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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:01.775)
All right, welcome to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle, and this week we have another awesome guest with us, Vidya, or Vidya from Product Rebels. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. Vidya.
Vidya (00:16.322)
It's Vidya or Vidya or Vidya. I go, I answer to all three.
Kyle (00:21.463)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. And we're really, really excited to talk about some of your experience and some of the things that you're working on. But let me introduce you briefly. Vidya is the founder and partner of Product Rebels, a company transforming product teams, and is a master in the product management field with over 15 years of experience in executive roles. Vidya, why don't you tell us more about yourself?
Vidya (00:48.47)
Absolutely. So I'll start by saying I'm a geek. I have a technical degree. I spent so much time working on product that I like to kind of say, look, I used to be technical. So I have a little bit of sort of street cred when it comes to that. Did a lot of work in technology, moved into strategy and different types of business operations before I found myself in product management.
And that's where I've been, as you said, for the last 15 years, overseeing different types of product teams. And for the last seven years, I've been coaching products with my business partner and our team. And we have probably, gosh, coached over 200 teams at this point. Over, you know, over a hundred companies starting all the way from early stage up to Fortune 50. So I've just been very fortunate to have worked with a lot of different
product teams and really focusing on product market fit, how to build products that customers will love. So that's a little bit of that background.
Kyle (01:58.739)
That's great and that's a great background and I'm excited to dive into it a little bit more as well. But before we do, why don't you tell us about what you like to do outside of product management and outside of the office?
Vidya (02:12.414)
Outside of the office, I actually, well, I'll give you both the, I'm an investor. And so I use all the product stuff, which might sound like it's work, but I never think of it as such. So I use everything that I've learned and seen and understand about product market fit in terms of building a portfolio. I spent a lot of time helping female founders and early stage startups.
And apart from that, I have three kids, so that's it. That's my life.
Kyle (02:44.611)
Yeah, that takes all the time, I'm sure. Plus time that doesn't really exist, I would imagine. Awesome. Well, again, I'm really excited to dive into some of the experience that you have, because it spans a lot of different things, but maybe you can tell us a little bit more about your journey. What brought you from your more technical degree into product management and into product rebels where you're helping...
Vidya (02:50.366)
Exactly.
Kyle (03:12.123)
and coaching product teams and organizations.
Vidya (03:15.086)
Sure. I think what's really driven my journey and moved me closer to the business first, because that was a little bit more of an obvious route, going to get an MBA, learning about business, and then I was in management consulting, really felt to me is there's a curiosity driving, how does this work? How do products, you know, how do teams decide what products to build?
What does that look like? How does that decision be made? And I was very lucky straight after my MBA and a stint at management consulting to land up at Intuit. And I think of it as two really strong things that I learned there. One was Intuit turns out leaders. There's a really strong focus on being a really developed self-aware leader.
that helps other people succeed. And I feel so fortunate and lucky to have had that training and to have that outlook on what it means to serve others. And I learned that within to it. And then the second was this really, it was like a masterclass, a second MBA on how to think about building products, both from a deep understanding of who the customer is.
I remember one of the first things that I learned and I found so bizarre and then by myself of course having to do and then loving was this concept of following people home. It was developed by Intuit's founder and that's how he started Quicken. He literally stood outside Costco and he would watch people pick up products and then ask to go home with them and see how they use them.
And gosh, this is in the 90s. So way before modern customer experience practices, way before we thought about experimentation and research, this was true. This was the heart of, I think, understanding customers and customer problems. And so growing up, and adding to it, I was there for over 10 years, really learning these practices firsthand, getting the opportunity and the privilege of leading teams
Vidya (05:40.826)
really foundational to my thinking, this is it, this is what I want to do. I love the curiosity. I love learning. I love that aha moment when you get this deep insight into what the customer pain is, and then of course, it's so much fun once you've understood what that is, turning it into how to think about experiments, how to think about coming up with different solutions and then watching sort of people's eyes light up when you kind of get to that product market fit.
So that's driven me and I think is going to be part of the ongoing journey as well.
Kyle (06:16.627)
Well, that's excellent. And I'm curious, what kind of moved you from a lot of what you were doing at Intuit and other places into more of the coaching side and helping other product teams develop and maybe, I assume, implement a lot of these practices as well?
Vidya (06:37.85)
It's so interesting because I found myself bringing on people when I was a product leader at a, after I left Intuit and went into different product leadership roles, find myself teaching and coaching a lot of the practices that I've learned from Intuit and interpreting them and adjusting them for the industry, for the group. And really love doing that. And I think at the heart of it, I love coaching. I didn't really understand it at the time.
but found myself talking about the same things to teams over and over. Got a chance, I was in an innovation role, and got a chance to work with a local incubator in my community, and saw and learned the process of due diligence, and saw and learned the process of how do you evaluate teams, and how do you help teams move forward. Now there's so much focus on, is it a good investment?
