 Hey everyone, Shailie here, really quickly a little bit about my background, currently work as lead product manager at Nike overseeing their machine learning and artificial intelligent products. And in the past I worked at Samsung, AT&T, Disney, things along those lines. And here we have today Sanam and Sagar. So I would love for either one of you to go first and kind of describe, you know, what you do on a daily basis as well as tell us a little bit about yourself. I can go. Hi, I'm Sagar. I'm a product manager at Google. I have been a product manager at Google for the last two, almost three years now. I work on Google cloud platform and a product called Cloud Run. And I lead that extensibility efforts, extensibility and observability efforts. My background, I come from a fintech background. So prior to Google, I worked as a software engineer in NASDAQ, which is the electronic trading exchange network for their office of CIO as one of their first architects. And then soon I found myself spreading wings across multiple teams asking a lot of voice and talking to customers. And then it naturally made sense for me to transition into product management. And I love it so far. And as for what I do on a daily basis, I use a lot of things, talk to customers, talk to engineers, playing around with my product, being, you know, taking up most of my time. And yeah, just having fun along the way. I think that's more important. That's great. Thank you, Sagar. Sanam. Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Sanam. I'm currently a senior player at Amazon. I work on a kids-related product. And I look after retention of the space for the Kids Plus product on all the devices. And I've been at Amazon for one year now. And I've been like in product for the last seven years. Before that, I was a developer and I worked in companies like Samsung, BlackBerry, SAP and also some startups. So and over the time, I have worked with B2B, B2C, all kinds of dimensions and multiple consumer tech as well as other spaces. So I have had different kinds of experiences over the years. And what I do for day-to-day is a lot of things. As Sagar mentioned, there is no one particular thing. But mostly it's like looking at regularly at data, customer tickets, making sure that our next bets are in line and the projects that we are executing are working fine, working with design. So it's filled with working stakeholders. But yeah, I try to not take work too seriously. But yeah, you need to have fun, as Sagar said. So I also follow the same thing. Yeah, I mean, that brings me to the next section, right? Speaking of fun, I just thought to lighten up our moods and kind of get into the discussion a little bit more lighter. I had rapid fire questions that lined up really quickly to ask both of you if that works. So all right, what is your favorite product? What is my favorite product? And let's not be biased. Yeah, I was about to be biased, but I think I really like LinkedIn nowadays. There are various reasons for it. I'm able to connect with people. And lately, my passion is to help people in however way I can, given the microeconomic conditions. And I think LinkedIn is doing really well in terms of making sure that content is created properly, like it's circulated properly, and people are able to find the right people or mentors. So I have had got enough help in past from this platform. So I've started liking it even more when I'm in a position of giving some guidance based on my experience. That's great. Sagar, how about you? We'll keep it correct. Yeah, since Sanam took my favorite product, I'm going to say Robin Hood. I'm a little biased because of my fintech background in exchange space, but Robin Hood, I love Robin Hood. That's awesome. Okay. Summer or winter? Winter. What? Hold on, one at a time. Go ahead, Sanam. Summer. Summer, okay. Winter for me. That's the reason why I choose New York. Okay. All right. Makes sense. Cats or dogs or none? If I choose dogs. Okay. Cats. I want to get. Okay. All right. I would say none. I have two kids. So, you know, most of my time goes behind the kids. Yeah. All right. And last but not least, favorite show or something that you might be watching right now? Yeah. My all-time favorite is Friends. So, I would say that. All right. My recent favorite is White Lotus. Okay. I haven't watched that one. So, I'll have to put that on my list to watch. All right. First things first. Just looking at over here at the questions, right? What types of customers are you building your products for? You briefly touched upon that in your intro. So, obviously, what type of customers are you building your products for currently at your company? Are they B2B, B2C? Are they internal to your company as well? Yeah. Would love to kind of have you both dive a little bit more into that. Sure. For me, I'm working B2C mainly right now. Like, my product basically is for parents. So, like, it's because you're very, very consumer focused right now. Okay. I'm in B2B space. Cloud is, Cloud Platform is typically B2B. And so, we're less, most of our customers are companies ranging from small to medium and some even enterprise companies. And these are my primary persona for my product is a developer. Okay. Developer. Gotcha. Okay. Well, that's great. It's great to have one of each, right? B2C as well as B2B. How do