 Hi, welcome to product school. My name is Vignesh and I am a technical product manager at Skykit Prior to Skykit, I have worked with large enterprises and e-commerce places like eBay Amazon, Microsoft and telecom industry like T-Mobile Accumulating my product experience across from the enterprises sector and currently I'm trying to you know find a balance between how we can scale products from a startup world and bring them to achieve the bigger enterprises level achievements that they are looking out for. So that being said, I'm really excited about talking products to you and talking my thoughts about how to conceptualize product scalability and I thank product school for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts and learn from you and also feel free to reach out to me over my email or my LinkedIn is right over there. Feel free to connect and I look forward to collaborating with you all and learn and share. So that being said, I'm going to quickly jump into the topic today. So I'm going to talk about the conceptualizing techniques for product scalability. So that might sound very abstract or you know a very unique piece of product management where as a product manager when you start developing a product or when you start thinking about new ideas, the whole purpose of you know doing a product or building a product is to like solve some needs solving a problem or solving a customer's needs to put it that way. So it could be like anything it could range from it could be an e-commerce product or it could be a software solution or it could be a SaaS or it could be even a simple you know a hardware device that we are trying to like build it could be anything but the end result of you know building a product is to like solve a problem. So why do we do that? Do we stop at the place where saying that hey my product is like behaving fine and I don't have to like think about you know scaling it because it's already been like catering the needs. Never any product like 99% of the products around the world don't want to like think about you know I'm good with where I am and I don't want to like do any kind of like enhancements or any kind of like market penetrations across with what I'm having currently because all we try to like do when we build a product is to like look at how are we going to like scale the product and how are we going to like you know cater the needs of different kind of customers or different kind of users that we are trying to like you know cater here. So that being said when you come to product scalability I personally feel there are like different techniques and different methods and different you know thought processes involved in scaling a product but the kind of information that seems to work well with me are listed below here. So defining the problem statement and iterate and innovate the feedback loops, the strategic planning, the user expansion, being the voice of customer and doing the market research. So these are the key elements and the key frameworks that I use and that has worked well for me from scaling even an enterprise level product like when I worked with Amazon there are like the multiple examples where we all know about the Kindle right. So when Kindle initially started it was basically built to let the users read their favorite subscriptions, write their favorite newspapers and you know magazines but magazines is a very interesting concept for Kindle. When I worked with Amazon back in like 2010, 2011 we were slowly you know migrating from being just a newspaper stand to you know have a whole publication you know pipeline built for Amazon Kindle for us to penetrate new markets. So how did the thought process happen? That I'm going to like break that down and give you that example with the frameworks that I have like listed over here. So when you start with a product like Kindle which is already a pre-existing product in the industry, we start with defining the problem statement where what are we going to like sort here? The problem statement could be like really abstract for like high-level understanding like say I want the users to you know be able to buy and read their favorite magazines or their favorite books or be it anything that is like irreadable and I want to like be able to like you know experience the book without actually buying a book or without actually buying a magazine. So how do we bring that problem into like different modules is where you iterate and innovate. So when you're trying to like innovate a product or when you're trying to like iterate what is the existing functionalities of the product and how we are going to like innovate on top of that we use the problem statement to help us innovate and help us you know ideate the new frameworks that are needed for these announcements. So in this case when the Kindle is first being like used to help the users you know just view magazines or view just newspapers the next step is to like allowing them the experience of you know reading a book or reading a colored magazine on Kindle Fire which is like a whole different game. So what are the innovations that is involved behind that like we need to like you know build on architectural platform which lets the users to be able to like you know download their book and you know get the publications to be able to like you know send the send the books in a desired format. So those kind of thought process like how are we like enabling it from the back end or how are we going to like enable this new enhancements of the product in the front end and with the business is something that a product manager needs to like think about and work from the problem statement itself. So once you figure out the existing pieces of your product and you are trying to like you know build on top of that based on the problem statement that you have you're almost like set with you know building a beta version of what you want to like you know show for your end customers at that point but in order for you to like reach there there are like different other different other areas of important verticals that we need to like touch upon like you know the feedback loops the feedback loops are like a really important concept or a really important tool method for us to like understand what kind of feedbacks are we like receiving from the end customer and if we are even progressing in the right path. So