Is it a really strong team? Are they coachable? Lots and lots of questions that investors think about. But the focus and the lens that I brought to it was how they're thinking about making product decisions. How are they really focusing in on what's the most important problem to solve? And then how do you make every decision based on that versus the great advice that you get from investors and your board and all sorts of well-intentioned people.
And so while I was working and starting to now meet and work with a number of early stage companies, I find myself again, going back to the same sorts of practices, teaching the same types of techniques. And at the same time, my, my business partner, she and I met at Intuit. She had gone on her own path after leaving there of becoming a chief product officer, a chief marketing officer. And she too was.
you know, we would get together over and over again. And as, as good friends talk about the fact that all of these great things that we were doing, um, there was so much opportunity and there was so much interest in learning these techniques. And so she and I, um, in true product development discovery fashion, put together a couple of workshops. We experimented, we learned, and we found that there was a need. And then we found our first client. And this client.
Vidya (09:04.862)
you know, helped us shape what we ended up being a core curriculum. We were able to test and learn with this client. And we built out our very first coaching platform to hand in hand, step by step with a customer. And that really led me to leaving corporate practice and to saying, I want to do this. This is this is the this is the thing that I love to do.
I love the excitement of working with new teams, the variety. I love learning about different industries. And I really feel like, again, the foundationals that we talk about can make such a significant difference and can truly accelerate a team's ability to deliver. So with that, she and I formed Product Rebels and we've been together for the last six plus years working with wonderful teams all over the world.
Kyle (10:02.931)
That's excellent. And it sounds very much like everything that usually happens in product where people come into the roles through a whole variety of means and you finding this need again and not necessarily being, hey, this is exactly the direction I'm going to go, but discovering like, hey, this is interesting. It's important. People need it. And then kind of...
moving into that direction. I just find it fascinating that it feels quite often that is how product management in general works, is that there's just these needs that need to be filled and people kind of shift into them. But I'm really interested in, as you go into companies or teams, what are some of the first things that you focus on, both
Kyle (11:00.463)
a really great product team or product organization.
Vidya (11:03.606)
Yeah, great question. One of the very first things that we do is we ask, what problem are you solving? And, sorry, give me a sip of water and I hope that you can just cut this out.
Kyle (11:20.211)
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I'll go through and do all the editing. So none of this will be in the final and will be all good. Yep. Yeah.
Vidya (11:27.666)
Thank you. I assumed that, but I was like, I found my throat. So thank you. So that's such an interesting question. One of the first things that we do, and we go into any team, and that's whether it's a team with an idea, a really early stage, they haven't got customers, they haven't got anything, no revenue, all the way up to Fortune 50, where there's established teams and there's products, and there's billion dollar companies.
One of the first things that we do is we say, tell us what customer problem you're solving. And it's an interesting question because a lot of teams go directly to talking about the features. They talk about what they're building. They talk about their vision. They'll tell you pretty much everything except a really succinct way of saying, this is the problem. And so,
That's our first diagnostic. And it's not for the want of not wanting to explain what the customer problem is. It's just that we don't really have a language for it. And so what we end up doing is we end up getting excited about the solution that we're building versus going back to what we call first principles and that's the customer problem, you know, and I remember one time and I'll never forget this. This was early days.
but we were with a group of different stage startups. Some of them, and all of these had revenue, some of them actually use series A. And there was two co-founders and we asked them to do this exercise and to write down what customer problem they were solving. And these two founders, what we had when we'd introduced ourselves and sort of talked about what we wanted to get out of this workshop.
One of the big things that they described is that they were at a point where they needed to, and they were in a great position to fund the next stage of development. And so they were trying to figure out which direction do we go in. And when they wrote down individually, these two co-founders, the customer problem they were solving, they were different problems. And so they had been arguing, they'd been debating, and they were both getting pretty frustrated.
Vidya (13:50.974)
And it was because, again, for us, the root cause is if you aren't on the same page with a customer problem, it's really hard to make anything else make sense. And it constantly surprises us that teens don't start there. So that's the first thing that we do. And it's really simple. We have a template. We come in, we say, just fill this out. It's a set of questions, but we don't want you to put any features in here.
Don't put your solution in here. Just tell us and describe the customer problem. And that's the first place to start. And it's the first place we start coaching.
Kyle (14:30.491)
I absolutely love that. And I find it fascinating too, and I have found the same thing in a lot of the work that I do and have done, is in defining that customer problem, there often is a wide variety of perspectives or ways that people are approaching it. And it's often not the same thing, like not the same problem that, whether it's product teams or early companies are trying to solve. And like you said, it's fascinating. But when we go back to...