you interact with your customers on a daily basis? So, Saga, I'm assuming, working B2B might be a little bit, I would say easier. Maybe account managers are the folks that you are interacting with as well as software developers than being your personas. But Sunam, in your case, I can't imagine. You know, you can't talk to all of the customers you possibly have. So, yeah. Yes. So, you are absolutely right. Like, so, there are various ways with which I keep a tab on things. First is like, customer tickets. So, like, weekly, I make sure that I'm going through the customer tickets and feedback of all the surveys that we run, like, so that I'm top of the things. Like, if there is any pain point that customer is seeing, also, like, I have, like, amazing stakeholders in customer service team, which regularly updates us about, like, how the customer is doing, like, what is the thing that we are seeing. Also, like, if you have a physical product, like, product reviews helps a lot, like, they keep on coming. So, like, it's not necessarily having customer interviews, like, you can have all these things. Plus, looking at data metrics, like, sometimes data also tells you, like, most of the times, actually, data tells you stories about your customers, how they are liking the product, it could be engagement data, it could be pension data. So, I have all these proxy places. Plus, of course, like, regular, like monthly customer research of the new features that we are building, or like, regularly, we have customer check-ins. But, like, other than that, on a regular basis, I use these things to keep me informed. That's great. Zagar, how about you? Yeah. I use several channels, and customer interaction is such an overloaded term that it depends on the phase of the product that you are in. So, there is a discovery phase, where there is a different interaction, and then there is a feedback phase, there is a completely different interaction. So, just talking about, from the very beginning, when you dive into building a product as a product manager, finding product market fit is such a critical task that conducting interviews is, in my opinion, the best form of interaction with some of our existing and new customers. Existing most of the times, because channels are well established, like you said, there are account teams, there are whole teams dedicated to these customers who you can reach out to. Most of the times, you can also find existing data in your UXR and previous researchers that have been conducted. So, that can save some of the time. But, I've always found out that interviewing them and hearing their problems first hand just lets you connect with them at such a deeper level that the empathy just gets ingrained in your DNA when you're talking to them. And you just feel their pain. And when you feel their pain, you can build products much better. So, interviews being the top most form of interaction followed by the research data that we have already engaging UXR, connecting them with our potential customers. And then, for the feedback, I would say we have several preview stages and several customer connect tools through the company. So, that's fairly easy to collect feedback once the product is out. So, that side of interaction becomes fairly easy. But that's a very critical interaction because that's when the pivoting of product happens, right? Because as the early feedback starts clipping in, start incorporating some of these nuance, new antique changes to your product. Yeah, absolutely. So, you guys both talked about how often and different ways you interact with customers. Let's say, all right, I'll reverse a little bit. How do you pick one customer over the other? Are you picking the most loud, loudest one? Are you picking the one that is complaining the most? Right? Again, I'll leave it up to you all. I think I can go first, maybe. Again, it depends on the company. It would be to be, like if you're a startup and you only have a few customers, and then it's a totally different game versus the big company, like millions of customers. But one thing that runs across is, according to what I see, the problem is always with positioning. If you know who your real customer or main persona is, then the problem becomes simpler. One problem that I've seen sometime in startups is, or even in big companies, we start serving everyone at some point where you say, oh, my customer is everyone, which is a problem. So, if you have clear definition of who the main persona is, then the problem is a little kind of contained, like, okay, my persona is a parent who just had a kid or a person who is working. When you talk about them, then, as Sagar mentioned in previous question, you can build the empathy. Then now you can understand why customers are coming with that request. Is that really a pain point? If that is a pain point, how many other people are feeding the pain point? You can go from there. I think the main point is always the positioning of your Yeah, absolutely. Sagar? Yeah, I agree with all the points that Sagar mentioned. In addition, I would like to say that listening to a customer is a function of two things. The customer demand itself and your product intuition. As a product manager, that's something that you bring to the table. So, you might have a customer who is very loud, like you said, and