Beyond The Code

Maulik Sailor (00:02.593)
Hello Sarika, how are you doing?

Sarika Tyagi (00:04.974)
Very good, Maulik. Thanks for inviting me today.

Maulik Sailor (00:06.689)
Long time, long time. You know, we have known each other for a long many years. I think maybe 25 years now, possibly. Yeah, but we lost contact and then we reconnected. And I was like super excited to meet you, you know, a few like few weeks ago when we met in the Bay Area. I was really excited to know more about you and I'm really intrigued by your journey.

Sarika Tyagi (00:15.598)
Unbelievable.

Maulik Sailor (00:35.585)
So why don't you tell us about your background? What have you done so far and what are you currently doing?

Sarika Tyagi (00:44.238)
Thanks, Maulik, for the introduction. I'm thrilled to be here as well. Regarding my background, I built products at Amazon, diving into the world of conversational AI. My professional journey, similar to yours, goes back almost two decades now. I have always been very passionate of solving real -world problems.

experiencing from a personal pet peeve of extremely hurtful and damaged heels, I co -founded a startup called Scarlet Fresh Shoe. It's an e -commerce company that offers instant shoe repair and foot pain relief solutions for women with heels, women who wear heels. That was the first time I bootstrapped a product from design to bringing it to the market.

Over time, I launched 14 products across four product lines. And while it's my side gig night right now, I'm still the in -house shoe whisperer fixing feet on the side. Talking about fixing, I also co -founded another startup called My22BMI, a healthcare company where I built an app.

which offered custom meal plan solutions for people with lifestyle conditions. So with obesity, diabetes, hypertension. And we also doled out health advice to individuals as well as businesses. But it wasn't really all about startups. I've spent a significant amount of time in my professional career working for large organizations like EMC, Cisco Systems.

where I built infrastructure products. I also channeled my inner engineer working for Cameron, where I built large oil processing equipments for companies like BP and Shell. I finally landed at Capital One and Amazon, where I think I found my sweet spot. Here I build digital products for people that help them in their everyday lives.

Sarika Tyagi (03:00.366)
I've really, I feel I'm blessed to have worked across so many different industries on so many different types of products. Like, you know, I've worked for B2B products, B2C products, infrastructure products. I've won a lot of different product hats in my time.

Maulik Sailor (03:18.657)
That's great, you know, and I can relate to you because I like similar to yourself, I have been involved in a lot of different product roles, you know, B2C, B2B, government as well, actually. And, you know, once you start being a product manager, you know, you're thinking your mindset changes, right? Was it difficult for you to get into a proper product role or it just came naturally for you?

Sarika Tyagi (03:49.486)
You know, that's such a good question because I think when I got into the role of, you know, when I started off, I had certain product related affiliations in terms of the roles that I was working on, but they were mostly, I think in the beginning, I was working on product owner roles. And at that time, I didn't quite understand the distinction. And I think it was really a lot of on the job training and work.

where I learned to distinguish between a product owner versus a program manager versus a technical program management versus coming into actual product management. I think, was it difficult? I would definitely say it was not a very straight line for me to get into a very specific product role, given that I dabbed into so many different industries.

And product management means different when you talk about physical product versus when you talk about really infrastructure product, that you're doing a lot more of that technical program management as well. So I would say for me, it was a lot of on -job learning, transitioning, constantly willing to learn more, being curious about what was out there. And...

what were the differences between the different roles. So I would say it was more of a natural progression over time. It was also a lot of curiosity that caught me from where I started to really getting into a very specific product role in a digital space.

Maulik Sailor (05:37.569)
That's great. Now, just building more on this whole product carrier, right? You've done a startup, you work for a lot of different organizations, right? And being a product person, you know, one thing that a product person, like, you know, most important thing a product person should be doing is defining a product vision and a product strategy, right? Now, I have a thesis, right?

Generally when you're working in a bigger organization you talk a lot about strategy and hey, this is what we want to do This is how we're gonna do blah blah blah You know, you're really trying to sell your vision internally and get your stake on the buy -ins right? Well, it's in the start of world Yes, you do have an idea like a vision where you want to go But per se you don't really have a strategy and this strategy keeps on changing fairly frequently, right? so

Sarika Tyagi (06:31.15)
Absolutely.

Maulik Sailor (06:31.481)
How do you go about doing that in your experiences?

Sarika Tyagi (06:34.702)
Yeah, yeah, it's again, I think when you think about a product strategy, it is very important to have two aspects in mind. One, you need to know what your not start is. The way you think about that is you start with your customers. You know, you think about how your customers are executing that function or using that particular product today.

And what are the common problems or the most biggest pain points or the most hurting aspects of that process or using that product? Once you understand that, you could actually figure that out by talking to your customers. You could observe how your customers are using those products right now. You could just basically follow through that journey yourself to see what could be those big problems. And once you understand that, take a step back and think about,

various possibilities of solving that particular problem in a way that is a delighter to the customer rather than just a fix to a problem in a short term. So think of that long term path, long term vision with a solution that is the best possible solution from a customer standpoint. So once you have that particular long term in mind, the next step would be to kind of think about,

How are you going to accomplish or move from where you are today in point zero to going to that point hundred? And that's when you want to break down that journey into smaller chunks, which is, and each of these chunks should be an initiative, should be a learning in itself, which means that you're kind of building into these milestones as you're kind of building these smaller, smaller components to really get to that end goal of it.

