Digital Signature Lawfulness for Product Management in United Kingdom

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for Product Management in United Kingdom

uh i'm prashanth we are back with another session with another great pm gaurav yadav uh i'm founder of veda dot io and i have been doing this session with couple of people with the goal to talk to all the pm across the world or at least one pm from every country uh and today we have gaurav who has been my friend mike's colleague and a great pm uh and a great friend uh mentor also how we call it bhai uh it's like bigger weather in india hindi so we have him he is currently product manager at delibro in part you have in with grab and that before that with ptm so gaurav uh would request you to just do a brief intro for viewers ah hey hey everyone uh good to be here hi guys i'm gaurav uh i'm a pm in delivery in london based out of london and my product journey started with ptm where i kind of did whole payments to a science so i was one of the earliest pm independence team then i moved to crab where i was fortunate enough to learn around fraud and how to control it and then uh was one of the pioneer pm in grabs uh fintech arm financial services where i was building loan products for our riders and now in delivery uh we just went public and i helped deliver you to have a good confidence into their numbers ensure the data is right and we have everything we need in order to go to public from financial data and processes point of view so perhaps not that sexy but super important job yeah so that is actually a good point a lot of people think that product management is about making products or making good ux flow making mobile apps and websites and other things but there's a hidden part of product management where you have to compliant pm for their security pms are there and so on and i know you come from tech background and now working on compliance and then worked on fintech how do you think people can feel it more sexier like what are the hidden parts in this which people don't know about oh okay so uh look uh these are two different uh areas so in one area where you have something which is very visible to the users yeah and uh i mean um your metrics are totally different what what's important for you as a pm on a daily basis is totally different then things should work on the back end so i can give an example where i learned the most while i was working to fight fraud so the smallest thing you can do in order to stop that fraud that could that could have huge consequences so uh it so as i said i started my journey with paytm and where so we were part of that hyper growth time of medium where uh more or less every second we were pushing something new out and that that's how we used to measure our own happiness plus because prioritization was something which was which uh at that point of time pms were not allowed to do so uh uh we were basically uh judged on our ship goals but then uh when you work on those non-sexy stuff let's say whether it's a fighting fraud or the security aspect of it or ensuring that you know you have all things from compliance financial audit those point of view it's it's different because uh i remember i i mean when i started working on fraud i knew that there are a certain x number of riders who basically you know i mean tractor principle applies a lot on the fraud side where i knew that these twenty percent of the riders are doing eighty percent of my fraud universe so they are basically uh part of that eighty percent uh uh uh cohort where majority of the money which grabbed was bleeding out there was because of these 20 and when you start looking into these the the first thing your instant would be you need to stop it and when you need to build a lot of things in a different way so what i did was i i basically pushed these twenty percent of the writers out of the grabber which led to rights in front of jakarta's office and grabbed and there was an angry mob of you know 300 to 500 riders and they were protesting and it was actually pretty scary i subconsciously put a lot of people's uh you know lives on risk because if you go out in such an environment it can be pretty uh difficult and could could escalate easily so you in in order to understand what you are doing it may not sound that complicated but the implication could be huge and i learned a lot so from there my biggest personal okr was to make sure that whatever i'm rolling out it should not have any adverse effect either on our employees or on regular people who are out there and same goes out for like things like in in compliance side of the world look uh everything is okay till nobody is checking it but even a single incident can have pretty serious effect can lead to you know fines on the company can lead to a bad report especially like you know given the current environment can make sure that your stock goes down so you need to be super conscious around these things definitely uh the one point which you mentioned to make sure uh to consider consider the repercussions of your decision i was actually reading about it earlier today that there are two types of decisions one are reversible and one are non-reversible but even in those reversible decisions you have to make sure that how much are going to the ripple effects before you reverse it back so that's very important and one thing which you mentioned um i think that you started your journey at pdm and i know a lot of my viewers also want to start their journey into product management and i know you shifted from some other domain qa to product and right now what i have been seeing a trend where people are reaching out they want to shift from business analyst to pm sales to pm csm to pm qa to pm what are your thoughts like your transition do you give any credibility to your past job which was product qa or you think in uh that will be helpful or not helpful look uh the best