who is very demanding and who has a very strong point and that is a pain point for them. But it may be just that one customer and a very small revenue to be unlocked and very niche use case to be solved for. That doesn't necessarily mean you are going to build that feature for that customer. You typically bank on your enterprise customer, the largest customers, because they already are using your product and they already are massively adopting your product. So, you don't want to disappoint them. So, they typically get the priority. But then if you identify that there is some long tail customer who is demanding a feature and they actually represent a whole gamut of new set of customers that you are going to unlock, then that's a strategy call that your product manager has to make. So, there are these trade-offs that you run into all the time. So, my rule of thumb is you first do what's necessary and then also look at the long tail which can unlock the whole spectrum of customers which is like a completely new segment that needs to be unlocked. And that typically entails a new feature entirely because you are building a new capability. It's not an additive iteration to your product because those customers are not using your product for a reason. And if this is going to unlock a whole new set of customers, then it means that you're building something highly specialized. So, that also needs to be prioritized. So, that's my approach towards picking the customers or customer feedback. Yeah, that's great. That just kind of, you know, we have one question from the chat and I'll go over that very quickly. But how do you even advocate at that point in time? Let's say you have a brand new customer, right, that you see potential for. How do you go and advocate that for them with your stakeholders that, hey, we need to go ahead and build this brand new feature? I mean, I do it in a certain way, but I would love to hear from both of you first. Yeah, since I made that point, I can go first. You have, like I said, you have a product intuition that something like this exists, there is a use case for this and it needs to be built, right? And then that customer queue sort of becomes a validation to it. It's just a validation to what you already know. And then you start gathering more data points. And that gathering of more data points goes back to our previous question of how you interact with customers. So, if you have additional bandwidth in addition to doing your other tasks to explore this new feature, which product manages by the way, do it all the time, right? Like you have to be on the watch that this is a new, this is a new breakthrough that my product can get and that can unlock a whole new set of problem statements to be solved for. You just do the needful, you do the discovery as always, you talk to more such customers, you look at tweets, you look at public platforms, because these are not your existing customers, we are talking about new set of customers. So, you don't have existing data points in your company or through any of the teams. So, you have to do a little extra work. So, you might also engage your GTM teams, your regional sales leads to gather leads and reach out to folks. And so, scouring becomes a little more aggressive at that point as a PM. But once you have that data, it becomes very easy to make a strong case to your stakeholders, to your point. Yeah. So, I'm hearing a lot of finding the impact, right? The impact that you hypothetically could be achieving with this particular new customer. And it should also speak to the vision of your company. If you are unlocking a problem that your company doesn't want to solve, then it will be very difficult to persuade your leadership. Correct. Absolutely. Yeah. I agree with Sagar. I think there are cases where you would have qualitative feedback, like qualitative data and quantitative data. With quantitative data, it becomes easy that you can give revenue projections or you can tell like, this is the value of the opportunity. But there would be features which might not actually, like, which might improve your brand but will not come up as a revenue number. Yeah. Or there could be places where you only have qualitative feedback. So, in those cases, like as Sagar said, there is certain product intuition that you need to take. And how you convince your stakeholder is like, you first, of course, try to collect more data points if you can. But otherwise, like sometimes what I have found like, there's like lacking in a lot of games is be bold, right? Like you just like, then if you have a strong product sense, you have qualitative data, then you can just put your foot sometimes and say, like, I think we should go for this. And as the time goes by, as you make more bets, your stakeholders would also get comfortable with you as you win those bets, basically. If you're right about your bets, sometimes you would have to take that call. Like, if you start scoring data, sometimes it's easy to get. But otherwise, it will take a month. But that time, you might as well do MVP and like, check the real market. This especially happens in startups. When you're small, you're trying to find a product market pit. If you try to do all this research, you might not even be able to. But if you have a strong product sense, just like build it and ship it and like measure the real impact. So like, you need to make sure like, that you are being bold as well, like taking these bets. Yeah, a lot of it also comes with experience, right? Like at that company, what, when you ship something, this will become successful because your historically seen a pattern. Yeah, it's all about accountability, right? Because it and also them being able to trust you, right? Instilling trust as a product manager. Yeah, absolutely. I think in earlier conversation, before we got started, one of you said, it's the loneliest role. But at the same time, we communicate, communicate, communicate a lot. