 Hello everyone. This is Ravi Shankar Mishra. Today I will talk about is a product manager equipped to be a tech founder. Thank you Product School for giving this opportunity. So let's start with a quick introduction about me. My career has had two parts to it. The first has been that of an entrepreneur or a founder and then second has been that of a product manager or a PM. So I started my first company at the age of 26. Also my second venture, I built a 20 member team, ran it for four years and then exited. In that venture, we ended up building the world's most engaged healthcare content web and app in 2016, measured in terms of the time that users spend on average on the platform. In my other avatar as a product manager, I joined Amazon as a senior PM in 2012 and learned product management from the best at Amazon. In this process over the years, I also took 300 plus interviews for Amazon. And currently I lead a team of principal and senior PMs at Zalando in Germany. So over the years, a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs have reached out to me with a lot of common questions. Like should I build a website or a mobile app? Sometimes they ask, should I quit my job to start a company? And the most common question is how shall I raise funds for my company? However, having done a couple of ventures and in the last one having raised a million dollars for my venture, I can say that the more important questions are not asked by the aspiring entrepreneurs. In my view, the not so common questions are who is the target customer who will eventually pay for my startup idea? What is the customer problem that I want to solve? Let's say if you think you are the customer of your startup, then are there more customers like yourself who believe and have the same problem that you experience? And that's where the third question becomes important. How do I know that the customer has this problem? Now, again, in the same discussion, I've also gotten a lot of questions from product managers, either aspiring product managers and also PMs from my team and other teams who have questions like, I have a great feature idea, shall I go ahead and launch this product? Or the next question about how many engineers or applied scientists will I need to develop the product? And finally, they also ask, what should be the good market plan for this product? Which marketing channels we should use and how much we should spend to take it to the market? However, I believe the same questions that we earlier thought enough entrepreneurs were not asking are also the same questions that are not asked so many times by the product managers. It's the same set of questions about who is the target customer for my product idea? What is the customer problem that I want to solve? And how do I know that the customer has this problem? So that brings me to the similarities between a PM and a tech founder. In my view, the most important part is to focus on the target customers and their problems. And this applies to both enterprise customers and consumer businesses or end customers. It is very important to have a clear understanding of who the customer is going to be. And when I say customer, I refer to the one who will pay for the product. In some cases, you may have potential consumers of your product. For example, products targeted for smaller kids who still cannot pay for the product. But in my view, they would be consumers. Customers are the ones who would end up paying for your product. What is also important is to define their problems really well. This will apply in both launching a new product and also launching a new company. The better is our understanding of the problem, the higher is the chance of success for the product or for the startup. The second most important aspect for both PM and a founder is to validate the problem before building the solution. In case of a PM with an organization, we should try to leverage a lot of internal data available in the data warehouse, or in database, or in analytics tools like Tableau, Google Analytics, where we can work with the data and understand the customer's journey to see where are the pain points, what are the problems. Before we talk about the solution, in case of a startup, we can reach out to customers through market research by conducting surveys, both online and offline, after we have defined the target customers and asked them about the problems without talking so much about the solution. This will help us get an unbiased validation of the fact that the customers really have the problem that we think they have. Finally, with all these data points and clarity about who is the customer and what is the problem, eventually we should focus on building a differentiated solution using technology to solve these real problems. In my view, for the MVP, what we should do is try to figure out a solution which doesn't need a lot of coding, so that very quickly we can bring out a minimum viable solution or a minimum lovable product in front of the customers, test out the solution, get real feedback from real customers and then invest further in the technology for scale-up. So the idea is to have minimum investment from a technology perspective for testing the solution and then going back and investing further from a scale-up perspective. In my view, the role of technology is to help us scale the solution to many more customers. So three things, we should focus on who is the customer and what is their problem. Second, we should validate the problem with data and research before building the solution. And finally, we should test the solution with minimum investment in technology before we decide to scale it. And in my view, these are the three steps that both a product manager as well as a tech founder need to do to ensure the success of their product or their startup. Finally, we come to the pitch deck for a founder. In my view again, this is where the documents are similar. The best or the recommended pitch deck for a founder could be a PR FAQ. So what is a PR FAQ? PR FAQ is a short form for press release and frequently asked questions before launching a new product. This format has been popularized by Amazon and has been made successful by many PMs in launching their products in the tech world. So why should we write a PR FAQ for your startup idea? Because typically a press release is the first page where you write in a way that it will be released to the press or the media. What this means is it defines the customer problem solution and potential impact in very simple language. So it can be understood by anyone who is reading the article. And then there are frequently asked questions which could be referring to the questions that we anticipate on behalf of the target customers and also in behalf of our stakeholders. In organization, it could be engineering teams, operations teams, marketing teams and the questions that they might ask us for launching the product. While launching the startup, this could be the questions that again our investors might ask, our co-founders might ask when we are pitching the startup idea. So that is the format about PR FAQs and writing this PR FAQ is equally important for launching a new product as well as for your startup idea. Because what it does is gives us a lot of clarity about who is the target customer, what is their problem, what are the solutions we need to build to solve those problems and also help us in measuring the impact of those solutions. It allows us to have a higher chance of success for both the startup and the product because this kind of clarity also allows us to get more stakeholders on board. It could be our operations team, engineering team, marketing teams or it could be co-founders and investors because eventually the success of the product will depend on how well we have understood all these aspects. Finally, as I already said, this will help drive the flywheel for the startup, which is very important at the early stage like getting co-founders and investors. So this is the reason why I think the best pitch deck or the recommended pitch deck for a founder could be the PR FAQ, which is so commonly used by product managers in the tech world. I can give a couple of examples from my experience of these press releases which were actually released to the press. Here is the example from my own journey as a founder in the health tech business where you will see the article in Times of India only talked about the problem which was finding a trusted doctor was so difficult, that is the headline. And then you will read a lot of background information on the problem and later in the article, it also talks about the solution and potential impact. There is another example of my journey as a PM. Here you see the press release for Amazon's launch of faster than same day delivery of smartphones in India. This was a successful product launch which allowed us to deliver to customers faster than the same day because same day was the fastest delivery at that time offered by Amazon. So these are some examples where a press release is actually released to the press both in case of running a venture as a founder and also in case of acting as a product manager. So that's why I believe this press release PRFQ format is very, very useful for both these genres. With that, I come to an end for today's discussion. I will end the presentation with a quote from Jeff Bezos, which says, Good intentions never work. You need good mechanisms to make anything happen. And that is my last suggestion for today that if we believe in a product, if we believe in a startup idea, we should not leave it to chance. We should use good mechanisms like PRFQs to be able to create a lot of clarity for ourselves and also for our potential stakeholders so that success is not accidental. That's it for today. Thank you and have a good day.