Hello folks! Welcome back to our weekly AMA series. This week we were elated to invite Sagar Gupta who is the Associate Director, Product at RazorpayX.
Sagar currently works as Associate Director, Product at RazorpayX (Neobanking arm of Razorpay) and has experience building 0-1 digital products, finding PMF and then scaling them beyond.
While building 0 to 1, focus is on building MVP at that stage or thinking about the MVP at scale as well? How would you typically go about it?
The question you should ask during the MVP stage is, what matters the most?
Your product or the market?
What are some new channels for launching an MVP other than Product Hunt & other forums?
Before you answer this, think about which platforms do your users use? Are you a B2B product or a B2C product?
1. Typically your B2C product users won't be active on Product Hunt apart from the product community.
2. For example, if you are a B2B company focussed on startups, your users would be interested in YC/bootcamps. Here, you can launch an offering for startups who are in the initial stage so that you grow as they grow.
3. Similarly, if you have a B2C product say focussed on finding the best restaurants in a city, you will find your users subscribed to Insta channels like "What's hot in Bangalore" where you can target to advertise your product.
What's your favourite book or article on product management?
On 0-1 products, the best article I like is "Do things that don't scale" (Link) by Paul Graham and "The only thing that matters" (Link).
Both the above articles give you a framework on the mindset needed to launch 0-1 products.
Apart from these, few other articles I like:
Books that I would recommend:
Once an MVP is successful, do you have a framework around how you decide to scale without stretching yourself too thin?
Here, time and energy are the two limited resources we have. To make sure you don't end up stretching yourself thin, two things you need to focus upon:
I love the framework for delegation where you need to channelize your energy on the high impact/high important stuff first. While delegating, it's important that your team is feeling ownership and you establish clear accountability so that the team understands the importance and impact of what they are working upon.
For prioritisation after you have achieved your MVP, try to focus on a narrow market deliberately and create larger value for your users.
If you are able to create value for your users, you can hire as you grow.
Seeing the trend in neobanking, it seems that while it's easy to onboard customers by increasing the CAC spending, it's difficult to keep these customers engaged and increase the average revenue per customer. How's your team approaching and solving for this?
How are we approaching on getting higher LTV from customers:
With open banking TPPs reducing the differences between the user experience offered by different banks on common use cases, what will be the differentiator that neo banks/ traditional banks will have to focus on to keep customers engaged on their own channels?
Differentiator that neobanks/traditional banks will have to focus on to keep customers engaged on their own channels:
What is your strategy for creating a safe space to fail fast within your span? How do you create the culture at an organisational level?
To encourage fail fast, it's important that:
While working on products, we initially ask the PMs to be clear about what they are trying to achieve. Few things we ask the team to define while working on any product so that it becomes a standard process for the org:
Answering above questions while defining the product helps the team and org to objectively approach each failure and not get emotional about it. This helps us to create a space that is continuously learning and evolving with failures.
What level of tech expertise is must to build a tech startup. Also, what level of tech expertise is suitable to lead the PM role for a company?
The level of expertise depends on the kind of technology you are building in your startup. You need to understand what's the core of your company. For example,
Also, you need to think about the skills your team as a whole has. To build a great tech startup, the team should have following capabilities,
If you have any of the above skills, you can get a co-founder who compliments you on the other skill.
Answering the second half of the question,
PMs are the champs or the face of customers for an organisation.
If you are able to understand your customer’s needs/use-cases well and deeply and you are able to articulate them well, it's fine if you don't have a great expertise in Tech. Your EM will help you fill the gaps in Tech as they have the right expertise there.
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