On its way up, Zerodha has been able to displace very deep pocketed incumbents in a short period of time. This is particularly remarkable since Zerodha is completely bootstrapped from ground up and has used no external investor money. How rare it is in the age of WeWork’s and Uber’s!

In the remainder of this article, we will look at the secret sauce behind Zerodha’s success, how it has democratised investment technology, its vision to bring new people into the folds of the capital markets and lastly an area that could use improvement.

The Secret Sauce is the usual suspects: Business Model and Technology

I. BUSINESS MODEL

The traditional business model for brokers was commission based, where a cut of every transaction’s value went into the broker’s pockets as the brokerage fee. The brokers usually offered other services in the bundle like stock recommendations to justify the hefty fees. For traders though, this is not an attractive proposition. Traders make money by speculation and usually do a high number of big value buy-sell transactions.

Zerodha was born in 2010 when Nitin Kamath, himself a trader, imagined and later pioneered the discount broking model in India.

With a discount broking model, Zerodha charges a very small flat fee on every transaction, irrespective of its value. Due to the high volumes of transactions, it is able to leverage the advantages of economies of scale. Zerodha is further able to reduce its cost by not offering advisory services like the traditional brokers. (How good are professional stock pickers from monkeys throwing darts anyway ?)

II. TECHNOLOGY

The technology behind Zerodha has evolved into the best among its peers, by far. This has also given Zerodha a competitive edge. Kite is Zerodha’s ultra fast, sleek trading platform designed for the modern customer, with excellent usability. In fact, Kite’s mobile app contributes to 70% of its traffic, contrary to the common wisdom that trading happens on larger screens. It has a far superior experience when compared to other trading and investing platforms which tend to be clunky, bloated and difficult to navigate.

In the section below, we discuss how Kite solves the key technical challenges:

1. Correctness

The most benign bugs in Software which is handling financial transactions, specially with as high turnover as a broker’s, can lead to catastrophic losses for the company and its customers. The Knight Capital’s fiasco is an infamous example of financial software gone wrong, leading to millions of dollars in losses. Zerodha has therefore placed high premium on correct execution of clients’ orders.

Zerodha has also been able to move away from the legacy dependencies in the capital markets (like third party order management solutions) to a huge extent by building its own layers of technology over the years. This ensures glitch free order execution.

2. Performance

Besides being bug-free, the infrastructure also necessarily needs to be performant. The stock exchange publishes millions of updates per second, which need to be streamed to millions of clients around the country. These realtime updates are not only important for UX but are also needed for order execution at the right prices, and to prevent slippage in case of market orders. This warrants low latency infrastructure.

3. Scaling

To be able to scale horizontally to millions of clients on demand, “the core of the Zerodha platform is built on replicable processes — it clones automatically if more users come online”. On exchange side, Zerodha has multiple dedicated lease lines for load balancing the traffic, and to also provide for fault tolerance in case one of these lease lines goes down. The most important of all tech metrics for Zerodha (or any other broker) is uptime. It invests a lot into avoiding any downtime and ensure business continuity.

Investment technology for everyone

Apart from the trading platform, Zerodha has developed and exposed easy to use APIs and client libraries for retail customers, with Kite Connect. This empowers people like you and me to develop our own trading strategies and trade like big hedge funds do! This has truly democratised capital markets in India.

True innovation is one that fosters more innovation. Exposing the core APIs publicly has enabled other startups to build on top of the Broking service provided by Zerodha. Any new platform can directly leverage the trading/execution capabilities provided as a plug and play service by Zerodha.

This opens doors for other fintech companies to innovate in the sector, despite the heavy regulatory, financial and bureaucratic barriers in the country.

III. VISION : BRINGING NEW PEOPLE INTO THE FOLD

The grand vision for Zerodha has another important component: Introducing and bringing more people into the folds of capital markets. Today, less than 0.1% of the Indian population actively participate in capital markets [2]. That leaves an untapped 99.9% for others to innovate and increase the size of the pie. By democratising and commoditising its investment technology, Zerodha has taken the first leap in that direction. With its Rainmeter initiative, it also aims to incubate and fund innovative Indian fintech startups.