So at Amazon, we call this particular framework. There's a framework we use day in, day out called working backwards. It's also a very popularly known framework across the industry. And essentially it's nothing more than how do you start with the customer in mind? How do you think about that North Star vision for the customer and then bear back to come up with smaller chunks of milestones that all help you get to that end goal?

Sarika Tyagi (08:57.806)
Now talking about how do you make sure that you don't miss out, you don't deviate and stay on the course that's going to get you to the end goal where the customers are really going to be delighted to be using your product. Customers are going to be compelled, in fact, over all the competition that exists, over all the alternates and complementary opportunities that exist to be using this particular product in specific.

And a good way of doing that is, once you have your not star, once you've figured out your milestones, make sure that you have a good set of metrics. These metrics, they are very important to define from a perspective that you want to make sure that you are thinking of what is that one metric that's going to make sure that you track your long -term vision, but also what are those individual metrics that are going to help you measure the effectiveness.

and success of individual milestones that are helping you build go to that point. Let me actually use an example to share. Let's say you're building an app, right? And your app sells a product. Your end goal of that product is as a business or even from a customer standpoint, you want to bring the best products out there so that more and more customers are purchasing your product. Let's say that's your end goal.

that you want to sell as much as possible from this particular website, selling the best products that customers would care about or would help them. Now, knowing that, what are the different components you would need to build? Of course, there are architectural components and there's the tech architecture that you would need to build to build a scalable system. But thinking of it specifically from a customer and a product standpoint, the first thing that you would need is a lot of customers.

You need customers to engage with your app, because when there are customers, they'll see your product, and they would be willing to buy in future, hopefully, if they like your product. Once you have a lot of customers, the next step would be you want to make sure that the customers have a reason to come back repeatedly and buy your product, which means you not only need a good customer experience on your app, you also need the right product at that time.

Sarika Tyagi (11:23.566)
And then finally, when you have enough customers coming, when you have enough of these customers buying your product repeatedly, then you're going to automatically get to that ultimate end vision of selling as much as you can with the customers that are out there. So that's your end goal. Now, the first step you started out was, hey, let's get some customers on my app.

So you start designing your app and you say, I'm going to define customer engagement as somebody who comes in, enters there, creates a profile and, you know, browses my app once. That's my customer engagement. And you say, hey, I'm going to build in a forceful UI for customers to enter that profile information. If you do that, of course you're going to have customers who are going to come in, enter their profile.

and they're going to engage one time because they are intrigued by your app. But at that time, you may think, look, my engagement is really high because I have so many customers engaging and enrolling their profile information. However, that does not necessarily mean that customers were engaging because they loved your product. It just means you engaged your customer because you created a UX that forced them to come to your app.

So in that moment, you may think, that's a success. But is that success really taking you to your end goal of where the customers love your product and they want to come back and buy that product again and again? That's why having these set of metrics is so important. And having that individual metrics at milestone level, important to kind of connect back to the top level.

Maulik Sailor (12:43.425)
Yeah.

Sarika Tyagi (13:10.542)
So to answer your question, how hard it is to really go back and say, am I staying on course or am I sticking to the strategy to something that customers are going to continue to like what I decided today to going to my end goal, which by the way could be a multi -year journey. You're not star, maybe a long -term initiative and it might take a long time.

through which you want to make sure your initiatives that you're driving are still contributing to your end goal. I do want to highlight one more point. Now, with how fast the things are changing, with the innovation in the technology that we are seeing, customers are also starting to expect better things faster and quicker. So how do you make sure that whatever vision you defined for two years out and whatever small

milestones you're kind of leveraging and implementing right now, the customers will continue to want the same thing. And that's where having metrics around these milestones is super helpful because you also want to get into that culture of continuous experimentation. What that means is you launched something. You launched your, you kind of are driving high engagement right now. You're focusing on engaging the customers, but at the same time, you want to make sure you're

figuring out from the customers, you're listening to your customers about the quality of your product. You're also at the same time looking at, continuously looking at the rest of the journey, the customer journey to see are there any big pain points for which the customers are not going to be able to stick to your product or stick to your app.

So you constantly want to iterate on your version of what you bring to your customer. You want to listen to the customers for any evolving feedback, for any existing feedback on the process that you have defined, any things that may have evolved in their expectations of their process or in their product as well. And you bring it back so that the next step that you're driving and the next milestone that you are creating incorporates some of that aspect.

Sarika Tyagi (15:30.062)
High level, you might realize that even your long term, yes, you have a strategy in place, but even your long term might need to continuously be evaluated to ensure that are there any changes based on the changes in the technology, in the customer expectations, or the customer behavior pattern. So that's the kind of process I would think about. Summarizing it down, you start with the customer. You focus on your customer needs.

You make sure you're tracking data and you're measuring the success of your milestones that you're driving in terms of customer. And the third thing is you continue to drive that culture of experimentation so that you're constantly learning directly from the customers and evolving as you need to. So you are able to drive the value to the customers. And at the same time, you're constantly able to create a clear roadmap.

that continues to excite your team as well.