that means that you know feedback loops could be both internal and external and it also helps a product manager to you know get a perception from a user's POV or from a technical engineer's POV if it is going to be an internal feedback loop. So designing the feedback loops is essential for a product manager to be able to like you know give get the information that is like required for him to like understand how the product is behaving in the market and how what kind of like difficulties or pain points are the customers talking about and derive like patterns based on the feedback that he gets or she gets. So as a product manager when you hear like a lot of noise happening around like a particular segment of a product which you think is like a key piece of the product that is helping the user to function or the helping the user to like you know even stay with your product then that's something that needs to be like prioritized on the top level and being impressed. So that you know you won't end up losing the market and as we all know it is really important for us to understand that as a user he is not obligated or she's not obligated to stay with your product for more than like you know like two three minutes so the basic attention of a user over your product is less than like two three minutes since it's fast-paced world. So as a product manager and as a whole team it is like a really stressful environment for all of us to make sure that we enable all the users to stay and experience the product and you know give the best in those two three minutes but it is clearly not possible without addressing the pain points of the customers. So for example if I want to like go and buy a sneaker I go and when I type sneaker on an e-commerce platform like say eBay the listings that appear in front of me needs to be like super relevant with what I'm searching for. So how do we have that connect? A product manager needs to be able to like you know have the feedback loops and the market research being done like thoroughly for us to understand what the product is what the user would actually require from the company or from the product or from the feature that they are like you know trying to like buy or use your. So these things are all things that is like listed below here in the slide are like interlinked they are all they are think of it like you know the avatar world where all the creatures and everything is like interlinked. So similarly in product management when you come to like scaling a product without thinking about these frameworks without you know using these techniques that is like listed below be the problem statement you cannot you cannot define a problem statement if you if you don't behave like your customer if you don't have the voice of customer and if you are just being a voice of customer you are not going to like do anything if you don't have the if you don't have the urge to go and solve it and define the problem statement or go and iterate and innovate. So you see that right like it's it's kind of like an interlink of terminology over here the product scalability and under that horizontal it's like a lot of verticals like this problem statement feedback loops user expansion voice of customer market research iterate and innovate. So these are just the frame these are just the verticals that work well for me and it helped me to like you know scale enterprise level products like Amazon Skindle from the existing new stand to you know delivering the magazines and books all across the globe along with the Kindle Fire. So and also it helped me to like you know scale scale a startup like fresh worlds penetrating into like new regions like the Middle East and Africa and it also like helped me with eBay in redefining the way how a refurbished framework should look like for the refurbished customers and it is currently helping me to like also put my thoughts into action but you know integrating new services for you know B2B customers over Skykit. So that being said I do know that there are like a different other ways of you know conceptualizing the scaling of a product but unless we don't have the basics of unless we don't understand the basics of how we are going to like you know derive a product and how we are going to like make room for us to like make those adjustments as and when we grow and as and when we scale it's not going to be like feasible for us to scale a product if you don't have these frameworks in place. So that being said I'm just going to like give you a minute to you know go through this and probably get trapped for the next set of like deep diving into the journey itself. Now here I'm going to break down what we are doing as a product manager and what we are supposed to keep our eyes on when we start developing a product, be it an existing or a product from scratch. So the journey as I call it involves like four different aspects where you start with ideating a product right like we think about the idea, we think about the customer problem statement and we think about what is currently there in the market which is like addressing those kind of like problems or if it is going to be like a completely unique solution for the customers over there then it's going to be like a breakthrough for the customer and the users themselves. So ideating those kind of other product or the solutions will be like the first stage as a product manager and I would also like talk about why this is like important for us to know with respect to the product scalability factor because when you ideate think of it as an exercise that you're doing it to yourself before even like going to scaling a product once you start thinking about developing something like I previously said it is important for us to understand why are we doing this and what is going to like happen if I do this and how am I going to like do it in a way where the market is going to like look at me and say okay let me try this product out so in order for us to like think about all that we need to like formulate our ideas and put the ideas into like presentable and actionable modules and execute them so that's what I'm trying to like describe here over the journey because only when you have the basic building blocks right is where you will have the ability for your product to go and scale if you don't have the basic blocks right say if you have built a sub part product