The full-stack PM | Anuj Rathi (Swiggy, Jupiter Money, Flipkart)

Three Questions for Leaders

Anuj Rathi: There are only three reasons why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. You can look at a person, and you would say either that person can’t do, which is a capability issue, or they won’t do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do, which is really your problem that you didn’t set up the ways of working now design properly. So, as a leader, do you have the right people in terms of capability? If not, is the right answer for us to coach them or to really put them… or mentor them and so on, or move them to some other place because maybe their capability is suited elsewhere? If they won’t do, why won’t they? Are they not aligned to you? Do they not agree with your vision? Do they not just have enough time? So on and so forth. So you need to really go deeper there. Why won’t they do?

India’s Most Popular Product Leader

Lenny: Today, my guest is Anuj Rathi. I’ve been looking to get more India-based product leaders on the podcast because this podcast has a large audience in India. When I put out a call on Twitter and LinkedIn asking people who I should have on, Anuj was the single most requested person. Anuj is Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Jupiter Money. Previously, he was Senior Vice President of Revenue and Growth at Swiggy where he spent seven years. He was also VP of Product at Snapdeal, a Senior PM at Walmart Labs, and the very first Product Manager at Flipkart where he led the buyer experience team.

In our conversation, we dig into how product management is different in India, Anuj’s lessons about building product experiences for new users, how he operationalized the working backwards process at the companies he’s worked at, why he pushes his teams to explore three divergent directions before settling on a plan, why he thinks product managers and companies should be much more full stack than they are. Also, a bunch of frameworks and contrarian takes about building product and your career in product. A big thank you to Sayan Maiti and Nikhil Kulkarni for helping me navigate the product scene in India. Look for more amazing India-based product leaders to come. With that, I bring you Anuj Rathi after a short word from our sponsors.

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Anuj, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Anuj Rathi: Thank you so much, Lenny. Thank you for having me.

What Makes Indian PM Different

Lenny: It’s my pleasure. I haven’t told you this, but when I put a call out on Twitter and LinkedIn for people’s favorite India-based product leaders, you are the single most recommended person, and so I just wanted to start with how does it feel to be the most loved India-based product leader at least according to my Twitter followers and LinkedIn followers?

Unique Evolution of Indian PM

Anuj Rathi: Well, it feels really good, and I really feel it’s come together because I’ve been doing product management for the longest time. In 2010, when I started the product management journey with Flipkart. I think that that was a time when there were not a lot of products being built for India. So I think one part is just the tenure, and B, I think it’s just a lot of people have known the work.

Rise of Modern Product Thinking

Lenny: Awesome. You’re very modest. I wanted to start with a question about product in India, and I’m just curious just how is product management and product building in general just most different in India?

Anuj Rathi: Yeah. I think that’s a very interesting question, and I think about this all the time. When I look at product management in India, and I do have a lot of friends comparing product management versus in US or even in Europe versus even in China, Southeast Asia, et cetera. I think India has had a very interesting journey of products in general and hence, product management also. I think till about 2010-ish, there were not really many products built for the Indian consumers in the first place. There were a lot of products being built, a lot of technology being built, but largely, because it was a back office, so you had a lot of great engineers working in companies which would build products for the American customer or even for the European customer and so on. So once these startups started coming in, which were thinking about building for the Indian consumers, I think we did not really have that talent which we could directly tap into. We’re trained into product building. Forget product management as a field in the first place. There were no colleges which were teaching anything about this. There was no playbooks, and so on, and so forth. We would go to the internet, and look at YouTube, and look at SVPG and all of that, but what we would understand would not… you could not put directly to the Indian startups.

The way that they shaped up I think also shaped up the way product management field would evolve in India. So it’s taken a bunch of iterations, and I think there are two or three different waves that have come in, and we are way closer to how good product management should be done in India. We still have a little bit way to go compared to, say, US. I also think of it along… For example, in US, the product building culture probably started in 1970s, the modern software product building culture, and you didn’t only have product manager, but the entire ecosystem… If you think about a company, who is the VP of business, and who is the VP of supply, and sales, and ops, and technology, and all of that? That group knew how to work with each other to build software products. They understood how that would be built and what to expect.

I think in India, when we were in 2010, et cetera, even those different people who needed to come together to build, say, e-commerce, they would come from, say, FMCG, or they would come from manufacturing and so on. What they would have seen in their journeys in terms of what we expect is a very request response kind of understanding which is, “Here’s machinery. If I give this X resources, I expect, with a little bit of variability, why predictable output will come,” and that mentality also moved on to what I expect from product managers or product building journeys and so on. So I think over a period of time, a lot of those cycles have happened, and a lot more other leaders in companies have now seen those cycles and understood, “All right. Now, I understand software is not machinery. Consumers are not predictable as much as we thought.” That has led to, now, finally, I think, product management coming of age.

Scale and Complexity of India

Lenny: You said that, I guess, in the Bay Area, things started 1970s, something like that. When would you say things started to really ramp up in modern product thinking in India?