What are, you know, what is the key thing that we need to understand? It's what problem we're solving, not the thing that we're building or the solution or the software or whatever it is, because you won't have anything or you won't be able to do anything with a great solution if there's not a problem that it's actually solving.
Vidya (15:18.602)
It's exactly right. And in fact, we call our template a convergent problem statement to, uh, really capture what you, you exactly what you said, which is it's not that there is ever a single problem. There's different perspectives on problems and every customer has multiple problems. Thankfully, because that's how we build roadmaps and how we build bigger and bigger companies, but the core of what that, that problem is, if you can think
broadly and bring in different perspectives and different voices and really work in partnership with your customer as well and capture all the different problems and then in a structured way, decide where you're going to focus. And we often describe this as you've got to get really uncomfortably narrow with this particular area of focus. You've got to converge and it's a starting point. It doesn't mean that you can't change your mind.
It doesn't mean that you can't build on and continue to address other problems. But if you can focus really specifically, it gives you an anchoring place for your entire team, for you to, if you're early stage, to be able to defend all the great ideas that come from your investors and everyone else involved. And for larger teams to really bring organizations together and move in a direction that's aligned.
and everyone knows what they're solving for. And so it works whether you're really tiny or whether you're a multi-billion dollar organization.
Kyle (16:55.731)
think that that's spot on. And I'm interested, you mentioned something really, really important is this idea of uncomfortable focus, like really narrowing in on what it is that you're doing. How do you help teams do that? Because like you said, it can be really uncomfortable to focus so narrowly and so specifically, and most teams, most organizations want to do lots of things want to do everything. How do you help them really focus in?
on what is the most important.
Vidya (17:28.35)
Yeah, great question. The first step, I think, is to be able to give voice to all the different ideas and all the different problems. And for this, we leverage a couple of design thinking techniques. We're such big fans of design thinking that we've incorporated this into our practice. And our workshops, our coaching actually has techniques that we want everyone to use, because
If you think about the principles of collaboration, bringing different voices and diverse voices together, being able to explore and take a look at all the different types of problems that exist. We need to capture those first. So we use a couple of techniques and whether it's a problem tree, whether it's five whys, there's multiple ways that you can go about it, but you wanna be able to be inclusive
and getting all the different problems together. And then you might find that you group them, there's some similar patterns, and you're starting to narrow. And then we might have two or three different directions that we think are important, and that's when we have to go to learn. So we try and again, incorporate how do you get out of your own heads, first of all, like capture what's in your heads, then get out of them.
Go talk to customers, go test what problems really resonate. What's the most important? You can stack rank problems with your customer. You can ask them to wait them. You can do all sorts of things that really kind of give you that external feedback that's so critical and allowing to give you a direction that makes sense. So that's really the process. I make the sound fast. It takes weeks, but it's not.
months or years. I mean, this is really can be done in a fairly reasonable amount of time that allows you to go from what feels like it's boiling the ocean to two or three specific areas of focus down to make a bet. And sometimes, you know, and I'm working with a portfolio company right now, and they're at a place where they actually have two equally interesting and important
Vidya (19:54.858)
And then we start layering on, well, what kind of skills do you have? What resources are available? What is it going to take? So you start bringing some of that business reality into the decision, but you can only, you should only do that after you've identified like what the options are. And we often find it does boil down to two or three. And then it's a process of again, bringing in those external factors, your capability, timeline, commitments.
type of customer, revenue, all sorts of other questions that then come to bear on saying, this feels like the right bet. Now let's actually start looking at solutions and seeing if we can build something that is differentiated, that customers will pay for, and that will actually get us to what we think is the right product market fit. So that's sort of a nutshell of the process.
Kyle (20:50.363)
That's great. And I'm interested in kind of that last thing that you mentioned in finding and understanding product market fit for you as you work with these companies and teams. What is good product market fit? How do you know when you found it? And then what are some of the steps that they take to, I guess, one, ensure that they have that and two, to then move forward?
Vidya (21:09.006)
I'm going to go to bed.
Vidya (21:18.686)
It's funny because there's so many companies that think they've got product market fit because either they've got one or two customers that have expressed interest. They might even have some revenue. And invariably, it's one of those things which I know sounds very fuzzy, but you can feel product market fit. And it's because customers get really excited.
And you've got a really clear understanding of who that customer is. So it can't be this one off. It's got to be a segment. It's got to be a clear concept of the type of customer. And they've got to be able to pay for it. I think you and I'll say something bold, but I don't think you ever get product market fit with a free product. And I see so many companies saying that they're checking for interest.
checking for viability. And so the freemium model is how they start. And they think they've got some traction because they get signups or there's some sort of market interest. Almost always that fades to nothing because if you are truly solving a problem, then customers are gonna wanna pay for it. They're going to want to be able to, they want to give you money.