you will never know it is a sub part product because you keep on you know patching it up and not scaling it and you would think that oh my product is functioning fine it's just that we are catering to like different needs at different times and when you look back all you would have is like patches all over your existing product and you haven't done anything to like you would end up in a place where you would be like too late to even think about bringing in like new enhancements that are actually going to like help you scale the product so as we talk about the journey it is very important for us to like understand that you know strategizing a product is equally important when you put in your planning interaction so when I say strategizing it's a very very abstract word or it's a very you know commonly used term when we try to like you know think about how we are going to like deliver and what are we going to like you know do to make sure that the market understands that the product that we are trying to like you know pitch to them so in order for us to like you know not in order for us to not to have the kind of feeling where you feel overwhelmed that the product is not hitting the right milestones or the product is not behaving the way how you wanted it to behave it is important for us to understand that the strategy needs to be bifurcated into the short term goals and the big rocks or the long term ones what we are trying to like achieve at the end this is very important and this is very crucial in in in scaling a product in conceptualizing the product scalability it is important to have the strategy of defining the smaller milestones the smaller milestones could be could be anything that is related to solving the customer's needs say the version one of your product is going to like solve a XYZ for the customer needs and the version two is going to like solve XYZ and give the customer the ability to perform certain actions so those kind of like differences you could bring along on your milestones which will help you to you know build blocks like consider Legos or think of it as you know playing a foundation and you know building a community on top of it and then you know expanding the community without having the foundations and the building blocks in place there is no point for us to like you know branch out and have community it's all going to like crumble back like how I said earlier when you look back you don't want to like see patches over your product you need to like you know see the product branching it out branching it out itself and you know behaving as the market leader for the customers who are trying to like you know use it for the first specific action so to do all this we need to have a solid team nothing in this world as humans we are all like social animals we need to like you know make sure that we understand a product is catering not just like a single user it's going to like catering it's going to cater or it's going to fulfill a whole community or it's going to fulfill a whole set of like market you know in order for that to like you know have that kind of scaling you need a proper team you need to invest your time in building a solid team that's like minded cultured people is very very essential for you to like you know ideate branch and grow and as a product manager it is also very essential for us to like you know collaborate and work with like different different teams and different set of like people for us to like understand what the pain points are from their perspective and see how we can address them in order for us to like you know scale a product the product should fly by itself but for that to happen the product manager should be able to you know give all the necessary feed in all the necessary information and feed in all the necessary you know structure for the product to you know fly by itself so this is like the whole journey of how how how a product manager should you know start building the blocks and what are the different you know steps that is like involved for us to like you know scale a product right from the scratch so as I said I'm going to like reiterate again we start by ideating and then we discover what's happening and then we provide a strategy we think about publishing a strategy we just going to like work help us to like step towards our end result which is like the big rocks so the stepping stones are the short term milestones which will help you to like you know achieve what you want to like achieve but then and for us to like do all this we need to have a kick ass team which is going to help us to deliver such awesome products and as a product manager you need to collaborate and you need to like you know have the ability to like grasp ideas and be a solid listener rather than a problem solver at the first place so only even you listen is where you get feeded in with the information that is required for you to go and but do stuff so that being said I'm I'm just going to like leave another 30 seconds on this page so you can grasp the information and I'm trying to like keep it really minimalistic and provide like little information and have this in a more engaging way so I don't want to like flutter everyone with like a lot of a lot of things put together over here now we talk about like scaling so if you remember I was in the initial stage I was talking about like all these different you know terminologies like problem statement iterate and innovate data driven user expansion so all these are the most important blocks according to me there are like different other techniques as well as I have mentioned earlier these are the ones that I personally feel would help a product manager to think about scaling so in order for us to like you know scale we need to like again think about having all our frameworks in place it could be take up take up anything over here all these are not in a specific order these are all like the important aspects that is like required for us to like think about how to scale so the important thing that over here is to not go and problem solve the important thing for us here is to like understand what the customer actually wants and and provide them maybe the customer would want want like abc three things but as a product manager you cannot go and like build all those three things together and go shove it to the customer it's not going to work