Some of the most exciting work I’ve done has always involved playing with CDRs (Communication Data Records) & that means I’ve daydreamt about phone numbers. Thrilling, I know.

Communication fraud always involved phone numbers naturally. But eventually as I crossed over to the online world I had an epiphany as I started noticing the importance of phone numbers and their behavior in online fraud as well. At Telesign, I get an opportunity to live that dream and help the world’s top online companies predict fraud using my telco background and experience.

REASON #1 — Phone Numbers have become a Centre Stone of your Digital Identity. Ignore it at your own RISK.

Not everyone has a passport, desktop, national ID — but they have a phone and a phone number that is unique. I’ve used the below picture for a few years to explain the increasing importance of a Phone Number. I started my journey on the internet many years back with an ICQ messenger using random numbers as my ID. Then came email, social logins & eventually PHONE NUMBERS. I associate the growth of applications like Whatsapp with Mobile & Phone Numbers. Mobile started to become ubiquitous in the last few decades and the ease of creating an account with just a Phone Number meant gigantic global GROWTH. Since then, many applications and services have used similar growth strategies. Many have updated their onboarding processes to include phone numbers — because users want to be reached on their Mobile — whenever & wherever.

A Phone Number alternative like Email puts your growth strategy in many markets at risk. Many growth managers I spoke to had a common issue. They tried launching an Email-based onboarding process in markets like China, India, Brazil only to realize that users either didn’t have email address or they rarely used it. There are close to 6 billion unique mobile users globally (in 2020) vs 4 Billion unique email addresses. The gap starts to widen as you dissect global markets much more closely.

https://www.goldthread2.com/culture/why-chinese-people-dont-use-email/article/3007702

https://qz.com/india/1169983/forget-amazon-or-flipkart-millions-of-indias-internet-users-have-never-even-tried-google-wikipedia-or-e-mail/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tobyshapshak/2018/12/18/almost-all-of-facebooks-139m-users-in-africa-are-on-mobile/#1fedef7a68e7

REASON #2 : Phone Number can move the needle — it help you detect bad users and good users

A Phone Number has many dimensions — its associations and behavior across multiple networks can give strong indicators on multiple outcomes, fraud and non-fraud being one of them. In my experience of working with various Fraud Managers globally, I’ve seen the below attributes being used extensively to predict fraud outcomes.

REASON #3 : Phone number can be applicable throughout the life cycle. Get a lift on your models !!

Online companies and enterprises have several challenges throughout the lifecycle of their users and their data scientists run plenty of models to gauge risks or insights to predict outcomes. Some of the most common models where phone number insights are valuable are highlighted below. If you own one of those models — try checking if a Phone Number could help you find that hidden fraudster!!

In my future articles I’ll give more insights on the specifics of phone number’s applications on various risk models throughout the user lifecycle.

What kind of Product Manager are you?

I love my role being part of the Product Management team at @Telesign. Let me start with a quick background — I started my career within the Professional services Org at a leading product company in India — Subex. Yes, it was rare 15 years back. There were hardly any product driven companies from India back then. Ranger from Subex & Financle from Infosys were the only famous IT products from India back then. Being part of the PSO team gave me an opportunity to become customer facing from day 1. The most important word for any business “CUSTOMER”. Customer’s taught me about their problems. Then I jumped to KPMG for a consulting stint for 2 years. The rigor taught me about the BIG4 life — made my work much sharper and more presentable. Although short this was one of the most phase of my careers thanks to my colleagues and seniors. Post KPMG I did presales again for Subex. More customers & more RFPs. Enter phase 2 of my career — moved to BICS, Belgium as a product manager. A make or break phase for me — moved from vendor-side to industry, jumped oceans, switched roles. It was about to get more exciting. Working with 40+ different nationalities at a global organization (BICS) taught me about cultures, influences, perspectives and possibilities. Today, I feel very honored to be a part of the Telesign Product Management team — where I am able to apply my learnings from past experiences, sitting next to the customer, working with a highly motivate organization and more importantly “create” something new.