Maulik Sailor (16:30.593)
Just talking of these metrics and the data, right? Without divulging too much about your current job and any sensitive information, is there any interesting metrics that you track?

on part of in your current job or in some other job, right? And I can tell you one that I used to track in one of my corporate jobs. So in one company I was working at, so we had the main product, the platform, and then we had like a community or a forums that no one was really monitoring. But we had some data being collected behind that. And what we found, so we had a very good data team whose job was to just keep crunching all the data and bring any insights. And what we found,

that people who were more engaged in the forums were actually more profitable overall on the core product. And then the whole plan was to sunset the forums and all and save some cost. But when we came back with this insight, the business decided not to kill it and instead actually start investing more into the forums. So that was one of the surprising insights or data insights we had. So something like that. Can you talk about something?

Sarika Tyagi (17:45.134)
You know,

I would love to give you one single metric. That's a magic metric for all products or across all products. I would say that I do not believe that you can just pick a metric and say, hey, this would be applicable to all products. Sure, if you think about the metrics funnel, really, you kind of start with the top of the metrics. You do the engagement. You do the.

stickiness, like if you just follow the specific metric framework, that you want to have metrics where you are kind of driving the engagement or measuring the engagement of your customers. As you move forward along in that journey, you want to measure the stickiness of your customers, which is the repeatability of the same customers coming, more customers coming, and then they are repeatedly coming. How often are they coming?

How much time are they spending? Because that would be directly related to the value that the customers are getting. And then finally, whatever is your monetization model. If it's purchasing, if it's your OPS, if it's the number of purchases that you're driving, whatever that monetization metric be, you're tracking that aspect of it.

I feel like the metrics are going to be different, like I was mentioning in the specific stage or a phase of a product that you are in, and in the specific funnel stage, especially, that you are in. And then you will always have that end goal metric. What I would say is you always want to have balancing metrics.

Sarika Tyagi (19:35.854)
For example, not just in one particular project or in one particular role, but something that I have seen across the products, across actually product types also, whether it's a B2B, B2C infrastructure, whatever it is, you always want to have balancing metrics. You don't want to just target revenue or OPS as your metric, because then what happens is when you become a mono -focused, you...

kind of lose the site on, you may lose the site on customer standpoint. Or if you just continue to focus on customer metrics, hey, is my customer engaging? Is there enough retention? There may still be something that you want to track from a monetization standpoint, if that's really what you're trying to track over there as well. So I think it would be unfair almost to say, hey, I have one metric and this is the metric I want to track across.

You want to really track through your North Star. You want to track through your phase of your project that you are in. And you want to make sure that there is a balance of the metrics that you're bringing and you're measuring.

Maulik Sailor (20:50.945)
Just moving on a little bit, right? Typically, you know, within a corporate world, you're always fighting for budgets. You know, you always want to maximize the investment in your product. And, you know, your stakeholders support, your project sponsor, your commercial sponsor, you know, your strategic priority of the company.

might be more relevant, right? So how do you go about building the coalition of your supporters to make your product a success, you know? Sometimes some of these side projects that no one is thinking about turns out to be really good success story for a lot of companies, right? There are plenty of examples like that. I believe Twitter was like that, right? Twitter was supposed to be like a meeting, like a notification on some meeting rooms, something internally, and then it became like a global platform that we know, right?

So how do you go about building this coalition, your product supporters?

Sarika Tyagi (21:46.478)
Yeah, it's, I would say this is one of the continued struggles, no matter what role, how much experience, a product manager has, because every project is different. every situation is different. what I mean by that is there may be some initiatives that are, that have a huge amount of visibility across the organization and.

It's almost like a top -down alignment coming from the leadership saying, suggesting this needs to be done, that there are going to be more obvious ways of alignment over there. However, there are very far and fewer of those projects because there are only few of those that get really high -level visibility. But a lot happens, a lot needs to happen, not only to mobilize some of those high -level initiatives, but also to mobilize

other initiatives which happen across the spectrum through the organization. So yeah, I align that this is one of the bigger challenges that I have personally also faced in my career through the companies, through the industries, working on different products. I think to really kind of start off, it is very, very important to have or to onboard all your stakeholders.

early on in your process of starting an initiative or working on a product. Especially because the stakeholders may have very diverse backgrounds. They may have different goals. They may have different metrics that they are tracking and which does not align with what this initiative can help them with. They may actually sometimes also have different views about how the product needs to evolve.

So which may be very different from what the product is thinking or product manager is kind of bringing forward as a vision. Given all of these different possibilities which create headwinds in getting that alignment, a lot of times what you'll see is valuable resources, they get misguided. And the entire product actually can be at a risk of going through that execution phase. So some of the things.