Anuj Rathi: I think 2010 was when it started because… Look, there were a few products that were built before that also, and I think somebody said this clearly that usually, when modern consumer internet starts coming in countries, it usually starts with travel, so you do have… Basically, any country, we would start with, usually, the first travel company. So I think India started with some companies like MakeMyTrip and so on way earlier. There were a few very interesting products being built in India which were solving uniquely for the Indian consumers that were in the matrimony side which is Shaadi.com, and Bharmatrimony.com, and so on. We’re like, “What do you think about Tinder?” India is famous for arranged marriages, so a product that would really understand that, “Hey, if you’re a parent, if you want to get your kid up for matrimony, how would you solve for them?” and that marketplace of matchmaking, et cetera started.

So a few blips here and there which was following uniquely for India. I think 2010 was a decade or time when I can very clearly imagine that’s where a lot of people started building for India. So I think, again, Flipkart started that kind of journey, but in a couple of years, then they were like, say, Ola which was, in a way, similar to Uber, what they were doing elsewhere, and then a whole bunch of other startups that started coming in. So, for example, in food delivery, when I was working at Swiggy, that came in like, say, 2015, 2014, in that timeframe. Now, you see a whole bunch of startups which are trying to do not only things which are… what could an Uber for India look like or what could a DoorDash for India look like. Very different and also, very innovative. So I think now is the time when you see a lot more product building around that area.

Unique Insights on New Users

Lenny: Where are some numbers of just like companies in India, people in India’s money spent in India? I don’t know. Things that would be like, “Wow, that is a much bigger opportunity than I thought.”

Users Are Lazy, Vain, Selfish

Anuj Rathi: Okay. This is a very wide question, so I’ll tell you. Before the opportunity in India, I think I’ll talk about the complexity in India which I think a lot of people don’t understand. India has what? 1.4 billion people. So there were three waves, really, that happened in India, but also, in the globe. I think first wave was from desktop to mobile, and then even from mobile to smartphones. From smartphones, there was what we call the Jio revolution. There’s an Indian company called Reliance Jio that basically got internet at the cheapest prices for smartphones. So because of this, a whole population came onto the internet which was hungry for newer products, newer content, completely different ways of interacting with each other, and using internet for all sorts of different things. That was one of the waves.

The other part is really what the Indian government really enabled which is… especially in digitization of a bunch of absolute core fundamental citizen-related machinery which is either through digital payments, which is a whole bunch of Indians now started having a bank account by default, and something called UPI. So even if you do not have a bank account or that bank account is linked to your mobile phone number, but now everybody would pay through that, and that brought in a very different kind of revolution. So even if 5 rupees, that is basically 10 cents or less than that, that would be paid through UPI, and people started moving away from cash and so on. There’s something called the India Stack that is all of these things coming together, which is social security, identity, payments, and so on, that a whole bunch of other apps can now use to build their own layers on top of that. So many interesting cases started coming about. So that’s one which is just a number and the infrastructure.

Now, the other thing to look at is India is very diverse, so the number of languages spoken here, even the official languages is so high, and they say… There’s an elders’ quote in India like, “Every 15 miles, the language will change, and the people and the culture will change, and it’s a huge country of so many people.” So your traditional ways of thinking about products also, the “Who I’m building for?” is very different. “Are you building for this person or that?” Et cetera. So a bunch of frameworks break down because it’s not even that the same language will apply. While English is a language that is used by the people at least who have the money and who have the dollar to even give to you, but you have to think way more widely.

The other thing about India that is interesting is the price that people are willing to pay. Generally, it does look at the per capita money that people have. It is very low. It’s in the two, two and a half thousand dollar range compared to US which is maybe 30 times more and so on. So while there’s a lot of people who are going to give you traffic, and engagement, and so on, but the craft of actually choosing the right kind of paying customer who will actually come, and engage, and give you money is at a premium. So a lot harder work needs to be done. If you’re running e-commerce, who are the people who will pay me delivery fee? Who are the people who will actually buy this expensive stuff? So a whole bunch of different ways of thinking has evolved in this country, and that’s why it’s so vibrant and so different than any other global products.

Lenny: Wow. Fascinating. I could keep going, but I want to talk product. I’ve collected a bunch of questions from people that know you or people that have worked with you about a bunch of different stuff, so I’m just going to go a little bit all over the place. The first area I wanted to talk about is the user experience. Apparently, you have a interesting insight and a different approach of thinking about new users and new user experiences.

Practices at Swiggy and Jupiter

Anuj Rathi: One of the things that I realized once we started working with the products is that product managers and generally, companies are too engrossed in thinking about… because they are very close to the product. It’s close to their heart, and they’re looking at it all the time. They’re looking at a lot of minor nuances in terms of how this works and feels, and almost inherent into this is the bias that everybody is thinking about this product all day, all the time, and so on, and so forth. Whereas the reality is most consumers in the country or in your target market, they don’t care, and they may have sometime heard about your product. The word of mouth is not ever so strong, even if you’re the strongest brand, and so on, and so forth, but that is the customer that you’ve got to bring in, and then serve.