We were looking at a startup the other day and they had built something and they were getting, and they wanted to actually shut it down because as the two co-founders, they wanted to actually move in a different direction. They had put this product out, it didn't cost very much, but it wasn't free. And so they had an exit path and they communicated to this handful of customers that they were gonna sunset this product.
They had a seat about 10, 15 minutes after this email went out. They had the CEO, one of these companies calling them and saying, what size check do I need to write you to keep this product going? That's product market fit. When you have a customer that needs it so badly that they're willing to do anything it takes in order to have your solution, because there is no alternative or the alternative is so painful. And this particular product.
Vidya (23:45.942)
better productivity for their development team so significantly that it was worth literally sort of a head count for the CEO to bring this product in and to keep it. And so that's what product market fit is. When you have customers that are hungry for the product, you feel it. It's both technically a product that you can sell, a product that is viable, the product that has sort of...
clear distinctions, it's differentiated from a competition, all the things that you might read about product market fit, and then there's the emotional piece, and that's how I know when founders talk about product market fit, if they truly have it, they have a different way of communicating how their customers are responding to their product versus someone who believes they've got product market fit, and I try to convince you that this is the work, this is the amount of money that they need.
in order to keep going. That is not product market fit.
Kyle (24:48.715)
I think you're spot on. And I love that example where you have customers who genuinely are passionate about it and it solves such a pain point for them that they need it. And that's an excellent example of product market fit because it's the kind of thing that I think we're all looking for. It's not something that you have to go out and sell to people. It's something that they understand their pain so well and how your product
Vidya (24:49.833)
Hahaha
Kyle (25:18.647)
or feature solves it that they absolutely need it and are willing to, like you said, willing to pay for it. And it goes beyond just this, I like it, I'll use it if it's free, but otherwise it's, you know, not a big enough deal for me to, you know, to pay for, or to, if I have to find something else that's, you haven't found it at that point. I'm interested, you touched on the, you know, the freemium model and pricing. I find this, this is such a fascinating topic where I know that there's
There's probably strong opinions on both sides, but generally it feels like the freemium is a bad model for most products because this was a conversation we had a while ago that the change from zero to even ascend is an infinite jump. You're going from free to actually having to pay, and that can be really painful as opposed to going from a dollar to $2 or something like that upgrading.
How do you address that with Teams? And as you're talking about pricing and different models, what's some of the advice that you give?
Vidya (26:25.066)
Yeah, pricing is really tricky and it goes down to back to that customer about how you had this deep understanding of who your customer is. And for us, it goes beyond anything demographic to true psychographics. What are their attitudes and behaviors? What are the alternatives that they have? How big a pain is this?
What are they willing to do in order to have this pain go away? And so for consumer products, it's, I think, a little bit simpler. You have competitors, you have alternatives. You can see how it's priced in the market. When you get to B2B pricing and enterprise pricing, then I think that this is where a lot of companies kind of then get into this, this freemium trap.
of like, if I can just get my foot in the door and we get someone using it. Now, and that clearly that's that there's some exceptions that everyone can talk to that has worked. But for the most part, if you're not truly solving a pain and having some people access the product and use it, it's not really good enough to get an enterprise deal and certainly not good enough to move you into what's truly the value chain. So for us,
First of all, you know, distinction between like the type of market research and the type of pricing research that you do for B2C, very, very different for B2B. Again, very, very different to marketplaces when you might have a certain side of the market paying for a product, and then you have a certain side of the market using the product. So the way that we think about this is coming down to, you know, and I know personas are...
sometimes persona non grata in our worlds. But we work on an actionable persona that really takes into consideration the mindset and the behaviors of the customer. And you have to go into, again, from a B2B perspective, thinking about your influencer, thinking about your purchaser, thinking about your user, as well as your buyer. And it gets quite complex.
Vidya (28:44.33)
And then you have to start making some trade-offs about who you're solving for and who has the biggest need. And once you understand the complexity, it's, and I wish I had a simpler answer that it's pricing sort of like one plus one, but it requires that depth of understanding and, and for a company and the founders or the product team, trading off and making a
and having that understanding about the rationale about who we're prioritizing and why, and then taking a look at like the willingness to pay. Like some simple things that we've done, again, going back to design thinking, is you can simply ask your customer, you can give them choices. We have done things such as, you know, getting them to allocate funds on different areas of the product.
to try and figure out which pain is most important and how much they'd be willing to pay. Working sort of in collaboration with what does that pricing model look like? And then of course, looking again at others in your industry that are successful and seeing does that pricing model make sense? And then going in and testing it, but it all starts with that true understanding of all the different players in your ecosystem of customer, buyer, client.