Sarika Tyagi (24:04.91)
that I have personally followed and have seen my fellow product experts follow is the number one thing, the first thing that's important is creating that space of transparency and communication. What that means is hopefully by the time you're thinking that you have a product you want to work, start working on, you've already done your product strategy. You have a certain vision that you're bringing forward.

with the stakeholders. Sometimes, even actually before that, while you may have an idea, you brought maybe like a one -pager to your stakeholders, suggesting, hey, this is what we want to build forward. Create that level of transparency to say, hey, this is what we are trying to build. Here is the reason why we want to build it. And we talked about data earlier, but I want to highlight a particular point over there, that whenever you are thinking about your product strategy,

make sure you're thinking from two different perspectives. One, you want to bring in the data, the quantitative data, which basically suggests what is the problem, that hey, you have an existing product and we have a high drop -off rate from our customers. I have a problem there. Or there is this huge market which is untapped, there is no product available, and here is how big of a market this is. So you're bringing this.

this quantitative data, which is essentially telling you how big this problem is and is it worth pursuing. And then the other aspect of it is bringing the qualitative data, which is essentially something that you can get by doing user research. You're talking to customers, you're reaching out to your customers, you're observing them and figuring out what exactly is the problem. Why is this a problem for the customers?

What are the reasons behind this problem? So hopefully, when you've created your strategy, you've gotten the two aspects together, which is essentially what you would call as the justification of why I'm proposing that this particular initiative or this particular customer problem needs a resolution and why we need to build a product for that. So it is extremely important to have this view when you're going to your stakeholders, what you want to build.

Sarika Tyagi (26:31.406)
Why you want to build this? What is the customer point of view on why this is a problem? And what is your resolution? What kind of a solution do you want to bring forward for this? And of course, based on that, when you're talking to your stakeholders, you're obviously also mapping out some kind of a roadmap based on your milestones and other things that you have discussed. You also want to make sure, in addition to data and your milestones, you're also talking about a

or bringing visibility to your initiative through several business reviews. You have business reviews across different teams, different organizations as well, wherever your stakeholders reside. You want to make sure that you're creating that visibility about the status, about the asks, the help needed, and the support that you are seeking for to parse this out to your leadership, the various leadership.

The second thing you want to do is you want to drive collaboration. There's no shortcut to that. To drive the collaboration, you have to earn trust of your team members, which means that you want to be a bit more fluid in how you are going out to your stakeholders. You want to kind of seek that input early on. So you don't want to go to your tech.

For example, definitely your closed team, your design, your tech, after you have defined what your vision is going to be. Hopefully you are keeping them very involved and very engaged in this particular conversation from the start. You're engaging your design and your research to actually reach out to your customers. You're engaging your tech to actually understand the feasibility of implementing your vision and devising your solution in a more cohesive manner.

And hopefully, that's how you're also defining your roadmap and your milestones, keeping that tech feasibility into perspective. If there is dependency on other services, on other teams, on other subject -for -subject matter expertise as well, you're bringing them along in that vision creation process. So they are able to also influence what that product ultimately continues or turns out to be.

Sarika Tyagi (28:55.694)
So I would say that even in the stakeholder mapping, they're going to be your inner circle of stakeholders, which is essentially your immediate team, your design, your tech, your marketing, if there is sales involved, if there are very close partner teams involved without whom you are unable to do your work, like your project will not succeed or will not see the light of the day.

You want to bring those stakeholders very early on, collaborate with them in the beginning of the process. The second thing you want to do is you want to kind of look at your broader team, the partner team leaders, your partner team stakeholders who may become consultants for you, who may have to be onboarded, like your PEs and your specialized engineers, who may actually...

play a role in a way, but they are not necessarily very ingrained day to day helping you execute your project. Then you want to actually have different mechanisms through, like I was talking about, the reviews that we conduct or monthly program reviews where you bring in these people together even before you have started executing your product or your project. You're bringing them together and you're giving them updates, seeking their inputs, and so forth.

The third aspect in this creating that alignment is to make sure you have the metrics. And I'm going to sound like a broken record on some of these things, but they are that important. You need to make sure that the metrics you've defined, everybody aligns and understands that those metrics are really what are going to define our Northstar and our individual milestones. And that's very important because when you want these other stakeholders to come and join you,

in the initiative that you are driving, you're leading, you want to make sure that it creates a win -win for all the stakeholders involved. Because otherwise, you may still have a short -term alignment, but you might lose that momentum in the long term. If the metrics and the goals and the objectives and your incentives, if they are all aligned and you've all put in and defined them from the start,

Sarika Tyagi (31:19.31)
You're going to have a lot more buying from your stakeholders than what you would have otherwise. And finally, a very subtle thing, and unfortunately many times gets lost, is celebrate the small wins with your team. If you have seen a little success, call out. Give a call out to your team member who's been instrumental in helping you with that first milestone. Or the team, if they have

gone above and beyond, to support whatever needed to be done to make sure you were able to get to your customers, you were able to learn from your customers, and you were able to evolve your product, your vision, and your journey towards building a product that really matters and helps the customers.

Maulik Sailor (32:10.077)
I heard about this Amazon product memo. Before doing anything, you are required to write a PR memo or something. What is it about?

