “…building a team is melded with step of acquiring customers…”
PS said this in the context of Sales and getting the initial employees on board. We often tend to think of Sales as customer-facing activities whereas Sales is actually every interaction we have with people around us. Another way to look at this is :
If we cannot sell our idea/product/ourselves to people who get paid by us (potential employees), how can we sell to people from whom we expect to be paid (customers)
3. Rigor in hiring process
PS recommended going on long walks with prospective candidates (Steve Jobs was known to adopt this in key interactions with people). He also suggested having outsiders to review hiring choices to cover our blind spots in case we get too enamored by our biases. Finally he spoke about calling people (beyond the references provided) who have worked with the prospective candidates to get an idea of the person in an actual work environment.
Have to agree with PS when he said that a rigorous process in hiring will be appreciated by all good candidates because they expect nothing less in return. (I remember all the interviews where I was challenged for they improved me. In fact I remember all interviews where I was not selected!)
On Indian Approach to Solutions
1. Easy access to labor delays leveraging scalable technology
PS highlighted that we tend to throw people at a problem first whereas the higher costs in the West force companies to throw technology at problems. This eventually becomes a limiting factor as companies scale.
It could not have been summed up better than PS saying that there is “…inconsistency in people, consistency in algorithms…”
This is an area where I partially disagree with PS. While I largely agree with PS that instinctively we may throw people at any problem, at an initial stage in a company, this may actually be a good idea. Paul Graham’s article “Do Things that don’t Scale” talks about this very well.
2. Indian companies are run in an hierarchical manner
While I have no personal experience working in non-Indian companies, I am not too sure if the management style of some of the most successful companies in the west is too different as compared to Indian technology companies. Larry Page had once fired all managers in Google, Steve Jobs was known to micro-manage and others like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have multiple stories in a similar vein.
Leaders in the nascent Indian Product industry are still evolving and are perhaps at a similar maturity stage as the early management styles of the leaders mentioned above. I think the management style of successful leaders slightly lags the stage at which a product (or the company) is at. These leaders will evolve with time and will eventually reflect the mature capabilities of the leaders of Indian service-based technology companies.
I digress, but this is my blog- I am tempted to say this about the inevitable evolution of maturity in leaders:
There are some things only time can buy. For everything else, there are VCs….
On Product Management
1. Customer Discovery
The biggest, THE BIGGEST point highlighted by PS around product management was the importance of Customer Discovery. He said it in so many ways and so many flavors, that it was impossible to not mention some of them here :
- “…shadowing customers..”
- “…front load the problem of customers even before you incorporate…”
- “…build at last minute possible…”
- “…(it is the) ground floor work in product management…”
- “…idea is a response to a problem…”
- “…(not speaking about my startup Learning Motors) as we are trying to impose discipline, trying to focus on the product, the Go-To-Market, the customers…”
I suspect that Customer Discovery is often given lower priority by less experienced people for the following reasons:
- Most technology ecosystems are dominated by Engineers, for whom building something is the easiest step. To go out and find what to build is often treated as lack of momentum by them.
- The higher visibility of hugely successful B2C products (Twitter, SnapChat, WhatsApp etc.) which have had a less elaborate Customer discovery processes, has contributed to Customer Discovery being not emphasized enough by initial entrepreneurs.
2. Need for an extensible technology stack from day one
This is the one area where I differ the most with PS, especially in a B2C scenario. The maturity and selection of technology stack is highly contextual. New architectures are created as a product evolves and while migration of data/customers to new platforms is always an issue, the initial tech stack of any of the large companies have rarely been extensible from day one. Here are a couple of examples of how the tech platforms evolved - Twitter , WhatsApp
While there is some merit in what PS said in a B2B scenario, in general the maturity of PaaS platforms makes choices of initial set of technologies a lesser problem to solve.
3. “…putting right instrumentation in place for MVP to later iterate…”
PS basically highlighted the importance of data in the build-measure-iterate loop. The general tendency is to focus on building & adding to a product which is different from building & iterating.
“Iteration” implies an evolution towards a product-market fit or feature-market fit whereas “adding” simply implies incremental features in a hit-and-miss kind of approach
4. “…minimal delightable product…”
We have heard of Minimal Viable Product (MVP), but this was the first time I heard of Minimal Delightable Product (MDP) [3]. One could consider both to be the same but the connotation of “Delightable” implies that a demo of it induces an extremely positive feeling, a compelling pitch to the customer, an offer that he can’t refuse [4].
It is important to realize that the context of “delightable” is not great looking screens or wonderful UX. MDP implies that the prototype demonstrates such a proposition that the customer is unable to imagine working without it
Other Points
1. On which markets startups should target
Paul Graham popularized Buchheit’s Rule which says:
It’s better to make a few people really love you than a lot kind of like you.
PS spoke on similar lines when he said that startups should go niche and after power users leaving the larger companies to go after big markets.
2. Trickle Down Effect
PS briefly spoke about the trickle down effect when he mentioned that adoption from power users leads to adoption among other users as well. He spoke about how Facebook in India was being used only in a few pockets whereas the Google-owned Orkut was completely dominant. But this changed so fast that Google was unable to respond to it. He also spoke about the blurring of lines between consumer and enterprise products.
Trickle down effect is one of the most powerful agents for change. This was not explicitly said by PS in the context it is mentioned here, but it can be best understood by following examples:
- The iPhone was a consumer device but its massive popularity led to its widespread adoption within enterprises .
- Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) were aimed at niche markets but consumer level GPUs now outperform Super Computers .
- Expensive space programs have provided benefits ranging from consumer devices to medical equipment.
- Economies of scale in consumer devices have provided cost-effective solutions in multiple areas, the rapid product cycles of mobile phones are the best indicators of this; last year’s tech is present in this year’s mid-range phones.
Closing Thoughts
There were two key standouts about PS which I think would be useful to mention here:
- An amazingly clear ability to communicate: Delivery was crisp and even on areas where PS may have strong views, they were articulated with a certain finesse which we often lack. For example, there was an interview of Kanwal Rekhi which had some harsh words for the Indian startup scene. The way PS expressed his disagreement without being contentious is something I hope I can imbibe.
- Seeped in Product Management: Due to the still nascent stage of Product-based companies in India (even after considering companies like Zoho, Druva, Directi), there are very few product management voices which can assist with lessons around execution. The talk with PS was littered with operational lessons which could be used immediately
Running a business is a time-consuming process, so is writing. Hence there are very few business leaders who have written their experiences around operations, execution and decision-making while in office. Alfred Sloan Jr , Andy Grove come to mind immediately, in recent times I know of Steve Sinofsky . If Punit Soni can write while in office, maybe his Learning Motors might power more than one business engine!
Notes:
[1]: For our English-inclined audience, one dialogue can be translated as “Once I give a commitment, I do not even listen to myself” delivered Chuck Norris style
[2]: On 10x employees
- In engineering, the existence of 10x engineers is often prone to debate. However, considering the average engineer in the IT Services industry, reading about achievements of engineers like Dave Cutler or Amit Singhal makes one think of 100–1000x engineers. I personally have seen engineers
- 10x capabilities in management are often easier to highlight as the best managers move large teams & the impact is often made visible by the media. Satya Nadella and the recent growth of Microsoft is probably a great example.
[3]: On Minimal Delightable Product: My first instinct on hearing it was wondering if “delightable” is an English word
[4]: Offer he cannot refuse: With respect to Mario Puzo and then the irrepressible Marlon Brando for saying it in a way only he could