Varsity, another initiative by Zerodha aims to educate more people about markets and investing. Zerodha has also fostered a vibrant and active community forum to gather continuous feedback and interact with users directly. And then there are other unconventional initiatives like mediation sessions for traders!

Evidently, Zerodha wants to create a comprehensive and supportive ecosystem for the financial success of more and more people in the country, which in turn would benefit Zerodha as well.

Perfect, is it ?

Zerodha was built with a focus on traders and seasoned investors. These customers utilise the platform to simply transact and track their orders or portfolio. However, as Zerodha adds more millennial customers, the product needs to evolve to serve their specific needs.

As of now, it has mostly chosen to leverage the network of its partner apps like Streak and Sensibull (for traders), Smallcase (for millennials), Coin (for passive mutual fund investors) and apps like Tickertape for research and generating ideas. This however, does not translate into a smooth experience for the customer on the platform.

The millennial user needs a trigger/nudge to start investing and do the due diligence. The trigger can be in the form of news, analyst opinions or other information, presented to the user in an intuitive manner.

Improvements along these lines can help Zerodha become the one stop solution for all kinds of customers : traders, investors and millennials.

Thanks for reading.

(Thinking Product is a blog series which encourages the readers to think deeper about the products they use everyday. I hope to uncover the behind the scenes thought process, that goes into delivering a visceral experience to the product users. Also read previous articles in this series: Zoom, Spotify, Duolingo)

Say hello on Twitter @BabelSakshi

References:

1. https://startuparound.com/read/1587513605.855892/[Product-Roadmap]-The-evolution-of-Zerodha,-one-of-India's-largest-retail-online-brokerages#gsc.tab=0
2. https://zerodha.com/z-connect/zerodha/bulletin-latest-at-zerodha/commoditising-and-democratising-investment-technology
3. https://zerodha.com/z-connect/zerodha/bulletin-latest-at-zerodha/todays-technical-issues-postmortem
4. For a fun read about Zerodha’s tech philosophy, do read Kailash Nadh’s blog here.

As the corona virus pandemic strengthened its grip on the world, technology has come to everyone’s aid in loosening that grip. Of particular interest is the meteoric rise of the video conferencing tool Zoom. From university classes to friend reunions and from virtual marriages to funerals, zoom is the new interface for social interaction. Given the exponential rise in its popularity, it is worth investigating what lies underneath its success (as well as the scrutiny that followed!).

Eric Yuan, left Cisco (after it acquired Webex) and started Zoom with the sole mission of building a video conferencing product that CUSTOMERS LOVE. Despite video conferencing being a crowded market already, Eric was convinced that there existed a vacuum when it came to having seamless video conversations.

And boy was he right! Videoconferencing is difficult. But why, you ask. Firstly and quite ironically, most of the products out there just don’t work! Remember those meetings with too many people? The smallest lag causes people to talk over or stop talking, creating awkward situations. And then, some of them would just abruptly drop off because of poor internet connectivity. This is exacerbated when the product does not support different kinds of devices, each with different capabilities, equally well.

In the remainder of the article we will talk about three things: 1) How is Zoom able to create a smooth video experience for its users 2) What have been the trade-offs in creating that experience and 3) What lies ahead for Zoom and the video conferencing industry.

Creating a product that customers love

Let’s take the example of a university class to understand how Zoom mimics the offline experience for its users.

“ Professor Bill takes a Sociology class at 9 in the morning. Students come rushing to the class just at about 9. Professor Bill asks the students to raise their hands if they would be interested in doing a group activity. Students look excited. Prof Bill explains the activity to the class and decides to break them up in groups of five. Students finish the activity and then present their work to the class. The class is about to be over, when one of the students has a doubt. Prof Bill decides to take the question outside and asks the student to visit him in his office during the office hours.”