Sarika Tyagi (32:23.15)
yeah. So essentially, the idea is think about a new product you are trying to bring in the space, or a new capability which is going to change how you're fundamentally doing something. Like if you're running a certain process,

And if you want to evolve that process such that the customers are going to see the difference, then typically you would write something that we call as a PR FAQ. Once again, it's all part of the work backward structure, very well known, popularly known across even like within the industry. You basically write a one page PR, which is, it defines what

How would you actually talk to your external customers? If somebody was reading it from outside, how would you define your product? How would you define your problem statement, first of all? How would you define your product? What is your product bringing to the customers, the value it is bringing? And finally, how do we, as our leadership, kind of support this particular initiative? How do we actually anticipate this to really help our customers and the commitment that kind of comes from within the...

within the organization or within the company rather. So you're essentially creating this one page memo, which is how the outside, anybody who's not associated with your product or with the immediate team. So it is not just for somebody who works outside of Amazon. It is also mostly for people who are, you know, the cross teams that are not involved in the day to day of your work. And it is a very, very powerful.

one page, I would say, because it not only is a product, product manager, it forces you to think very clearly on what exactly are you trying to solve, how you are going to solve it in such a way that it is understood by a person who understands nothing about your space. So essentially, you know how you say an eight -year -old needs to be able to understand what you do? It is essentially similar to that. Like,

Maulik Sailor (34:35.617)
Yeah.

Sarika Tyagi (34:43.246)
A disconnected person should be able to understand that. It also comes with a lot of those supporting FAQs, which are frequently asked questions. So what you do is you kind of put yourself in the shoes of the people who are not in the immediate product team and identify what are the questions that people might have when they look at or read this one pager.

And then you go inside, go into details, and then you start answering those questions. It is, again, I repeat that it is such a powerful tool because it forces you as a product, as a product team as well. And you know, as your immediate design team, as your tech team, it forces you to think about how am I going to design my user experience? How am I going to identify or define some of these product specifications?

And then how am I going to actually implement it from a tech standpoint? What are the dependencies? What are the capabilities? And how am I really going to address some of those questions around metrics to my partner orgs? How is this going to influence or be influenced by the partner orgs, the customer value that we are bringing in, and essentially all the aspects that you should be thinking as a product manager.

The difference is now you're just putting it on a paper.

Maulik Sailor (36:09.601)
You know, one of the place where I worked is a big public company. But they had a very interesting way of prioritizing products, basically. So every product manager, similar to what you're talking about, like one -pager, so every product manager has to create like pitch, like a startup pitch about their product. And...

Sarika Tyagi (36:20.334)
Mm.

Maulik Sailor (36:32.417)
Like every bi -weekly, they had a company like a board meeting, like a proper board meeting with all the like CMO, CRO, you know, CFO, CEO, everybody in the room. And you go in as a product manager and you pitch your product that, hey, this is my product. This is what I want to do next. This is what, you know, the cost will be. This is what the returns are going to be and blah, blah, blah. And you're kind of a...

like pitching, like a proper dragon stand or, you know, something kind of moment. And they evaluate all the other product managers and decide, okay, which product or which proposition is the most value for their investment. And then accordingly, you'll get a go ahead. Okay, yeah, go ahead or do it or no, can it, you know, or come back with better information, right? But if you get go ahead,

Sarika Tyagi (37:23.95)
Thank you.

Maulik Sailor (37:24.385)
That is kind of a rule that, okay, this is the go ahead, means everybody in the company has to align to it. So that was like, no, like, yeah, there may be internal politics and all, but you know, everybody knows, okay, this has been approved. So it has to be done. Right. Right. Exactly. So I found that approach like, like, very unusual compared to many other companies I've worked with, but very effective in a way where it's kind of you competing, you really get in this.

Sarika Tyagi (37:37.966)
Disagree and commit. Whether, yes, yeah. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (37:53.793)
mindset of a value creation, you know, as a product, you know, product managers like mini CEOs, but here you were, you are actually see you're really thinking about the cost, the revenues, you know, the, any other metric drivers, not stars that you were talking about. and really like trying to win that funding, you know, from, from your board. and then once approved, then your job is to deliver that. Right. so I, I always found that particular approach very, very effective. And.

Like right now I have a small product team. It's me and another product manager which I hired recently. But if I scale to a bigger product team, hopefully we'll scale to a bigger platform and we have multiple product managers. That's exactly what I'm going to do. Ask them to come with a proper pitch.

Sarika Tyagi (38:40.878)
You know, it's a, and that reminds me actually of something that we do with our PR FAQs as well. So we don't, as a product, once you bring that document out, people will not talk to you or want to understand from you what you're doing. People would want to read through what you think you want to do and make sure that the doc actually explains it all. So.

Maulik Sailor (39:00.193)
Hmm.

Maulik Sailor (39:04.225)
Hmm.

Sarika Tyagi (39:07.278)
But I think just a different approach over there that, you know, how do you, and then of course there'll be Q &A, there'll be additional questions, there'll be, you'll always find those gaps, right? So additional discussions, but what that allows, and I actually love the approach that you're also sharing is because what that does is it forces the product manager to think deeply because it's important to not just think broadly, but also very deeply.

understanding and thinking about each of the different components that need to come together from design, tech, metrics, performance, and all of those perspectives to make sure that there are no loose ends. Because you might rather question and think through at this point versus at a point when the customers start pointing out some of those gaps in your product. Or worse yet, the customers just silently disappear because some of those...

key elements were missing and they were not as tight as they should have been. So fully aligned with that.