Different product managers are driven by diverse traits or their combinations. There can be plenty of ways you can slice & dice product managers. In my short career, I’ve seen the following kinds which I would like to reflect upon.

The Checklist Guy

Self-explanatory. Like any other business unit — Product Manager is either the “influencer” of “influenced” within an organization. An influenced product unit feels like a sinkhole most of the times. From sales — to billing — to support — provisioning everyone points their issues to the Product Manager. As a new joiner this is the worst situation to be in. The fear of being a sinkhole makes the over thinking pessimist PMs prepare a list of non-exhaustive lists of pre, post product launch checks. I may want to clarify that its good to have a basic check list. What is worrisome — are PMs preparing a list of all (non-probable & probable) failures within processes, products or GTMs and an associated plan. Symptoms of business run by such PMs looks like Postmortems, Re-launches or Re-branding. Legacy organizations tend to accumulate a lot of such PMs and defend their style of work. As these organizations transform themselves to be more operationally effective, this tribe of PMs is becoming non-relevant and disappearing fast.

Buzzword Architect

The most detrimental PM tribe. These PMs advocates “industry reports”, “hype cycles”, “technology trends” as “Innovation”. Most of them are unable to associate customer’s buying behavior to product value. This tribe rides on industry waves. If a market grows their product grows. Life becomes tough for them when the market starts throwing up challenges (i.e 99 out of 100 times). Since they have never understood their product value or misunderstood a “technology as a product”, they feel clueless to the testing market conditions or customers. Hope never fades for this tribe, they have their own fan following within organizations and continue to survive. They jump from one buzzword to another, until the organizations burn out of buzzwords.

Engineer by heart

I don’t know why manage engineers feel shy of becoming product mangers. They tend think that technology is a much-trusted function (that will not fail them) than supporting sales or facing customers. Having said that, many successful PMs have been engineers. Building your own product (even an MVP) and taking it to market is a very strong proposition. Right balance of technical skills, understanding of production cost levers and the sweet spot of customer needs is a very lethal proposition. As a product manager the right combination of this balance, it confines your dependency within the larger organization if you possess this balance. Lot of startups and organizations making tech products are full of this tribe. Their skillsets are “must” for markets/products where technical needs determine buyer’s value or consumption.

The Sales Hero

A very famous tribe. A happy customer is a salesperson’s dream. That’s why the name of this tribe. Puts customer at the heart of product building and GTM process. Constantly strives to qualify the customer’s problem vs product value, prepares a customer driven roadmap, acts as a pseudo customer towards the engineering organization, if needed will fight on behalf of the customer within an organization. With cross functional support with an organization he can ideate, build, grow successful products and capture new markets. You would often see individuals from sales or presales background ending up in this tribe. Point of caution for this tribe — sometimes customers don’t know what they want. They like to be told what’s best for them. Few can transition this challenge and enter the next tribe — which is the “creator”.

Creator

Creators are rare and zen-like. The denounce industry reports, hype cycle and even customer’s biased understanding of problems. Remember customers have their limitations as well — they also tend to look at their problems from a buzzword, hype-cycle or just legacy perspective (we’ve always solved the problem like this),true creators fundamentally look at new ways to solve a problem .While average or good PMs keep operating in the existing market conditions to incremental value for buyers (i.e the same product at a lower cost or a differentiated product) , creators create a new level playing field without getting bound by the current industry conditions successfully. Essentially the create a new value curve where cost doesn’t matter. They make customer fan of their products and their marketing engine, competition is no more relevant. Startups and companies operating in “red-oceans” handpick creators to take themselves towards “blue-oceans”.

Eventually a good product team is not one or all the above. Its an ever-evolving balance of the above styles to drive your immediate product needs and long term transformation strategy (if needed).

So which tribe do you belong to ?

#ProductManagement #ProductManagers