thing about being a pm is it doesn't really stop you whether you are coming from a tech background or you are coming from a data background or even like you know you are a guy with an mba degree and you want to make begin pm so personally for me i actually started my career as a developer and then i the java the next job i got was for a qa and then i realized i'm not really very satisfied there and then i see this opportunity that you know i can move into products and i made sure that i grab it by both of my hands because i love doing the pm work so you might be coming from any of the background and whatever your old background is that does help you in a lot of ways so coming from a tech background of course i mean uh there is this biasness at least in my head that being having a tech background in the past would make you a pretty nice execution pm like that's that would be your fourth day which you may not have realized but it is something you can you know easily master all you need is a bit patience and a couple of releases that you're pretty good and then uh you know you should look into other aspects of uh pm rule and same goes out for mba folks for example they'll they'll be pretty good in strategy data fox there will be pretty good in analytics part of it so the thing with pm is you're supposed to know all of these things and of course like your background does help you to uh you know be good at at least one of them and that kind of comes naturally i think i agree i had to learn a lot of uh doctor programming ux data analysis after getting into job and i wish i knew it beforehand but that was a black box back six seven years back what was product management as compared to now when there are a lot of content and material out there for people back then it was more like oh you have to do this and make sure you ship it right that was the strategy absolutely i mean uh for for the new folks who want to you know break into pm uh role like as i said just take your first step the best way to do this is like you know try and have that position within your company that would be the easiest one otherwise like you know if if you are on a totally different role and you want to take a pm role in some other companies uh that's a lot of hassle and you need to explain a lot of stuff and probably the people in front of you may or may not agree with you so uh i would suggest like in a first try in within your own company and second once you have actually got that role uh i would suggest like you know have a mentor that's the best way to go about this of course you can read nowadays you can read a lot about it on you know on different places but having a mentor really helps you up i'll say i have at least twice a week meeting with him or her and just talk about what's going on in your life as a pm et cetera and you know just try to learn from him and apart from that uh you know i would also suggest that i have a a group of years of other pms where you generally talk about different problems uh just like we used to did in paytm that uh you know after office whenever we used to sit we more or less used to pick one topic and kind of debate around this so that helps you a lot so it makes the journey smoother plus you know having those mentor and the you know a group of friends where you can discuss stuff so as a pm you can see you can get that feedback pretty early in the process and you can learn a lot from other people as well and you know there will always be different point of views which uh especially when you're starting off you would you wouldn't really have thought of different point of views which generally happens once once you grow into pm category then you realize there could be different personas of of your users and you realize like what all permutation combinations are available on the stuff you're trying to do so it's always good to start with these things they help you a lot that's my personal uh you know opinion i totally agree i mean mentors and networking in the industry have been super helpful i think uh that helped me get my jobs to and coming to jobs you worked in india then you worked in singapore and now you are in london which are like totally three different backgrounds playgrounds and all what has been your experience working in three different countries uh what were the differences no answer if you observed okay uh so here's the thing i can't really say a single aspect of it like you know so each time when you're moving from one place to another and especially in terms of product you're working on there are a couple of factors around this the factors are in which sort of company you are by that i mean like you know how your company runs how exactly they prioritize uh what's important for them and super important in in which phase they are whether they are in a growth phase or they are in a maintenance or phase like you know within the company journey and then the other thing is like what's up what sort of users do we have so in india while we were working you know uh we never really thought of uh creating separate designs or having a lot of user personas at least you know somewhere in 2015 16 so though it wasn't that popular at that point of time yeah and uh at least at that point of time we knew that uh our users they were supposed to be tech savvy though we we were supposed to make things super easy for them and not just for them for anybody but uh we always kind of uh had that thing that our users will figure this out we tested a lot etc but then these things changes a lot plus uh we were not really bothered about numbers at that point of time when i moved to southeast asia so uh things were totally totally different then because uh the uh grab was a different company which where uh you know anthony tan specifically believed in giving the best experience even to you know each and every user who's out there for him all the users were same and he didn't