Maulik Sailor (40:08.257)
Exactly. Just moving on a little bit from our discussion, of course, we can go about talk a lot about defining your product requirements and all of those things. But after doing all this hard work, there is a moment when you are about to release your product. Now, I have been involved in a product launch which has gone really bad once. This was right at the beginning of my career. I was fairly young, fairly new and...

I was like my first PM job effectively and things went wrong. Not something that we had this and like plan for or thought about. And at the same time, you know, recently, like I'm sure you know about chat, GPT and OpenAI, right? They were not sure whether to launch the product or not. And they just thought of launching it and it's like exploded, you know, that we know. Tell us about.

some of your product launches, what do you think about, what do you plan for?

Sarika Tyagi (41:08.398)
Yeah, you know, it's going to sound like an unfortunate statement. However, we all need to have that one launch that goes south. However, it's also true that there are many, you know, they say that you don't make a mistake unless you're working hard and working towards something. So I think failure in product launches, I have seen a few of those, especially in my startup.

a lot of those. And I think with those failures, there were a lot of critical learnings that also came in. You know, typically when you are launching a product, there again, whether you are in a startup state or you are working in a large organization, the challenges that you will see with any launch, they're going to be very different.

When you think about a startup, there are the risks. I would say the complexities are low because you are a very cohesive smaller team from a team standpoint. However, the risks are huge because you're also a smaller team. You have less resources, less eyes to kind of think about it from different perspectives.

probably even not that much experience sitting together in bringing variety of those products in the specific segments. That might be a very helpful piece of information as you are launching. And when you think of large organizations, there are a lot of stakeholders. There are a lot of complexities because there are so many people engaged. And also the stakes are high. Like if you think about,

big companies, when they bring a product, even a capability, there's a lot of scrutiny that would be surrounding in the external world in terms of how does it impact? Because even a slight change makes a huge impact on the customer base that they have. So I think there are going to be different kinds of challenges. Of course, the benefit here is you have a lot of different eyes, set of eyes, reviews.

Sarika Tyagi (43:28.27)
the experience of launching too many different types of products. So, you know, the dependency on one or fewer people is less. However, there are different challenges and more often than not, I mean, I have yet to be a part of a launch and I can't count how many launches as a product manager in my career I have done where I haven't seen something that I, you know, that it went all green, that it was all smooth.

And I was like, hey, this is a piece of cake. I mean, you are always going to have challenges right before launch, during the launch, post launch. And that's a given. So I think it's important to acknowledge that launches are... Don't expect the launches to go smooth. But what is very, very important in this process is to know where or what are those areas or potential pitfalls.

that could go wrong in your specific scenario. And if so, how are you going to address that? You need to know what they say is the BATNA. It's like the best alternate to an existing situation. And the idea there is make sure you are integrated as a product manager, not just in the design, in the tech, in the details of the down grains of the tech.

progress, and from a customer standpoint, from an external communication standpoint, stakeholder standpoint, from metrics preparation standpoint, you want to make sure that all of these elements are falling in the right place. And wherever things are not, you kind of go and take charge and make sure that the right things are put in place. So for example, almost like a readiness checklist.

So the first thing is, once you get on the journey of kicking off your milestone, whatever initiative you're working on, I make sure, first of all, that all the design docs, they are ready and available. First of all, think about it from a product development readiness. So in the product development readiness, you would think about, are your designs ready, frozen, finalized, given to tech? Because as.

Sarika Tyagi (45:51.374)
robust as you want it to be. Many times it's going to happen that they are not, some of this is happening in parallel. You want to make sure you are probing the tech teams, having those deep conversations to identify the right risks. Is it a compliance risk? Are there any partner dependency risks? Because that's where you as a product would need to come up and kind of create that stakeholder alignment. If...

The tech teams are not getting that kind of right support. You also want to identify, make sure you've identified those risks. You want to identify any exceptions. You had your requirements document, but you will also find that there are exceptions along the way that you may have to make. And as a product, you are making those trade -offs to make sure, is this something that's a non -negotiable thing, or is this something that can be a fast follow -on? You want to also ensure that your tech team, your design, your marketing, all of these people are

unblocked from any stakeholders and partner teams. Your test plans need to be there, and you need to have your launch plan. Whether you're launching it as an experimentation in a web lab or you're going all out and kind of in a staged way, you want to make sure you understand what your launch strategy is going to be. So that kind of all relates to your product development readiness. There comes, if this is depending on the type of product it is, you may have external communication that

you know, to your, maybe do a PR, maybe you need to reach out to your, you know, to your customers, maybe to your external partners, whatever that is, have the right communication, whatever questions you think, anticipate those, put together a formal responses for them and make sure you're circulating and bringing that out as visibility ahead of time.

You make sure you also doing your analytics readiness, you know, more often than not, what happens is, Hey, metrics is going to come, it's going to come. And then here you are on the day of launch and your metrics is not ready. Then you are either scrambling to do those ad hoc reports, which sometimes are not even effective, or you're not able to, you've not created the right data pipelines, which take time. make sure you're doing that ahead of time, work with the right, you know, stakeholders and partners to do that.

Sarika Tyagi (48:13.23)
And finally, make sure that team is aligned. Team is aligned on your communication of your product, on how the launch is structured. You remember the launch plan I was talking about. Make sure the team is aligned on the launch plan. The partner, the teams that are immediately working within, so you know, the tech, the design, the marketing, all of these are actually trickling it down to their leadership as well in terms of, you know, how and what the plan is. And again, it can be a collective effort.