Now the university decides to go digital…

Professor Andrew suggests a new tool called ‘Zoom’ to Professor Bill and explains how it can be useful in keeping up with his teaching style:

Andrew: Hey Bill, this video conferencing tool is unlike anything else out there. First of all, this one REALLY WORKS! You can take a class of 20 or even 200. Students can join the class without any hassle, in just a single click. No more installing complicated softwares and creating accounts. You can also save the hassle of scheduling your classes every time. Just share your meeting room with the class and they can enter in just like they would usually do at the university.

Bill: Andrew, that sounds great but what happens to those group activities and my office hours?

Andrew: Alright! With Zoom’s breakout rooms, that’s possible too. Split up the class into different breakout rooms and then reconvene when you want to. There is also a live poll feature to replace the quick show of hands. Another key advantage is that you can be in control of your class.

And about our offices, they are digital too with the personal meeting room feature. Replace office no. with personal meeting IDs and students can barge in whenever they need. If you want to make it even more real, then just put on a picture of your office as your virtual background!

Professor Bill is excited now and looks forward to using this tool.

End of this story.

But what is it that Zoom was able to do that most other platforms could not? The answer lies in Zoom’s claims of being the first video platform that was built and optimised for video since the very beginning. Most other platforms attempted to add video on to a legacy solution of chat, screen sharing etc which resulted in a clunky experience for its users. [4]

To put this in perspective, there are two important aspects of Zoom’s technology stack:

1. The cloud network: Zoom operates its own data centres in 17 locations around the globe which are interlinked through private connections. [1] This gives Zoom a lot of control and flexibility when it comes to routing and serving video content in real time.

2. Video architecture: Traditionally video conferencing solutions have relied on a standard centralised architecture (called MCU). [1] The different participants’ video streams were collected, processed and broadcasted from a central server. Zoom identified this bottleneck and built a decentralised architecture to collect, process and broadcast video streams of different participants by different servers. This way Zoom has been able to horizontally scale the number of participants to hundreds and even thousands!

Trade-offs for a frictionless experience

While Zoom succeeded in delivering a product with great user experience, it made some heavy trade-offs to achieve that goal.

Researchers recently discovered that Zoom installer bypassed security mechanisms so that it could launch with fewer clicks. This resulted in the unintended consequence of users’ webcams being accessible to not just the company but also to hackers [4].

Moreover, Zoom meeting IDs are short, number based URLs which can be easily generated by hackers for hijacking and trolling meetings (unless they are password protected). This rampant abuse is now a phenomena called ‘Zoom-bombing’. Similarly, Zoom did not support end to end encryption (contrary to its earlier claims) for group meetings because it is very difficult to do encryption while making sure the experience is intact [5].

After this hyper scrutiny from researchers, media and governments, Zoom is now tackling these issues aggressively. It is a lesson for other companies to not leave security and privacy on the back-burner during product development.

Some parting thoughts on the future

The pandemic has caused people to shift from the physical to the digital in a matter of few weeks or months, which would have otherwise taken years. Players like Zoom will catapult on this trend. For Yuan, he is not building a video chat service but something that will start looking more like a Metaverse, a virtual shared space.

In his words [2]: “Imagine a world where, anywhere, any device, one click, you feel like you’re in the same conference room … you can see each other and shake hands.”

It is a bold vision and there is still a long way before virtual environments accurately simulate the in-person interactions. For the short term though, let’s hope that Zoom solves some of these rather awkward social situations on video calls (Courtesy: Twitter):

1. When the speaker makes a joke and everyone is on mute. It seems the joke has fallen flat but nobody wants to unmute to just go ‘haha’ :p
2. When a speaker is done with the presentation and everyone just leaves. There is no applause. Even though unintentional, it seems rude. Isn’t it?
3. Or when you are not on mute and the baby finds the perfect moment to cry!

Thanks for reading.