Kyle (30:09.007)
Yeah, I think that's great. And you're right, it's a complex thing and something that there's, unfortunately I've never found it to be a simple answer where you can say, this is how you do pricing. Just take this and do this, and then you've got your price. It's a lot more in-depth and a lot more understanding kind of like you mentioned in order to get to what's right for a specific product, for a specific customer.
group or segment and be able to do that right.
Vidya (30:40.31)
Yeah, just don't give it away.
Kyle (30:44.059)
Yeah, that's a great advice. Zooming out just a little bit, what have you found makes a good product team? Or as you're helping coach product teams or helping even build product teams and organizations, what's some of the advice that you give to think about and what have you found working with companies that makes for a really successful product team or product organization?
Vidya (31:11.239)
I'll share, we have an assessment that I'm happy to just quickly kind of give you the framework because it's these components that we believe make really strong product teams and strong product led organizations. And by that, I mean, we're working and we're aligned in terms of making strong, durable decisions that are customer backed.
And so we think about this for great teams as a mindset. There is definitely a perspective and a lot of this, again, I go back to sort of our intimate days of being sort of customer obsessed, and do you have that mindset? Do you have the curiosity? Do you always go and think about, are you flying that customer flag at the table?
Are you bringing the customer in and learning at every opportunity? So there's sort of, there's a mindset around how do we think about the way that we build products. And then there's a set of resources and sort of resources are, and I'm sort of going sort of very broad now, are examples of like, is data easily available in your company? For example.
We've gone into companies where the product team needs to fill out forms. They need to get on a wait list to get information out of finance or out of sales. So there isn't that direct access to that information. It's really hard to do some maybe bigger research projects. Again, there's a research team, but you're getting in line that, that visibility into all the information.
everything that's going on around your customer, around the product, around the market, is segmented in different functional areas. And so that's the resources. And then we come down to competencies. And so competencies are skills that can be taught. I think the mindset and resources, mindsets definitely, we look for those. We look for that innate curiosity. We look for someone is collaborative. Are they...
Vidya (33:28.786)
interested in bringing people in, how do they go about doing their work? The resources is things that it's out of our hands as a product team. It really is requires that alignment from right from the CEO down. But the competencies of things like analytics, being able to be outcome focused. Do they understand how to do this? Do they understand how to communicate effectively?
Do they understand how to convey information and look at data? Do they understand some custom of research techniques? All of these things and again, competencies, those pieces I think can be learned and there's lots of great resources out there to learn these competencies. But those three things together, that's what makes organizations great. And when we go in to do these assessments, we look at all three.
We start with individuals in the product team. We then go to product leadership. Then we take a 360 look at how the rest of the organization looks at the product team. We come up with a heat map and it allows us to then pinpoint, where is that area? I think if anyone's listening to this and thinking, what does that look like? Just if you can think about the mindsets, I mean to people with the right attitude.
Are they skilled and trained effectively in good product practices? And then are we making it easy for the product team to be effective? Those three areas, I think, cover what makes great product organizations.
Kyle (35:07.511)
I love that. And I love each of those different areas. And I feel the pain, and I'm sure so many people listening probably feel the pain of a number of the things that you talked about, whether it's not having access to good data and information about customers, about the use cases, all of those things, all the way to the overall product mindset of an organization and how are we approaching these things and how...
How does the rest of the organization interact as well? And where does product sit in all of that? I'm interested as you've worked with organizations that you've gone into teams, and as companies are, a lot of companies are trying to move into more of this product mindset and product led teams, how can they make those changes? How have you helped them make those changes? What are some of the things that you focused on in order to even take the first steps?
of being more product-led or having a more product mindset throughout the organization.
Vidya (36:15.006)
Um, well, I think one of the first things that, that is, is simple for organizations to do is to move, to, to bring customer stories to light. And whether that's in an all hands, whether that is through, you know, Slack or some sort of their intranet is, is how visible is real customer stories. And.
that's not just wins, but areas that there might be some confusion or areas where customers are struggling because everyone in the organization know this. And, you know, certainly our, you know, our customer support teams have this, this detailed day-to-day information. Um, you have your account managers and your sales team who might be looking at prospects or who might be servicing. And.
Then you've got your product team who's working on developing the actual products and taking in all of this feedback. And a lot of the time as teams and organizations want to go to being more customer centric or being become more product led, one of the simplest things they can do is just to share customer information. So I think that's sort of the simplest. It puts actual examples.
it puts, it really shines a spotlight that we believe this is important. And we're going to talk about our customer. And so I look for that. And I think that's a really simple thing for, for organizations to do. The other thing, which I think when we come in, and I just want to give you two more examples, when we come in and we are helping organizations to become more product centric, we try to work with the product team and we try to work with the leadership team.
because there's specific areas of focus and the mindset and competencies that I talked about, but it's also leadership that needs to think about product a little bit differently. The types of ways that you ask questions, the way that you provide feedback to a product team can either be very motivating and it can really, again, move you towards that customer centricity, or it can actually halt it.