because the customer would be like too overwhelmed looking at all these options and you know you'd be taken aback to like you know to not have the complete experience of a or the b or the c over there right so I'll tell you an example um when I when when we started like working on uh working on figuring out what to do with the refurbished framework with an ebay there were a lot of thoughts between the product leaders and like different teams trying to understand what we need to like go and cater first so uh when you go to a website like ebay or amazon and when you try to like you know buy an item um you are going to you you would go with your mind like a customer comes in with a mind if I go to amazon I would get xyz item if I go to ebay I would get like xyz item but in a different way or I would go look for like specific items specifically farmers platforms so in that case what we did was we did a heavy market research and we understood that the most sold refurbished items over ebay are you know the electronics and the sneakers and you know laptops so we had like different categories that were listed in like one two three like in the level of priority so it helped us to like you know understand what the market wants the market is looking at ebay and saying that hey I come to your website every day looking for like refurbished goods under specific categories but I'm able to like you know see a whole bunch of other stuff and it looks like so uh claustrophobic for me to like you know clustered sorry clustered for me with like all these different options in front of me so why don't you claim it out so as a product manager what I did was like I had to like you know do a comparative analysis uh and see what the other brands and what the other products are you know doing at this space and how are they trying to like you know solve this problem for their customers and how ebay can like stand apart and deliver quality results with that so uh the market research helped me to like you know um understand how well the market is behaving in the current trends and what I need to give to the customers in like the top priority order and we went to we went back to our engineering room and uh we told the engineers to you know like pull certain data that will help us to understand how many customers are there like regionally or how many customers are trying to like you know buy it periodically and have all those have all those reports ready as well for us to like you know evaluate and see if we are even going through the right path so this kind of exercise is really essential for a product manager to understand and deliver enhancements in an existing product like he you would have always gone to ebay and you would still go to ebay even if you don't have this functionality but is the product experience going to be better or are we going to like retain that user are we going to like you know be able to like convince a new market with an existing framework these are the type of questions that we need to like you know think as a product manager when you think about scaling a product so when we start building refurbished under specific categories for ebay it it really helped the customer to you know understand and get the desired results in the way that they wanted because if I go and have a refurbished uh uh planned for sale uh say a plan for sale it's it's it's like a lot of effort put into like such a menial thing where uh the the product lifecycle I mean the lifecycle of the customer on that specific vertical is going to be like really really minimal so the effort that you put in like you know building a framework which is not catering enough need is not going to help us similarly if you are going to like you know help the customer by a refurbished iPhone or refurbished computer so you're adding a lot of value for your product you're adding and you're bringing in like a lot of users to ebay or to your specific platform by providing the knee shade and curated experience for your customer to go and like buy stuff or to go and experience the product that they want over there so that so making room for a user and making room for a customer to go and experience the required the required product feature is really essential as a product manager when you think about scaling a product because uh scaling is not just about the product feature built in it or you know making like different versions of your product scaling is also about the penetration of new markets the penetration of like new user bases and uh are trying to like you know retain the existing customer base so it is also important for the product managers to be uh the voice of customers because once you onboard a customer into your product your job doesn't end there like it should it shouldn't be like a place where you know what hey you've onboarded everything look fine take care and i'm good and uh and just like scoot off like it doesn't work that way because because it is very important for us to like you know retain a customer rather than like retain a customer as important as like going and building a new market or bringing in like new user uh new user base into the product so in order for us to like you know do that we need to uh you know start taking feedbacks more seriously and being like a constant touch with like different verticals of the uh engine over here uh it could be uh the engineering piece and it should be also the business side and it should also talk about uh you know how what are you going to like software customer and how your customer is feeling about the product and taking all those feedbacks and prioritizing them and curating them and building blocks that will help the product to scale and also the user to stay happy in your product and in order for us to like you know go go and do all this we need to have few essentials so those essentials are listed here performances processes automate frameworks objective key results customer experience and trends designed for the light and prioritize so the so it's a product manager when you want to like scale a product you think about what are you giving something along with the existing product experience that would allow you to even compete in the race of skating a product into a new market or an existing market or or beat anything so what what would help a user or what you help what would help anybody to understand if