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's take the question from the chat. Sonam is for you, but talk about feel free to chime in as well. How do you validate new ideas in your product because there is obviously a stark difference in the wants of parents and children in a product? Yes. So I think like, I like this, just to be a generalize, like, this is a problem with all marketplaces. I have worked in a workplace marketplace where there were employers and like the contract workers whom we were trying to match. And here, like also like, we have two personas like where we have parents and kids both have different needs. And we need to cater to both, like children would be the main for our engagement, parents engagement is also important because they are the payers. How do you do that is basically you think through both empty maps, like what is needed for a kid to have fun experience. And for parents, they want a safe browsing experience for the kids so that like, they have this piece of mind that my kid is actually learning something and learning in an environment which is safe for them. So as long as like you have those notes are set, all the features roll up into them. So like we have a like product vision, like what do we want to create and then for parents, what that means and for kids, what that means. So we keep that center at heart, like when we are creating these like road maps for parents, we want to do this. And for kids, we want to do this. And this is how like overall value would be attained. So like the competition like, oh, this feature, sometimes there is like, oh, if we build this feature, maybe kids would love it more than parents, for example, like, oh, we make this a great game and then like kids would love it, but like maybe parents do not want people to play like kids to play games all the time. So what we do is like, we try to come up with one games where parents can also engage with the kid or there is a learning part to it that kids can learn to while playing, which may, which is also like just of our product, like we want to create a safe environment. So like this, this kind of translates to marketplaces as well, like if I talk about employer and contractors, we want like them to find the right opportunities at the same time employees need to learn needs to have good like reliable people. So like you build this rating system where like you can read the worker. So like if the worker rating is high and employer rating is also high, like you can match basically same for overwrite. So like you make sure that both the entities are being entertained, that's how you maintain the health of the market, any market where there are more than one user. So I'm assuming you guys have, you also interact with kids, bring them on campus or okay, with the parents, I'm assuming. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sagar, any, any inputs, any feedback? I don't know. You said in the past in FinTech. So yeah, I don't have experience with parents and kids in terms of shipping products or my user personas. So I won't be able to give too much insights into that, but in terms of picking my customer, like, I think, like which, which persona to cater to, there's always a dilemma between who is, who is going to be who is going to make your product more successful and which is, which is the most gnarly problem or the most necessary problem to solve for. And I feel the user happiness score always wins. The happiness score has to be high and that's what speaks to your company's value and mission. Again, it differs from company to company for a startup, it might be something else, but for an established company, you typically do what's best for the mission of the company. All right. Now, thank you both. All right. Taking a look at another, other questions. What does it mean in your words to be customer obsessed? I mean, Sonam, that's one of Amazon's 14 principles, right? Let's have Son, I mean, Sagar go first in that case. Sure. I'll keep it very short so Son can grab the rest of the time. I think customer obsession just means empathy in your DNA in every decision that you take so that your customer doesn't need to be in the room and you can speak on behalf of your customer for every single decision that you make. That's what customer obsession means for me. Yeah. That's great. I mean, put it in, put it in a very short format, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think Sagar, I think I don't need to say anything, but just to complete it, I would say if you are creating any feature, any product, you need to start thinking about what are the pain points of the customer you're trying to solve. I've seen, I'd have done this mistake, where