Vidya (38:39.85)
If you're coming up with new ideas at a product meeting, it's really not the place. If you're providing feedback at a very granular level, it's not the place. If you're not asking outcome and instead you're asking output. And by that, I mean, are we talking about a launch date? Are we talking about, and how quickly and what are the obstacles? So it's like a project plan. Are we talking about, you know, we're trying to move a certain metric. We're trying to.
improve our net promoter, we're trying to increase retention, we're trying to grow a certain segment of new customers. How are we moving towards those outcomes? And are we aligned as an organization? Those are the kinds of questions that really need to come from the leadership team. So it's a one-two punch for us to truly think about transformation. And then the third thing that I'll say that is probably one of the biggest barriers is
When teams are so focused on agile or safe development practices, that they're not providing the time for discovery to learn from customers, to make customer learning and understanding sort of an integral part of the way they develop products, that again is a fairly significant issue in not being able to get product lead. Again, you can use all the words.
But if your development practices are set in stone and are very ceremony-based, and you don't have that flexibility or you haven't built the time for the product team to think strategically, to move forward, to really partner with design, with research, with development, on thinking where are we going and why and what's most important to customers?
then again, we're going to be very short-term focused and we're not going to get to that really product-led transformation that is being required.
Kyle (40:41.699)
Yeah, you hit on so many great points. And I love that the idea, and I think they kind of go together, those things that you mentioned, the idea that this output focus, especially at like leadership or executive levels where we're not talking about what is it that we're trying to achieve, like what outcomes are we trying to get to? And what metrics are we trying to move? It's much more about what features do we have and when are they going to be delivered? And that's...
For me is always one of the first things that is either a flag that like, hey, we're having the wrong conversation or we haven't developed that kind of maturity yet to really be thinking about why are we doing these things? And we need to start to change that conversation. And then that goes into, I think, like you mentioned, especially very rigid frameworks like SAFE that it's so easy to get just in the mindset of the outputs. And we need to do...
what's on the next release train and all of these things that like, what are the outputs that are coming out of this? When are they going to be delivered? As opposed to the, what I think is the better conversation of why are we doing these things? What problems are we solving? And how is that going to benefit users and the business? And then the next level down is the things we're delivering in order to move those metrics. But that's not the focus. Those are the things that are helping us.
Vidya (42:04.395)
Yes.
Kyle (42:09.017)
achieve the focus.
Vidya (42:10.506)
Exactly, yes. If we could only have a magic wand and we could change everyone to outcome. Wouldn't that be nice?
Kyle (42:17.364)
Yeah, it really would. You mentioned as well, some of the individual characteristics or the focus on product teams and product individuals. What are some of the things that make a successful product manager? And how can those either be taught or learned? Or what are some of the key things that you found help product people be successful?
Vidya (42:43.718)
Well, I think we love our fundamentals. We wrote a book on it called Groundwork. And so I think for a really successful product manager, I feel like I'm sort of just turning our own horn here, which I don't mean to, but it's really being problem focused. It's being customer obsessed. It's being able to communicate effectively. And when I say that,
It's not as if you have to be this wonderful presenter, but it's how do you create the right argument that isn't about you, isn't about the team, it isn't about the launch date. It really is focused on here's what I've learned and this is why, this is my rational argument for why I believe this is the right way to move ahead. And all of those things I think are taught.
And you said right in the beginning of our conversation that we all come from this in very different places. And so I think the consistency of just core, really strong customer driven practices, we can see what good looks like, but often organizations because product teams are made from people in all sorts of different backgrounds, all smart, effective people.
but we don't have this common language and we don't have this common way of approaching and then showing up into the organization consistently. And so I think there's definitely a piece of this for the product manager that, like really embrace that curiosity, always kind of go out and want to learn and validate and.
And think in terms of problems and not solutions. Know when it's time to bring people in to start thinking about how do we build this. Let your development team, your design team, like, no, let them do the how. We're really so focused on like, what is it? And partner with them on the how. It's not an answer that you give. All of these things, I think, again, I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said lots of different ways by different product people.
Vidya (45:01.814)
But for us, I think the differentiation is that commonality of the core practices and that you all think about it consistently and you're always going back to that problem and that persona that I feel is really important for any product manager to be successful and, you know, and for product teams to be successful, not just the individual.
Kyle (45:27.215)
Yeah, absolutely. And I want to expand on that a little bit because you mentioned the book that you wrote together with your partner, Heather, I believe, called Groundwork. And it has a lot of these product fundamentals that we've been talking about and a lot more from some of the convergent problem statements and personas and other things. Maybe expand on that a little for us. What overall is the book about and who would benefit from it?