they if these are like happening correctly the performance of your product so how stable is your product in the market be it rain or shine does your product does what it needs to do uh is it is it giving the is it giving the users what it is required to give and is the experience seamless those are very critical when you want to like scale a product because based on the performance this is where we usually have uh we usually have a point for us to like say if you're doing the right job or not so in order for us to like you know keep the performances are on top notch we should always stay uh hungry and we should always stay vigilant about having using spikes and have like contingency plans and having plan of actions when when it when when it comes to like you know scaling a product when you're going to scale a product you are uh you know marching towards you know increasing the capacity of how the product is functioning and at the same time making room for new users to come and experience it from a technical standpoint it would sound like you need to make like two uh decisions it could be either horizontal or vertical scaling you either increase the capacity of what your product is already capable of or you increase the support of where your product has been like hosted or how where your product has been like you know sold from it could be an external server like just increase the you know server usage and it would be good so those are like the two different basic ideas when it comes to you know increasing uh managing the usage usage spikes for your product so what are we doing what are we going to like do uh when it comes to uh you know enable such performance uh you know enhancements or such uh you know scaling we need like certain processes we need we need certain methods uh certain principles and guidelines for us to like enable to do that seamlessly and without any um hassle so the processes at the same time should make your life easier and should make uh the other person's life easier as well because uh when you start investing a lot of time on defining or doing repetitive work when you do a lot of processes and when you are just marching to field every day you don't have the time to think about you will not have the time to think about what you want to do with your product and what you want to like do about scaling the product a product manager shouldn't spend a lot of time with processes uh a bit with like you know repetitive works but he should have like enough room or she should have like enough room to think about how to scale a product in order for us to make that room we need to like have certain processes which will help us to you know take care of the work which are which could be like automated or which could be like you know done easier and which would also help us to like you know unlearn what we are doing uh repetitively or what we are doing wrong and have a continual improvement with respect to the work that we are doing will enable a product manager to have a clarity of thoughts when it comes to scaling the product and the other important aspect over there is automation automation saves lives it will save time time is the crux of a product manager because a product delivered in the wrong time is as bad as a product never developed because it's not solving anything it is going to a failure and all the effort that you have put in is never going to be like replicated because the marketing time was bad or the penetration time was bad so a time is the essential crux for a product manager to go and solve the problem so so if you automate stuff it would help you to like you know manage all those repetitive tasks it will help you to have room for innovation when once you start like having the room for innovation is where your new ideas will start getting structureized into like breakable modules or be a product itself so in order for us to like you know do that we also need to like you accelerate our solutions as I told you time is the crux for a product manager if you think about like solving a customer's problem today and if you wait it out for like say like two three days that problem might be like an older problem for the customer themselves there are going to be like new set of problems coming in like every single day so that doesn't mean that our prioritization should be like you know really dynamic it needs to be in a way where the solutions that we are building are going to like cater the customer's immediate needs and have room for you know like accelerating their solutions to perform few other tasks that would help the customers to like you know stay afloat with your product so that's that's where we need to like have those acceleration of solutions so in order for us to like you know grow we need to have a framework and we need to strategize the growth like I told you earlier we need to like strategize how are we going to like grow and what is going to be our span we cannot have unachievable targets set in our mind and march towards that march so in order to you know help us understand what we are going to like do it is very essential for us to understand when we are going to like achieve that are we going to like do it in the span of six months or are we going to like you know achieve it in the span of like one year or how well your market is like behaving right now on how well do you predict the market to you know behave after like six or eight months so marching towards that and having like realistic goals will help your product to like scale and will also boost your morale to like you know look at the achievable targets when you achieve that it gives you confidence it gives you a boost for you to like go and hit the next set of like targets so that that should be like a step-by-step process as well and keeping really minimalistic key metrics under the OKR when you consider a product that are like a ton tons of report or tons of metrics that you can like derive from customer base user base user ID habit customer name information what are they doing and when are they doing it how are they doing it like so etc etc i have like tons and tons of information that you can like pull out from but as a product manager you would need to like understand what are the key metrics that are essential for you to like go ahead and scale your product so say for example if you take amazon you go into amazon kindle