(Thinking Product is a blog series which encourages the readers to think deeper about the products they use everyday. I hope to uncover the behind the scenes thought process, that goes into delivering a visceral experience to the product users. Also read previous articles in this series : Spotify, Duolingo)

References:

1. https://www.sjsu.edu/workanywhere/docs/Zoom%20Message.pdf
2. https://www.protocol.com/zoom-videoconferencing-history-profit
3. https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/06/26/zoom-can-provide-increase-industry-leading-video-capacity/
4. https://onezero.medium.com/zoom-is-a-nightmare-so-why-is-everyone-still-using-it-1b05a4efd5cc
5. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/

Thinking Product is a blog series which encourages the readers to think deeper about the products they use everyday. I hope to uncover the behind the scenes thought process, that goes into delivering a visceral experience to the product users.

Spotify is an audio streaming platform which provided access to over 50 million songs from record labels and media companies. It has 271 million monthly active users including 124 million paying subscribers.

I still remember listening to my Dad’s favourite songs on our cassette player, before it slowly went obsolete. Then I grew up, and like my friends at school, I was copying CDs and collecting my favourite songs. Though it was inconvenient, but hey, it was free! As kids, none of us were probably aware that copying and distributing songs was ‘piracy’ and hence, illegal.

The music industry has since come a long way, with the disruption brought on by the Internet and digital technology. As the industry grappled with piracy in the early 2000s, a glaring inefficiency in the industry’s business model was exposed. It thrived on selling entire music albums for high prices. This meant that only a very narrow customer base was captured. With digital technology, there had to be a middle way between $15 for a CD and $free.

There were in fact two ways: First was Apple’s introduction of digital downloads with the iTunes store. Users could download a single song for 99 cents. Second was the introduction of subscription based music streaming services like Spotify, which gave users access to all of the world’s music, legally.

Let’s now talk more about Spotify.

A listener’s journey of listening to music can be divided into four stages:

It is worthwhile to look at how Spotify solves each part of the journey for the user :

I. Access to music: Spotify began with the aim of providing access to all of the world’s music. The ingenuity of the product truly lies in its business model. Early on, Spotify partnered with the three major record labels that dominate the entire music industry: Warner Music, Sony Music and Universal Music. These record labels deliver licensed music to Spotify, and in turn get paid 70% of the streaming revenues (subscriptions and ads predominantly) from Spotify. The record labels further distribute a portion of these revenues to the artists, based on the artists’ market share of the total music streamed.

II. Find the right music to play: Not being able to quickly play your favourite music can be itchy.

Along with the standard browse filters of mood, activity etc., Spotify’s ‘Daily Mix’ playlists are designed to solve exactly that. They’re the shortest path to a good and comfortable music experience.

But, all users are not the same! A friend might listen to pop all day but you might listen to classical in the morning, jazz at work and punk rock during evenings. Based on a user’s listening pattern, Spotify identifies groups of similar songs and creates upto 6 pre-mixed playlists. These playlists cater to the user’s familiar and favourite music, with only a small amount of discovery. And these playlists are never ending :)

III. Play the music smoothly: Since the music is being served to the user on demand, a seamless listening experience is of paramount importance. To solve this, Spotify uses a mix of caching, pre-fetching and P2P sharing. The primary goal here is to serve the music immediately, while also reducing excess load on the servers. The details of these concepts are however, out of the scope of this article.

IV. Explore new music: All music recommendation systems in particular, are faced with a unique problem: similarity v/s diversity (yes, the same exploration v/s exploitation trade-off!). Very bold and you err towards apathy, very restrictive and you err towards boredom. Spotify solves this dilemma with one of their super-hit features, ‘Discover Weekly’. Every week, users receive a new playlist of songs that they have never heard before.

In order to come up with the perfect Discover Weekly playlist, Spotify combines a number of recommendation models. Let’s take a sneak peek at them.

Collaborative filtering is used to recommend songs based on the behaviour of other similar users. Here is an analogy to understand this better:

But what if there is a new song from a niche artist ? It might just never get discovered! To solve this problem, Spotify analyses various elements of the raw audio track itself. On top of this, Spotify uses language processing models to analyse text (news, articles, blogs etc.) from the Internet, for signals on moods, artists, genre etc. All this is great news for budding artists!