But you need to make sure that your entire team is aligned, your leadership is aligned on what the plan is and so forth. It's a checklist that you prepare. And after that, you have discussed enough through these mechanisms that if things are going to fall off, you have backup plans on how you are going to address that.

Maulik Sailor (48:50.497)
Cool.

Maulik Sailor (49:04.225)
I think you need a checklist of all the checklists.

Sarika Tyagi (49:08.59)
That's true too.

Maulik Sailor (49:10.185)
All right, you know, we touched upon the open AI and chat LGBT. You know, right now we are seeing a lot of AI stuff happening here. The whole world is going crazy about that. There's a lot of startup investment as well. We see investment backing some crazy AI startups. A lot of talks going on about, you know, roles becoming redundant. You know, developers may no longer have their jobs and whatever. Right. I want to ask you two questions there. First.

Like on developments, I don't there is a co -pilot and other tools out there which can help developers do better programming. But do you think of any tools or any technologies currently out there or in development that can help a product manager better in doing their jobs?

Sarika Tyagi (49:58.734)
Yeah, there are so many different tools. A while ago, I was doing a research on, I just Googled. In fact, I went to Bard and I asked, what are the different tools? There were so many tools and in very different spaces. I'll give you a few examples. When you think about the user research that we conduct today, it's a very manual process. You prepare a research plan, you go talk to your customers.

You listen to those videos, you prepare, you interpret that resolution, and then you prepare the report on what the customer's feedback was. All of this, imagine, happening through automated tools. That's kind of one thing that's kind of coming along. The other aspect is in this space of just AI for all product managers, where...

The product managers, earlier it was expected that if you are a product manager working in AI space, you need to understand, you need to be a lot more technical. But now, so think about you're building an app and you want to bring in a chat bot, integrate into it. I mean, there's no way a product manager was going to do that. There would be engineers, there would be data scientists you would be working with and along with the other teams. Now there are tools like, I think,

There's a tool I heard about that's called a Drift. And there are many. There are many of those tools, and there are many more coming up, which essentially allows you to integrate a chatbot, like a drag and drop capability, within the app that you're building. Other aspect is from a personalization standpoint, not so much of a tool per se, but I think.

That's going to be a big thing where there's a lot of these earlier. What used to happen is the products would take in explicit signals from the customer asking very specifically, hey, what are you looking for? What kind of a product do you need so that you would give a recommendation back? But now there are all these implicit signals that are possible to.

Sarika Tyagi (52:14.926)
really evaluate given the growth in that technology that we're experiencing so that now customers or product managers or the product teams are able to use these implicit signals to give those recommendations, give the recommendation that you know is going to work for this particular person or the deals or the personalized experiences that you offer to them.

And finally, along the same lines, it's going to be increasingly important. And this is one point I want to bring up. As you build your products and as you make them more AI driven, it's going to be very important to make sure that you are bringing in the right level of explanation to your products or your recommendations. It's not the same now that I go to a salesperson, I give them my requirements, they give me a product and explain why.

Now that job is happening online in your app. So you need to make sure to be successful no matter what tools you are using, no matter how you're building your products. But given that you're leveraging some of these technologies, it is important to bring the right explanation for the customer so the customer is not wondering, why am I seeing this? And does it make sense for me to see this?

Maulik Sailor (53:13.121)
Mm.

Maulik Sailor (53:35.073)
Cool. And the second question is related to the job of a product manager. So do we all need to go back to farming? Or do we need to learn new skills to stay ahead of the AI game? What skills do we need?

Sarika Tyagi (53:54.318)
You know, no, we don't all have to go back to farming. However, farming is a really growing trend and a growing space where I definitely want to dabble in at some point of time in my life. But you know, no, I don't think so. I think it's a great time to be a product manager. We are seeing such an incremental, accelerated focus on product -led.

growth in and the products that we are building. You know, I look at AI as an assistant, that's it. I look at it as a way for this technology to help me do things better, reduce my busy work, so I can focus more on strategy and the art that AI can't do for me, or definitely not in the foreseeable future.

And sure, yes, we'll have to constantly be agile in how we think about this. However, I really believe that there are a few things that have become more important as a product manager. Now that we are working so much with this evolved technology in AI, one is the product managers have to be a lot more data savvy. You need to be comfortable working with data analytical tools. You need to be comfortable knowing what implicit data is available.

How do you use this data and then slice it in a way to make your conclusions? AI is gonna make all the data available to you. How do I use that data and interpret that data and make evolutions in my product? That's gonna be a big job of a product manager. I also believe that, you know, as product, you will need to make sure you understand what are the applications of AI.

How do I use AI? What kind of models do I use? Do I know how this model is generated so that the bias in the model is clearly understood? I need to understand the inputs that are going into my models that I'm using to create my outputs. So that's going to be very important. And third thing I feel that's going to be super important is focusing more and more and more on our user experience. You know, you.