Vidya (45:37.334)
Mm-hmm.
Vidya (45:55.65)
Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that you asked that because we have very much who is this book for. Like, if this is a product and it's an offering, who's the ideal person to read this? And we do have a little guide in the beginning to say, if you're coming in from a technology lens, this is where you should focus. If you're coming in from a product leader lens, if you're coming in from different places, how do you navigate it?
But for the core, we really wrote it for the product leader. And we wrote it for someone. We've been in their shoes. We have been product leaders in many different organizations. And we wanted to provide a way for a product leader to give that consistency to a team, so that you're setting the expectations that when you come to me, you're always coming to me with an understanding of the customer problem. And these are the things.
that I'm expecting you to know. When you talk about a customer, these are the kinds of areas that we want you to be familiar with. One of the big things that we do is we talk about individualized needs. And this is because no product team has one single customer problem and one single customer. We all, especially to get more and more successful, have many different...
problems and they're being solved for many different segments of customers. But as a product team, you've got to make decisions. And so we have a technique that allows you to pair up a problem with a customer, with a persona, and then allows you to lay them out and make trade-offs between which pair is more important to focus on and why. And then, so, so the core of the book is these
three specific practices. The way that you think about showing up every day, those kinds of things that you talked about, and we'd call them, it's a way to frame what you wanna learn, what you don't know in terms of hypothesis, how to learn quickly, which we call Scrappy Research, and then how to communicate effectively, like how to make decisions that stick. And these three practices support
Vidya (48:17.046)
the pillars that we have been talking about for the last, for our conversation, which is around that problem, the convergent problem, the actionable persona, and then individualized needs. So it's a way to say to your team as a product leader, this is how I expect you to show up. This is the kind of work that I want you to do. And this is the consistency that I want that we as an organization, as a product team, can make.
durable decisions can always be focused on the customer. And then we are helping our entire team move to be this product lead organization that we all want. So it's sort of a help for product leaders. It's for them to work with their teams. They can certainly, as a coach, as a product team, they are the product leader coach that's consistently with their team. And it's a way to almost work work.
how to have these fundamental practices in place. So thank you for letting me share that.
Kyle (49:20.599)
Yeah, absolutely. And we'll put the link to that book in the show notes as well, so you can check that out. You mentioned at the very beginning that you also run an accelerator for female founders and are an investor in female startups and businesses. Tell us a little bit more about why you do that and what you found in working with, you know,
Kyle (49:49.132)
female founders and startups.
Vidya (49:51.982)
Sure. So I don't exclusively, well, I didn't start off by exclusively investing in women. When I was in a role with innovation and getting involved with incubators and doing some due diligence, it was an opportunity for me to start investing, which I did. And as I was going through this process, I found that women were being, they were,
failing out of the due diligence process fairly early at this incubator. And as much as, you know, it wasn't that they had different, they didn't have good problems, they didn't have good solutions, they didn't have good teams, but for some reason, and I didn't know why at the time, we weren't getting them to the final selection set. There was another woman who was also on the selection committee at the time.
And she and I started talking about this and she's a very experienced, my partner, Alison. She's a very experienced VC and she had almost no woman, I think, no woman at all in 15, 16 years of investing. And so that led us down a path of trying to understand why. And we came down to, there's a couple of things going on. One is a set of implicit biases that exist because
of the way that investment has been set up. A lot of investors, it's pattern recognition. And so you tend to look at other successful businesses, mostly which are male driven and male led. And so the kinds of things that we found were really supporting that women weren't being seen or talked to in the same way as male founders.
And so again, it went down to, there's some really interesting research that we uncovered around promotion, prevention bias. There's so much more. We could spend hours talking about this, but it led us to say, we would like to bring together a group of women that we think are investable. We'd like to help teach this curriculum around implicit bias, around what we call a hierarchy of needs, which for us is the investment equivalent of Maslow. Like funding comes at the end.
Vidya (52:13.558)
but there's a lot of different steps of which product market fit is one of them. And if we take these two things that we've, we've spent about a year researching and then we apply, um, we add this to our investment criteria. We believe that we can invest in more women. And so we have about 25 women, uh, company, woman-led companies in our portfolio right now and have again, um, put all those practices into play. And it's, it's fantastic. We are now broadening. Uh, we,
we believe the same sort of investment thesis and it has got more sophisticated over the years can also apply to diverse teams. So we are broadening our look at investments as well. So it's sort of exciting. We're still learning and growing.
Kyle (52:58.379)
That sounds very exciting. And it constantly reminds me of, I know that there was, as Amazon, for example, and this is just an example, but put together their hiring and filtering process, that it had a lot of those same issues of pattern recognition that you talked about, that ultimately was filtering for who had been successful at Amazon, as they were looking at candidates.