Another method for getting direct recommendations is through friends. On Spotify, users can follow famous artists and friends to see what they are listening to. Users can share playlists and even create collaborative ones. A shared playlist works great for those house parties and long drives with your friends.

Measuring Progress…

Most companies have one north star metric that acts as their guiding force. A good north star metric is one which measures customer value, represents product strategy and indicates revenues. In Spotify’s case, that metric is user engagement. It is measured as the avg. time spent by a user, listening on Spotify. Everything that the company does, translates into users spending more listening time on the app.

Finally, some food for thought…

Daniel Ek, the app’s founder mentioned in one of his interviews:

“We really want to soundtrack every moment of your life”.

What does that mean for the future ?

With unlimited streaming, music has already started to become utilitarian. That treasured listening experience has become a lot more passive and its value (or at least the perception of it) as an art form has certainly declined. And some artists, who realise it, have also been vocal about it.

With this seismic shift in the pattern of music consumption, its second order effects will soon begin to emerge. It will reflect in everything, from how artists are compensated to what music is produced and how.

Stay tuned ;)

References:

1. https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-797-fall2013/archives/557
2. https://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes-spotifys-discover-weekly-playlists-so-damn-good/
3. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-11-02/our-spotify-cheat-sheet-4-ways-to-find-your-next-favorite-song/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify

Thinking Product is a blog series which encourages the readers to think deeper about the products they use everyday. I hope to uncover the behind the scenes thought process, that goes into delivering a visceral experience to the product users.

Duolingo is the most popular language learning platform and the most downloaded education app in the world. It boasts of more than 300 million users to date, since its launch in 2011. It offers 94 different language courses in 23 different languages.

Unearthing the problem

The founder, Mr Luis Von Ahn is a professor at CMU and was born in Guatemala. He saw how difficult and expensive it was for people in his community to learn English. This insight presented him with an opportunity to build Duolingo with his graduate student, Severin Hacker.

Getting under the hood

The problem becomes much more vast and interesting, when taken into account all the people who want to learn a new language: hobbyists, people who wish to travel, relocate for work or others who simply want to explore a different literature and culture. How does one even begin to solve it ?

For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at a verbatim from a hobbyist:

“I am a working professional and I wish to keep my brain young and healthy by learning a new language, Spanish. I also want to go to Spain sometime and use the language to understand the culture, by talking to people. I feel it is a much better use of my free time as compared to scrolling social media feeds.”

What does the user really want ?

Let’s begin by translating the user story into well defined needs.

• She wants something that works for absolute beginners.
• She should be able to learn from anywhere, at her own pace
• Learning should be a fun and engaging process for her
• She only wishes to spend small amounts of time learning everyday
• Of course, it should help her efficiently learn the language

That is asking a lot, isn’t it ? Fortunately or unfortunately, that is just how users are.

Nailing the problem

What are some of the alternatives for her to learn Spanish? An online instructor led course; an at-home tutor; offline group classes or books. With little thought, we can see that none of these alternatives would satisfy most of the user needs listed above.

DUO, the owl, comes to rescue.

Duo offers a mobile app which means that one can learn from anywhere, while commuting, during little breaks from work or in the comfort of the bed. That in itself is quite powerful.

Learning a new language follows the Power Law, like a lot of other phenomena around us. It’s implication is that, in order to strike a routine conversation or to understand a basic language text, one needs to learn only 20% of the vocabulary. Duo knows this well, so that, it structures the lessons in a manner where user learns the most frequently used vocabulary first and so on.

The claim to fame for the clever Duo however, has been its excellent use of gamification and the easy to use interface. The use of streak is particularly interesting. Everyday that a user practices, her streak gets bigger and so does her fear of losing it. Don’t worry, its not so bad if you miss it once! You can give some of that in-game currency to Duo and it will freeze your streak for the day. Quite fun! Then there are other standard elements borrowed from the gaming world e.g. leaderboards, badges and experience points, all designed to give you those little doses of dopamine.