prioritize that then he want to give the best experience to the people who have faced the worst experience out of grab and grab was in a growth phase too but then uh i worked a lot on the rider side so i'll give you an example of uh you know i was creating this lone product and i was testing it out in whole of southeast asia so in order to let user choose how much he wants uh as a loan i actually put a uh a scroll bar there where you know they're supposed to scroll and pick the right number when i was testing this out i realized that none my rider in vietnam or thailand they were not able to understand that and then there was this huge difference that these are the people who actually got internet for the very first time on their phone and their behavior compared to other behavior is different so there was a new user persona for me and we need to rethink everything from the start and then again like you know you need to constantly think from their point of view need to understand how they will perform and you need to do a lot of user testing especially when you know you you have different set of users like like your rider domain for example those guys are different than you know someone with a degree or uh people who are more qualified or in let's say in a white collar job etc so you need to think from all these point of view before you arrive on a conclusion and also like you know your prioritization all etc depends like what company wants to prioritize i can give an example of being in london so over here i mean in terms of growth you do not really have a big runway and each step you are performing because of you know the economy and cost of living etc everything costs a lot of money so your whole focus shifts so you can't have that growth strategy you probably not gonna get enough backing and you need to ensure that you're getting the best out of your the buck you're putting on the table so prioritization has to be brutal and what it means is that in i mean in some of the companies let's say in southeast asia we if i was supposed to perform you know a task or build out a feature i i actually have a bigger say on that because we want to give the best experience to all of the users compared to in london while i'm working on a lot of back-end stuff over here i know that for delivery for example our vision is same since day one we want to be the most food definitive company in the world which means that majority of the focus is actually on the food products and the stuff which we are creating at back ends something which is for our own users so this is how it goes a horse can walk so can a donkey and i usually create a mule because that's what we need so prioritization helps companies vision and uh you know unique economics of your product all of them play and it's it's not exactly i mean there has to be more than one factor whether you are you are in london or you are in southeast asia or you are in india so a lot of factors come in comes into play and also you mentioned that you know you while you were working at crab you had multiple geographies to take care of thailand vietnam singapore malaysia indonesia which are very diverse in their own effect and now you are in london which is focused only on united kingdom and when you were in india atm was mainly focused in india so working for one geography versus building a product which is going to be in multiple job fairs how has that experience been any learnings um right yeah so uh so southeast asia the your users are different and key to your product is your users so behavior of let's say you know users in malaysia is going to be different than users in indonesia is going to be different than users in singapore or in vietnam or thailand so you need to consider all of them and the idea was that you need to come to a common ground where uh you know you should have specific items in let's say your product flow which can appeal to all of these users in a way that you know all of them are able to understand and all of them are able to use it that requires a lot of groundwork so each time we used to create product we used to make sure that we are testing it across the countries and we are taking their uh you know uh feedback and then we are working again on that feedback we are updating our product and going again so that may take like more than one or you know a couple of iterations in terms of user testing so uh because your users were peculiar and then in india there was like there wasn't different versions of our product across a single product would work and the delivery is actually in uh around 12 to 13 countries but uh because of you know the the way our product is structured the unit economics of each order plays a big vital role so i think that that's that's one of the reason that we are in majority of the developed countries or developed economies and uh over here uh apart from localization in terms of how the product is supposed to behave that doesn't really change a lot but uh of course like when you are doing something peculiar for a country then you need to uh actually go out and test them out but uh for for a normal flow which which will be universal across the idea is that it should appeal to everybody and uh because it's it's europe or you know people the the majority of the people out there who who actually saw internet first time on uh you know the desktop they are you you kind of predict how they'll accept or you know what they will expect out of your product but for specific things like you know i lost few meal cards just like sodexo in india uh for french market we actually tested out justin's trunks so you so basically there is no silver bullet answer to this it entirely depends on uh which particular feature or product you are building and is it something regional or it is something global that's all yeah i i totally agree because when you are building for multiple geographies you have to for example