ShareChat GTL: Fireside with Manik Gupta, Former CPO, Uber
ShareChat is proud to announce the start of a new GTL Series, where we invite eminent leaders from Product, Technology, and Data Science domains to share the wisdom accumulated across their years of experience, helping all those of us aspiring to be the best, and learn from the best.
For the first of this series on June 19, 2021, we had invited Manik Gupta, the ex-CPO of Uber and the former Director of Product Management for Google Maps. Interviewing him from our side was Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and CEO of ShareChat and Moj
Introduction to Manik Gupta
Manik Gupta is an advisor and investor to various technology startups based in the US and India. He has extensive experience and perspective earned through his years functioning at various levels of leading product management at Google from 2008 to 2015, and his stint as the Chief Product Officer at Uber from 2015 to 2020. Prior to working at Google, he graduated with a B.A. Sc. in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University in 1999, with the Highest Honors and as part of the Dean’s Merit List, and an MBA in Analytical Finance and Strategic Marketing from the Indian School of Business with a Gold Medal for best all-round performance. Before his MBA, Manik co-founded an e-commerce startup, BuyItTogether.com, in Singapore, and later went on to work as a project manager and solutions architect at HP in the Asia Pacific and Japan.
So what advice does he have to aspiring product managers? Here are some nuggets of wisdom he provided in a tete-a-tete with Ankush Sachdeva ( CEO and cofounder of ShareChat and Moj), as part of the first GTL session.
Career — Consulting or Product Management? Imagine Your Work Calendar
Having once seriously considered pursuing consulting himself, Manik knows first-hand the dilemma that young people from premier engineering colleges and B-schools in India face even today. He knows why consulting feels like a lucrative career to pursue, with the amount of intellectual capital and analytical rigour that consultants bring in to solve the various challenges that companies and industries face. To him, consultants deliver significant value in their ability to connect the dots and see patterns that people boxed into one company and one product might miss.
However, Manik’s personal decisions boiled down to two types of considerations: emotional and practical. On the emotional side, when Manik asked himself what he wanted to do in his life, he realized he was a technologist with an enduring love for being around engineers, and for building and scaling products on a day-to-day basis. With respect to practical considerations, since Manik had already had 8–9 years of industry experience prior to his MBA, he realized that having to juggle family and the travel obligations that come with consulting roles wasn’t an attractive option for him.
One of Manik’s mentors gave him a piece of advice that he believes a lot of people starting their careers should follow: construct a rough daily calendar for the job you’re considering, and reflect on whether it represents who you are and what you want to do in your life. You can have several grand visions for your career, but at the end of the day, as Manik says, “You have to do your job every day, and that’s where the rubber hits the road”
How to work with tough challenges? Keep working in spite of scepticism….
Having worked as the product lead on Google Maps both in India and internationally, Manik is no stranger to hearing scepticism. Prior to the launch of Maps, a lot of his friends used to wonder, what was the need for such an application, when standard practice for driving was to roll down your car window and ask for directions? Further, India’s road network was “all over the place”, a lot of the houses were not even-numbered, and there was a marked difficulty in gathering traffic data.
Manik believes there is no substitute for rigour and grunt work when building a product. The map of India was being constructed by collecting user input through another product called Mapmaker, which functioned as a sort of “Wikipedia for maps”. Here, the grunt work entailed manually looking through all user logs, field queries, and all relevant parts of the data stream being collected. Manik gives significant credit to the engineers he worked with on their system thinking capability, which enabled them to look at failed queries and identify and generalize broad patterns of problems to work on. It has also helped him to have a challenge connected to the project, which in the case of maps was to develop a sensible road route between Srinagar and Kanyakumari. This route became an aspirational goal for the team and helped them solve the mapping challenge for India.
Customers’ needs are fundamentally the same globally….but context matters!
While building Google Maps, Manik and his team had to hold a strong forward-thinking perspective, especially for India. Back in 2008, India differed significantly from advanced countries like the US in terms of the data available to license or acquire for mapmaking, at all levels from cities to the country. Moreover, smartphone adoption was still in its infancy, and Google Maps on the desktop was not as compelling a use case as its use on a mobile device.
Manik calls these considerations, “structural elements” that any PM needs to be aware of, with respect to the geography and demographic that their products serve. However, Manik believes that products need to be built for a core user need that does not change with the demographic, and this core purpose cannot be compromised at any cost.
User behaviours and expectations are always built on this core need, and the value that is unlocked primarily comes from serving this core need, without which scale cannot be achieved. With Maps, it was trying to reach point B from point A in the least amount of time, and with Uber, it was getting a ride by simply pushing a button. Anything else built on top of the core product helps in operationalizing the product for different geographies, and that is where nuance and local perspective starts to count.
Growing as a Product Manager
Manik experienced rapid growth within Uber, starting with managing 10 people in his first year, managing 100 people in his second year, and over 1000 people in his third year. Further, Manik has to learn on the job how to scale organizationally as an executive and a product leader. From Manik’s experience, success and growth as a product manager come from four broad focus areas: product skills, prioritizing product growth, communication skills, and management skills.
Product Skills
Manik believes that the importance of staying close to the product cannot be underscored. It is a crucial role of every product manager to have a strong sense of customer empathy, which is understanding from the customer’s perspective what one’s product does for them. This focus does not dilute as one ascends in their career, but the amount of focus on scaling the product grows at each level.