you start from a profit statement, oh, this market, total principal market, we will win and we will make 50 million in revenue. I've done this mistake myself, early in my career, I've seen big CEOs make this mistake as well. Whereas, if you start from customer and you are truly customer obsessed, you would start from the problem that you're trying to solve that become your mission vision for even features and product, it doesn't need to be always on the same level. But you start from that pain point, why are you trying to solve that? And then both backwards from there, okay, if I'm solving this problem, it would lead to customer happiness in this way. And there's nothing like that in the market. And this solves the customer problem in a 10x level or at least 3x, 4x level. Then you are taking those decisions from customer obsession point of view and always just one liner is like think about customer when you are trying to and make the decision as if you are the customer. I think BM should be the president of customer in that. I think one more thing also helps in this is falling in love with the problem and not the product. It has been said a lot of times, it's a very well known thing, but it's easier said than done. But falling in love with the problem itself is very important than being myopic about the product. Because a lot of times we just think about especially if you're working on an established product, it's very hard to put your brain outside and think from a person who is going through that CUJ that's actually there in your PRD. But you haven't really put yourself in that person's shoes. So how do you fall in love with that problem versus what you already have designed? So I think that also helps. Yeah. I mean, would you also say that taking a look at it from the problem perspective also not being so defensive for your product as well? Because sometimes because it is our baby, we are building it. Sometimes we can become really defensive, so kind of putting our guard down and seeing it from the other side and setting the problem in itself on the other side. It doesn't mean downplaying your product. It just means when you fall in love with problem or when you're thinking through problem lens, you just come up with five different solutions outside of your own product and your product just happens to be one of the means to an end to solve that problem. And you are also open to other possibilities, right? So you explore, open up other possibilities. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of startups as well, you need to pivot if something is not working. Yeah, you need to kill things as well. Yeah, knowing when to sunset your products is another big thing. It's always harder to do in a bigger company because there is always going to be that one person that is still going to be using it. But all right, Amol in the chat says or is saying that, but if we as a PM think about or think from the point of view of a customer, won't we bring our biases as well? Very good question. I mean, that bias is necessary, I would say. But you have to be, well, I don't know by bias if they mean bias, your own bias or that customer's point of view. I'm assuming, yeah. But when we say customer, it is not one customer. It is a representation of hundreds of customers and you have distilled that hundreds of customers' problems into one common problem. So it's not just one customer that we are talking about. So we try to mitigate the bias as much as possible, but when it comes to that particular problem statement, you have to be strongly opinionated. And as Sanam said, being bold is what gets things done as a PM. Yeah, I don't have anything to add actually. You're absolutely right. There would be certain bias, but you make the bias only after looking at qualitative and quantitative feedback across multiple customers, not one, ten, no. Like, it should be a bigger, bigger question. What if there is no feedback and or data? What would you do? You ship. Repeat, yeah. If it works, it works. Otherwise, go to the next thing. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So we have about 30 seconds remaining. Any advice is right. One of the questions I always like to ask towards the end of these events. Any advice that you would like to give, right? Your younger self, your younger PM self or anyone on the channel watching today? I would like to believe I'm still young. Yes. Yes, sorry. I know I'm just kidding. I think I should have transitioned into product management way earlier. Yeah, if I have to say anything, I would say like ask, always ask for things. Sometimes we think that, oh, I shouldn't ask for this. It would make the conversation awkward with my manager or something. But what I've learned is asking always helps. Like I ask for that raise, ask for switching into the role that you want, or ask for anything that you want without asking. Yeah, absolutely. The answer is always no until you ask, right? It's always my motto as well. And there is no better time to ask than right now, hopefully not at five o'clock on Friday. But perfect. All right. Well, thank you both so much for parting your knowledge, answering all the questions, and just speaking with me today. I really appreciate it. I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend. This was fun. Thanks for talking to me.