and if you want to like look at the kindle metrics and i'm trying to like you know scare my product i want to like you know make sure that kindle is being readable by everybody so when i go and look at the existing customer base i'll have like a lot of information right so what are the information that is going to like help me to actually go and scale the product well information's like you know how many users are not registered or how many users are one-time users or how many users are actually spending time with publications will these out of these three i think how many users are actually spending time on reading the publications actually matters to me because i need to understand what is a product like uh lifetime and i need to understand what the customer is like spending most of his time on and i need to understand what kind of like pain points i see like going through when he is like uh reading a paper or reading a publication over kindle and derive a pattern on what could be like built next so that the customer feels happier when he touches the kindle again rather than focusing on uh you know blogs like uh how many uh sorry how many failed uh login attempts are being made or how many other uh you know users just log in once in a day so those kind of like information are not required for me at that point so you need to understand what is your key metrics that is essential for you to like go and deliver a product or go and like scale a product in order for you to like you know do that uh in order for you to like do that you need to like have uh you know a measurable outcome uh when i say measurable outcome when you when you look at a product there are two things that happens when a product is being like you know build one is the output and another stuff is the outcome so the output is the product's behavior uh the way how it should behave and the outcome is how the product is solving the purpose like is it is it actually helping the customers to like you know do the stuff that they are required to do so those are the those are the two different aspects that you need to be like considerate about when you are measuring the outcome for uh getting the key metrics and we have already spoken about customer experience and friends so uh we need to understand how the impression of the product is uh amongst the customer because that will help you to like determine if your product is in the right track and if you want to like you know do certain elements of steps that would help you to like you know elevate from the current stage to uh scaling part uh so we have already spoken a lot about the market research and how how essential it is for you to like you know uh determine the product scalability here uh so i move on to the design for the light uh so i usually write a 5q uh document uh 5q document is uh uh you know um something which talks about what when how when and why so when you have those crystal clear right in front of you it helps you to determine how the design needs to look like um and for me when it comes to design it's very important to have a simplified uh process so as an user you are supposed to not think when you're using a product so that's as a product manager all we are working towards is making sure that the user is not thinking when he's using a product that doesn't mean that we are you know you're you're turning them into a lazy person or something it's just that when a user starts thinking about what he needs to do in the product he actually stops uh you know he actually like starts uh uh spending lesser time in completing the task say for example you have a cluttered um web page uh a e-commerce web page with like various number of like deals coupons and you know different things of like things that you can buy there uh everything thrown right in front of you to your home page then you are actually going to go and buy something uh something that you actually know what you're going to do for there for the way how it is presented would make the user feel so stressed and he would start thinking about why is this button here oh do I need to go and click there oh what happens if I go and click here so the chain of thoughts and the chain the chain of thoughts that happen inside a user will slowly wean them down in from experiencing the real product so we need to be like super clear about like not uh making the customers confused so simplification is is really complex to achieve and once you have the clarity of thought of what you're selling to your customer and how you want the customer to experience it you can you can just like put a blinder and you know just go ahead and show just that to the customer so that he doesn't feel stressed or she doesn't feel stressed when they are experiencing your product and in order for us to uh you know have all this in place it is also very essential for us to like you know prioritize the ideas into uh achievable modules and for us to have such like achievable modules our ideas needs to be data driven our ideas can be like really abstract with the scratch but unless you don't have the data like who are your target customers or who's your current market what is your customer talking about or what is your company you're talking about the existing market friends those are the different set of like data and how is the product behaving and what I could like do on top of that and where is the room for improvement all these can be like achieved from your data so these are the very very essential and crucial things that are required for us to you know think about when it comes to scaling a product and that being said I am again reiterating the fact that there are different other techniques and that there are different other thoughts that would help you to achieve scaling a product but what has worked for me are these frameworks that I have like presented right in front of you so far so I think my thoughts and my my ideas of scaling a product and conceptualizing product scalability has been like helpful to you all and I really really look forward to hearing your thoughts and your comments and feedbacks on what you think about this product scalability techniques and ideas and I look forward to you know hearing your comments on how this went and if you have anything to tell me please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and thank you for the session thank you take care