Sarika Tyagi (56:16.27)
There was earlier views to spend a lot of money on marketing so that we would bring more attention to the customers. Now we're moving into the area where you want to focus and spend more resources on actually building a product which is focusing on the customers so that there's organic growth and customers would want to come back to their product and use it. In all of this, I cannot and I think about this every day, but I cannot stress enough the importance of

you know, keeping and building responsibly, using AI responsibly, where you're building the products that are, you know, keeping the customer data safe. You're building the products that are not biased in the models that I was referring to. You're also building the products which, you know, which are good for the society. You're thinking about all of those aspects together. And finally, be curious.

As a product manager, this is your time to constantly learn, constantly be open to new ideas, new technologies, learn because there is no substitute for that. You'll have to constantly be agile to be able to survive and thrive as a product manager who's able to bring products that customers love.

Maulik Sailor (57:35.681)
That's great. That's great advice, Sarika. Look, I want to talk more to you, but the mindful of your time as well here. I think it's about time we start wrapping this discussion. But before we end the conversation, we normally ask a few questions to all of our guests. They're generic ones, so don't get scared. But they would be good to... I think they will be good for you to also answer in my opinion. So let me ask you the first one.

Who is one person living or dead doesn't matter that you got inspired the most in your life from.

Sarika Tyagi (58:14.894)
Wow, that is going to require some thinking. You know, one, and again, this answer may evolve now that I'm going to be thinking a bit more about this. One person that comes to my mind, and I have wondered about this a lot as my kids read the books, the Harry Potter books, is the author, J .K. Rowling.

Maulik Sailor (58:38.529)
Mm.

Okay.

Sarika Tyagi (58:41.742)
I believe she has done a tremendous, she has a very, she has, her background has a lot of struggles. She really struggled to come up with a product that has become like a masterpiece for all generations globally. And I would really love to understand what was her journey like of building, of going through those struggles, building the product that she did. And I know she went through,

Maulik Sailor (58:57.153)
Yeah.

Sarika Tyagi (59:10.67)
tons of different iterations. She failed many times as I have read a bit about her. And then she successfully created an empire, which I don't know if it will ever die and even the next generation to come.

Maulik Sailor (59:25.025)
Yeah, no, that's amazing. I think she certainly had struggles of her own. And what commendable, you know, she's from UK, right? I'm based in London, as you know. She's from the UK. I think she lives in Scotland. And when she sold her movie rights of her books, she kind of made a deal, like a point that all the production has to be done in the UK with majority of the UK actors in it.

Right. So she kind of brought back that whole industry back to the UK. And right now, you know, you wouldn't believe me, but actually London is becoming like an, like an LA outside LA with a lot of productions going on here. Right. So, you know, a lot of things happening thanks to her in the, in the creative art space. So yeah, we are curious for that. Anyways, the second question, right? Again, a very similar, interesting one.

Who is the one person that, again, living or dead doesn't matter, that you would like to go on a dinner with?

Sarika Tyagi (01:00:30.542)
that I would like to? Ooh.

Maulik Sailor (01:00:32.129)
Go on a dinner.

Not your husband.

Sarika Tyagi (01:00:37.646)
That wouldn't be the name. You know, I don't know if I have a very strong reason. Maybe I do, but it would be the Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi. I think, and again, you know, just at a personal level, I am really intrigued by how he manages his aura.

Maulik Sailor (01:00:53.377)
Woody? Yeah.

Sarika Tyagi (01:01:07.214)
And I love how he speaks. I would just like to understand what his journey, in his own words, what his journey has been so far. So I find him to be very charismatic. So yeah, that would be my pick.

Maulik Sailor (01:01:21.941)
Yeah, great, wonderful. And the last one, right? Who do you think we should invite to our podcast? Can be anybody.

Sarika Tyagi (01:01:29.838)
Hina, I'm going to have to think about that, Maulik. This one is probably a harder question. There are a few people that come to my mind. Let me get back to you on this.

Maulik Sailor (01:01:40.129)
Jeff, those is Jeff Faison.

Do you want to mention Jeff?

Sarika Tyagi (01:01:46.958)
Jeff Bezos? I would actually like to go with him first.

Maulik Sailor (01:01:52.257)
Okay, cool. Anyways, look, Sarika, it has been great speaking to you and I'm really, really pleased that we connected after a long time, right? I know more about you. You know, I wish we can talk more, you know, maybe we do plan another recording with you at some point. But, you know, thanks a lot for making time.

For us and our audience, you know, it's a really great to talk about your journey the products you have been involved with and what you really go about You know thinking about the products that you're building and how you really go about doing things behind the scenes, right? And and I think a lot of general audience B2C don't really understand the hard work that goes into making a product, right? You know, yes, there is an engineering team. There's a lot of other stuff going on But just the amount of thoughts you need to put in

to make a great product. It's not something that I can easily describe in words, right? And some of the great product managers that even I know personally of, they are like super, like super talented individuals that are from another planet, not from this planet. So thanks a lot, Sarika, and all the best for your journey. And to our audience who are joining us today, thanks a lot for making your time.

If you want to listen to more of this podcast, then do subscribe to YouTube and Spotify channels or to our newsletters. By the way, there's a small announcement. We're changing our brand name from code .com .ai to notchup .com. So in a few weeks time, our domain is going to change. So just make sure you bookmark the new one. Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Sarika Tyagi (01:03:30.19)
Thank you, Marley.

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