Additionally, the learning methodologies adopted by the app are backed by solid cognitive science principles:

1. Spaced Repetition: Many of us would have noticed that our ability to remember something decays over time (again, as a power law), also known as the forgetting curve. Unless… there is an attempt to retain it. Duo is well aware and throws that word, just when the user is about to forget it. A class move! And there’s more, it learns based on the answers given by the user and accordingly re-adjusts the duration before it throws that word back again.

2) Active Recall: Duo also asks the users to translate entire sentences, instead of using flash cards or multiple choice questions. This enforces active recall of the memory, which is different from passively watching or reading something. Active recall is the key to strengthening long term memory.

3) Use of multi modal learning: It is well known, that when we engage all our senses in the learning process, we are able to internalise the idea both at a conscious and sub-conscious level. To leverage this, Duo makes use of visual cards, pronunciation and typing to enhance the learning experience.

Measuring Progress..

One of the concerns that learning products across the board face, is measuring whether the learner has actually learnt something. Engagement metrics like time spent do not portray a complete picture.

On a platform like Duolingo, there is a spectrum of learners, with different levels of prior knowledge. Some absolute beginners, while others looking to refresh their knowledge. This is solved by embedding a quiz in between two consecutive sections of the course. Now these are pretty tough! The user is not only asked what she has learnt in the previous section but also what she is about to learn. This lets Duo assess the pre and post knowledge of the learner.

Thinking critically

The product unarguably adds a lot of value to its users. However, it has also faced criticisms around the learning methodology, which is heavily pivoted on translation and runs dry of any context. Duolingo only takes the user upto a beginner level understanding of the language, after which one needs to practice speaking and reading in it, to really hit the next level.

Bonus facts!

• More people are learning Irish on Duolingo than there are native Irish speakers!
• In Sweden the most popular language on Duolingo is Swedish (mostly by Swedish refugees) !
• More Americans are learning a language on Duolingo than in the US public school system!

Gracias mis amigos!

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo
2. https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/579004/What-Language-Acquisition-Theory-s-Is-Used-in-Duolingo
3. https://making.duolingo.com/how-we-learn-how-you-learn
4. https://making.duolingo.com/doing-our-homework-checking-in-on-how-well-were-teaching

A little background: I am currently working on Digital Value Added Service products like warranty, buyback and protection plans etc. for categories like Mobile, Large Appliances and Electronics.

My time for the day is usually divided into the following four buckets. The proportion of time can however vary depending on the stage of the product life-cycle that the product is in.

1. Discovery and Ideation

A PM’s most critical job is to find out the right problems to solve. Data and customers are usually her two dearest friends in this phase.

While some of our products for Mobile category were maturing, we did not have much presence in another fast growing category ‘Large Appliances’. Hence, there was a dearth of data to draw insights and build the right product for customers. So we worked closely with our business team to conduct a market research, followed by customer interviews. Through these interviews, we understood our customers, their context, their concerns and pain points when they buy a Large Appliance from the platform.

Once the research concluded, I started putting together what is called as a PRD. A PRD clearly defines the specifications of how the product should be built and is the guiding document for taking any key product decisions. It also lays out the roadmap for the product, identifies dependencies on other teams along with the product’s success criteria.

Key skills: Problem Solving, Vision, Customer Empathy, Data Analysis

2. Planning

This phase is important for a PM to prioritise the most critical problems from a bunch of problems that she might have at hand. It would typically take into account the resources, tech capabilities, budgets and certain other constraints.

This phase involved a lot of juggling with multiple teams (who were identified in the previous phase) to ensure that our product is prioritised for execution in each of those teams. During this cycle, the team could be stuck in continuous meetings with the leadership or other stakeholders and presenting the potential impact of the project and its roadmap. Although the continuous back and forth can sometimes appear to slow things down but the importance of this phase is paramount.