Vidya (53:16.717)
Yes.
Vidya (53:24.75)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (53:26.755)
which was predominantly male at the time. And so it was filtering out a lot of women just automatically because it was looking at who had been successful in the past. And since it structurally had been biased towards men, it continued to be biased towards men. And so, that's just one example of how I think our pattern recognition, whether it's in technology or in ourselves, becomes kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy.
if we don't do something to break what has been happening. And I love what you're doing. It sounds really great and hopefully leads to many more companies and products and teams that just haven't had a chance in the past. I think that's excellent.
Vidya (54:12.206)
Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
Kyle (54:14.927)
Yeah. Well, I want to ask, you know, what advice would you have for anybody considering, you know, getting into product or, you know, looking to start a company since you've been involved in all of these things?
Vidya (54:22.955)
Mm-hmm.
Vidya (54:28.47)
I would say just, I've said curiosity, I think at half a dozen times, and I'll go back to that, which is just notice, if you want to get into product, understanding human behavior, having the desire to learn, to ask questions, and then to translate that into, you know, technically what we call insight. That I think is something that if you love doing that, product is a great place for you to be.
It's such a fun job. You get to touch all the different parts of the organization. There's an end to end perspective on this. There's a real, you've got your pulse on the heart of the growth of the company. So I think this is one of the best jobs there is. And so if that sounds like you, some of the things that we've been talking about in terms of personality, because I do think it starts with mindset. And again, it's not, I don't wanna dissuade anyone, but...
But if it is more, if you're more process driven, product is naturally sort of more free flowing and curious, with a lot of drive and a lot of, you know, it's still kind of attracts a lot of Taipei people, but it's more around the curiosity. And so that's, that's where I would go. And if you're in and look for problems, look for unmet needs, in terms of founding a company, so much of it goes from
If you hit a pain point or you see someone hit a pain point, so many startups that I've talked to, they noticed, and then they did some research and they said, why isn't this problem being solved? And they found there was no alternative. And that's a great place to be. If you can do a quick sort of sizing, this feels like an important problem. It feels like this could benefit a lot of people. And gosh, there isn't anything there right now.
What a great place to start, right? Because you just tapped into an unmet need.
Kyle (56:24.547)
Absolutely. I think that's excellent advice. Well, Vidya, this has been an amazing conversation. You've brought up several things that I feel like we could probably dive into for several more hours or several more episodes because there's so much here to talk about and unpack. But I think this has been incredibly, incredibly insightful. And as we wrap up, I've got a couple final questions, but before we do that, is there anything that we've talked about or didn't get a chance to
Vidya (56:36.666)
Hehehe
Kyle (56:54.247)
that you wanted to add.
Vidya (56:56.062)
I just felt we explored so much, Carl. I was like, this has been such a fun conversation. So now we've gone everywhere.
Kyle (57:03.551)
We have, and I think it's been absolutely excellent. I've enjoyed just every second of it. This has been great. Well, to kind of wrap things up, we like to ask a couple of final questions, and these don't have to necessarily be product or technology related, but they can be if you want. So have you read or watched or listened to anything recently that you want to share?
Vidya (57:25.87)
Um, I, you know, I just been playing a lot with, I think like every single one of us, um, with a lot of different AI products. And so I've turned my attention to what's new. Um, there's some really interesting and so fast moving that just trying to get on top of a lot of the video is where I've been focusing, like what the, the techniques around, um, bringing people to life, like what that animation looks like, how it's learning.
how it's turning a lot of the help that we're getting into a way for humans to digest more easily. So I can't point to any single one. It's a lot of triangulating around sort of video, AI and help as a combination. That's where I've been spending my spare time.
Kyle (58:15.863)
That's great and I agree with you. There's so much there and it's such a fascinating space right now. I absolutely, I thoroughly enjoy it as well, experimenting with everything. Well, Vidya, where can people find out more about you, about the things that you're working on, about product rebels or anything else?
Vidya (58:33.378)
Thank you so much. You can find us at productrebels.com and that will point to the different books, the different articles that we write, the offerings that we have and all our templates you can download there for free because we want this to be a resource for everyone to be more effective at writing great problems and developing great actionable personas. So you can head over to productrebels.com and download all of those assets.
Kyle (59:02.099)
Awesome. We'll put the link for that in the show notes as well. Vidya, thank you again. This has been, like I said, an amazing conversation and appreciate all of your insight and everything that you've shared.
Vidya (59:12.866)
Thank you so much, Carl. This has been so much fun. I appreciate it.
Kyle (59:15.547)
Yeah, it has. All right. And thank you, everyone, for listening.