now you have localization so even in india you have localization for each state they have a necklace uh product and similarly if you are building for europe your website your product will be in different languages for each country based on who are the picking but this ufo persona of someone who started using first on desktop versus in india where it was more like mix people started late desktop or let's say laptop and then there was mobile phone whereas in southeast asian countries it started directly on smartphone so there was a very clear-cut cap when i worked in california versus japan versus indonesia you could see the difference and sometimes it you can put yourself in those shoes and say that oh i would have never thought about it because for example in india you have a customer complaint and people try to communicate on whatsapp whatsapp is considered to be okay means of communication among people whereas when you go to europe or usa people don't talk on whatsapp they prefer for email communications these kind of nuances happen but in your uh like you worked in payment and i know delivery is still uh you are working in payments part but it's a food com food delivery and overall now a delivery company let's say last mile delivery company right so how do you think these and then grab off also into uh right sharing so right sharing payments which was in paytm and now you're into logistics company which is delivery how have the experience in three different domains yeah so uh look uh this is this is actually a pretty important question especially from uh the point of view of what pms are expecting right so what you would i mean your company's vision i'm gonna tell you where exactly they're gonna focus the most and uh then especially with payments uh i mean payments i'll say is an enabler and it's it's it's enabler for rest of the use case uh unless you are in paytm where you're gonna actually make money out of payments except that uh you you're probably not gonna have that sort of prioritization or visibility and let's be honest witho with that so uh in payments uh so let's start with paytm paytm was a payments company and of course like you know whatever we wanted to prioritize we were able to prioritize uh that was given and again like you know the thumb rule was to make the best user experience with least amount of resistance this thumb rule doesn't change what changes is the the complexities around that so from here when i moved to uh you know uh grab at that point of time grab had his eyes on moving into payments but then they knew that they not they're not going to be able to solve all the downward complex ability on the event so uh the reason i said that says in paytm we had direct integrations with bank and we were we often used to work on those you know pretty sophisticated features like you know ensuring we have the best success rate with the lowest cost around that particular transaction but in grab they they actually worked with psp's payment service providers for them getting the payment done was more important than saving the cost around this and the same is true in delivery which is uh you know a food delivery company so the vision of that company defines the prioritization around your product which means that you probably may not solve a lot of complexities around payments but still you need to make sure that you are giving the best experience uh because payments is always an enabler so look here's the thing you probably have a product because you're trying to solve something and there are no free lunches in the world which means you're either you are making money out of solving that problem or you're going to make money in future by solving that problem in either case you are supposed to have supposed to make a transaction with the user and that would involve money and you want to make sure that your user focus on your use case rather than payments so you need to create the best and least resistance way for user to pay plus the difference is that especially when you're working in different geographies you need to understand what your users are comfortable paying for an example we kind of uh launched mvp of cash delivery cod in italy and this is this is the first time we did something like that in europe so before this everything was uh online so people were supposed to pay online and we were looking we we did integrate all the specific like you know uh regional payment method so whether it's for hong kong australia and uk because you know the more number of chinese folks or ensuring that we provide cod to specific areas in italy where people prefer paying in cash god that's interesting inside i mean i think the key takeaway i would make to whole journey which has been constant is it depends on the situation your goal as a pm is to as you fit to create a value to deliver a good complete the task with the least amount of resistance and making sure as a pm that this happens in a way that no one in the company side is affected it's creating revenue whatever value that is and for the user the problem is solved and as a pm we have to make sure that this happens all the time no matter what country no matter what industry no matter what role it is this is going to be the constant great gotta that way all the questions from my side and thanks a lot for the time and thanks a lot for talking to us uh we would really catch up again and when i get the veda out i would love to give you feedback uh access of the product and get feedback too yeah man i'm desperately waiting for that uh you know can't wait want to test this out won't want zeta to actually take away the pain of daily chores and you know make sure that uh we give the right feedback so that you can create a kick-ass product for all the pms out there on life and static and let's try and make the pm job good again thanks a lot thank you guys we'll be back again uh next week with another session thank you