Key Skills: Communication, Negotiation, Influencing

3. Execution

After the groundwork of ideation and planning is done, a PM goes with full force to build the product. This phase involves working closely with everyone and bringing them together to ensure that the product sees the light of the day.

In this phase, I was working closely with the engineering team, taking them through the detailed product requirements. On other days, I could be making wireframes and working with designers to build the right visual experience of the product. This phase involved working together to resolve any roadblocks that might come up and track the progress of development. Since our product had dependencies on few other teams also, we were doing multiple follow-ups and monitoring progress with them as well.

Key Skills: Execution rigour, Collaboration, Stakeholder Management

4. Launch and Monitor:

Once the product is tested and launched, the PM’s job is to closely monitor the metrics and make ensure everything is working fine, with no major customer issues.

As the build cycle was nearing its end, we were preparing with the Business team for the launch of the product. We needed to make sure the data tracking for the product is in place and the product is tested end to end. There were few bugs that came up after the product went live, so we worked with the engineers and customer support team to make sure those were fixed. Simultaneously, we were also gauging the performance metrics on a daily basis and working with the analytics team to ensure the integrity of the data.

Key Skills: Stakeholder Management, Storytelling, Data analysis

A product’s journey is never finished with the first version of the product. Good product managers will continuously iterate to ship out the best product for customers.

To sum it up, as Ben Horowitz says in his classic article on Good PM/Bad PM: “Product Managers are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails”.

Credits: As an APM and being fairly young into the organisation, I had immense support from my colleagues and everyone involved during the course of launching this product and I am grateful to them.

APM or PM is a fairly new role in the industry that has come up in the last decade or so with the rise of Internet giants like Facebook, Google and the likes. At first when I was applying for the role at Flipkart as a college fresher, I was not sure as to what my day to day job would entail. As I read more and more about the role, it really got me excited. While the profile looked tempting, I was still not convinced how a chemical engineering fresher from IIT could fit in and contribute. My research showed that it is a role usually given to B school candidates who have had a flavour of how various departments in the organisation function and collaborate to achieve common goals. . Having said that, I chose the role primarily because it offered me the following things:

• Entrepreneurial mindset: While this is a very overarching term, to me it meant the excitement and enthusiasm for creating new products. I was seeking an environment that posed me with uncertainties sometimes, and as a result, an opportunity to learn from my decision’s success and failures. It is this entrepreneurial mindset of connecting with your product such that it is your very own that really got me excited about the role.
• Problem solving: Through my years at IIT as an undergraduate, I had realised that I derived a certain level of satisfaction from solving intellectually challenging problems. APM looked like a role that would really give me those opportunities of product thinking to solve real and big problems and satiate my thirst for knowledge and learning. Launching an entirely new category like grocery or building a 12 hour supply chain are the kind of problems that one has an opportunity to solve at Flipkart.
• Exposure: Being a cross functional role, it gave me an excellent opportunity to learn about how a big organisation works and how different teams like Business, Engineering and Design come together to write success stories. Apart from this, it gave me a peek into everything that goes into developing a product from scratch or improving upon an existing product. This in some ways aligned with my larger goal of building something of my own.
• Leadership opportunities: I never wanted a role that was so leadership oriented (like the ones in FMCG companies from my past experience in HUL) that it becomes overwhelming for a fresher. I was also looking forward to do some work on ground and get my hands dirty. The APM role seemed to strike a balance between both of the above things, giving me chances to demonstrate and develop my leadership skills as well as a good understanding of fundamentals.
• Personal and professional developments: One’s first job is always a multi faceted learning experience. However, one should be cognizant of the scope and pace of learning that an organisation and a role can provide. In my case, Flipkart and product management was a good place to start, where I could learn and grow professionally as well as personally from a great bunch of leaders in an environment that fosters learning. Flipkart has a two year rotational program for APMs, giving them experience across multiple teams along with a course curriculum that helps them understand the basics of tech, design and business.

To anybody looking out for a career in product management or even otherwise, you should first answer the Why question to yourself, just like a product manager would do.