Prioritizing Product Growth
Growth, Manik stresses, is like oxygen to any company. There may be unsustainable and sustainable ways to grow, but in the end, the company moves forward by growing the user base and the use cases of its products.
Communication Skills
According to Manik, there is no such thing as too much communication. As one grows from a product manager to the director level, the demand for communicating succinctly, and communicating more often keeps growing, and this is a skill that Manik believes that a lot of people still neglect.
Management Skills
Product managers have to get things done by exercising influence, and this becomes all the more crucial in an environment where teams are highly leveraged. Influence is not just something exercised within the team, but across stakeholders, and it is for this reason that as product managers grow, product managers need to start shifting their perspective from the company’s bottom line to the impact of their products on the broader industry.
Growth or Perfection — Is there a Trade-off?
Manik reiterates that growth, especially at a fast pace, is always better. However, it is also a common concern as to whether product managers should be satisfied with shipping “good enough” products during the growth phase, at the cost of building something perfect. This is by no means a trivial concern, because it is a common sentiment to want to build a product that one feels proud of, and one that does not feel unpolished in any way.
Perfect solutions to user needs take longer to build than solutions that are “good enough”. Further, accumulating technical debt comes with the concern of whether the teams that build the product will be able to catch up and pay off that debt in the foreseeable future. In such a situation, Manik still firmly believes that reducing the time-to-market is the most effective instrument of product growth, and also affords opportunities to explore further user needs and patterns around your product, while enabling them to “love” the core features of the product.
This is not to say that perfecting solutions can be indefinitely deferred. Rather, there needs to be a sense of transparency in the organization about the fact that a possibly imperfect product is being shipped early. According to Manik, engineering teams would need to take calls on where they let imperfections in the product slip through, because this would help them plan and function better for when issues around those imperfections crop up later.
10x Product Manager — A misnomer?
Manik is not too fond of this shorthand terminology for a valuable Product Manager. He understands that every organization needs to prioritize whom to shower with resources and bet the future of the company on. There are 3 key traits that differentiate these strong PMs:
1) They have a deep empathy with the customer and spend a significant part of their workday understanding and solving pertinent customer issues. For example, in an enterprise-level product, they spend time talking to the customer success team or sales team to understand the customers' problems. However, they don’t blindly build whatever the customer mentions but have the empathy to prioritize what the customer needs.
2) They are intensely curious individuals and try their best to understand how people make decisions. They are well-read and understand economic data, their ecosystem trends, what bigger competitors are doing as well as how smaller companies are acting.
3) Manik disagrees with the common school of thought that believes in only focusing on the customer and ignoring everything else. Competitors also have smart talented people and a great PM acknowledges his competition and uses their actions as an input to his own strategy development. Tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. have reached this stage by building their platform and perfecting ecosystem plays. The competitors' actions may signal a strategic shift in the market. The PMs who can navigate these shifts and bet their strategy on these shifts are the ones who succeed. An understanding of the bigger picture in addition to being customer-focused is essential to being a great PM.
Both Ankush and Manik concurred on the fact that your competitor launching a product creates a sense of urgency for you to also launch a similar product soon. However, the correct approach should be to understand the rationale behind this competitor’s product and evaluate if it is relevant to your customers. While there should be no shame in copying a competitor’s strategy, it should act only as an input to your own strategy development and be incorporated only after critical first principle thinking.
Questions by the Audience
Towards the end of the session, the audience was given the opportunity to point questions at both Manik and Ankush. These questions dove further into the insights and experience they had built over the course of their careers building successful products and leading organizations from the senior-most vantage points.
[Question to Manik] What are some red flags in interviews?
Manik looks for the following red flags while interviewing PMs:
1. Lack of humility. A product manager claiming all credit for himself clearly does not understand the engineering and team effort that goes into building a product.
2. Acting like they know everything and not being ready for a discussion or being challenged. PMs should always be ready to learn.
3. Never having failed. Even if you’re early in your career there should be some instances where you took a risk and failed. No one wants people failing for the first time in your project.
4. Lack of communication skills. Communication is not about flawless English but rather the ability to relate to the other person’s point of view and build upon their ideas in a clear articulate way.
[Question to Manik] How PMs should gauge performance and provide feedback?
Product managers irrespective of the scale of their startups need to gauge their performance by their ability to meet success metrics and milestones in the project in time. The goal should be to create a product that is winning and a team that everyone in the firm wants to join.
[Question to Manik] What are some important considerations while building an organization and designing processes for work?
Manik believes that there is no perfect design and the company needs to be nimble about it and not get calcified in a particular method of working.
Teams should be mission-focused and saturated with the required resources. Any dependencies on other teams should be figured out and sorted while the team is being built itself so that there are no delays later in the project.
For building platforms, horizontal teams should be constructed to maintain consistency in practices.
For customers facing products, vertical teams should be constructed; for example, Uber has separate rider-focused and driver-focused teams.
[Question to Ankush] What ritual from ShareChat’s early days has endured over time?
Size your bets and resources based on data. For example, To gauge the effect of the introduction of exclusive fashion content, reduce the fashion content in the previous quarter and measure its effect. Such experiments can yield information into incremental gains that can be expected. Performing such cheap experiments can help work out a strategy in a quarter prior itself.