So there’s very interesting insight that I heard from Scott Belsky from Adobe, and then now, he’s doing very interesting stuff, and that stayed with me which was you have to think about users on modern internet consumers having three attributes. So they are lazy, they are vain, and they’re selfish. So lazy meaning, “I don’t have time for this, so blow my mind away. Otherwise, I’m not going to pay attention.” Vain which means, “I have a habit. I’m solving this problem in a particular way, and here, you come with your two-pack product and ask me to change my habit. Do you really expect me to do that?” That’s second. That’s their inherent attribute. The third one is that they’re selfish like, “Show me what’s in it for me.”

Once you start thinking about users in that vein, and if these users are not even using your product, suddenly, you realize, “Oh my god, it’s quite difficult even… How do I attract this kind of customer, and if my marketing team has done a good job at bringing this user to my product, how do I actually now empathize with this lazy, selfish, and vain customer, and build my product in a way so that I can make this appear on your site like this is the thing that you have to use, the way you write your copy, the way you build your onboarding, the way you do your first warm welcome?” It’s going to make the biggest amount of change in terms of a product success, then your core product features that you’re going to build for your loyal consumers.

So that one insight, and I’ve seen and applied that multiple times not only the companies that I worked with, the companies I’ve consulted and spoken with. Most neglect it. Well, they get user onboarding is important, but just how important is that is one, and B, the craft of thinking like a user who’s lazy, vain, and selfish, and basically, rejecting all your products, but this does not work for this kind of customer. It’s extremely hard. It’s very hard, but it’s totally worth it if you put that lens on.

Lenny: Is there an example of you using this framework on a product you worked on where you’re just like, “Here’s a thing we really did…” I don’t know, had a big impact or really surprised everyone?

Products Aren’t Plug and Play

Anuj Rathi: So we used it in two different areas. So one is, of course, products I worked on. So I worked in Swiggy for the last seven years, and really, when we started working towards this user, instead of thinking about everybody as, “This is what our onboarding experience looks like, and this is what our product is.” So, essentially, we used, basically, say, a key that it’s… “We are a food delivery app. We are a grocery delivery app, and we have these bunch of things.” Instead of that, we just started reframing it from the point of view of, “What would you want, and how could you use us? What is it in it for you?” and we started connecting all our marketing messages along with the onboarding. So even going out market and thinking, “Where do you actually find us? How did you know about us? It’s a reasonably large brand. Why have you not already downloaded us and used us? Have you used us and rejected us in the past?” So building that entire mental model and looking at a user from the point of view of, “Let’s assume that you have heard about us 20 times. What was that exact situation that brought you to download this app?”

So right from the entire journey of you hearing us, what was the trigger, and what was the marketing message, and what was the promotion that we were running? How do we continue that journey on your onboarding from your splash, that 200 rupees of… X rupees if you buy from us, continuing that entire journey in the language that they understand and with the user experience that is continuation from the marketing to product, other thing that we started focusing on a lot more, and it instantly started showing us results. But while I’m talking about just a very simple example and everybody should be doing it, that is true even when you have a particular app which has multiple products and many product lines. It’s the same principle that applies there, and that’s where I think the largest amount of delta that happens that people don’t know really why are we not able to cross-pollinate or cross-sell, and so on, and so forth.

Right now, I’m working with a company called Jupiter which is a financial services app, and it’s a neobank. So we care for personal finance, and it has a bunch of offerings. There’s a personal account or savings account. There’s a credit card. There’s mutual funds. There is investments in, say, gold, and FD, and so on, and so forth. It’s a bunch of things. But when people think about why using us only for one service and just go away, actually, the key is to recognize that this user has found value in… They are not interested in all the other things that you talked about, so be able to empathize with that user, and now thinking about the behavioral science aspects in terms of, “How do I convert this user from one to the other?” That I think is extremely important.

Lenny: So a couple things I’m hearing here. One is the importance of focusing on not people currently using your product, but this idea of maybe the marginal user or the adjacent user, the next state of users is who you should be thinking about when you’re trying to optimize onboarding the user experience, and then two is… Something that sounds like you’ve had a lot of success with is picking one value prop, maybe one positioning statement, and then following that through their entire journey versus like, “Here’s all the things we do.” Is that right?

PMs Are Full-Stack Influencers

Anuj Rathi: That’s absolutely right. Let me give an example of this one. One of the reasons why I really feel product managers must, if not better, but equally understand, category consumers which are not in market or which are not really buying your products just yet. As good as the marketer or the brand expert in your team does… because they really are tasked with, “What is that one message that I can say that will make the user take attention or get to like, ‘Oh, this is interesting,’ and direct attention towards your product?” If the product managers are able to do that, then they will choose that positioning and essentially, understand, “What is my hope product, and what is the hope that…” At least get them to try my app or any of those things, right? So if they understand it as well as the marketer, and then understand, “Over a period of time, what is the right time when I introduce them to this other one rather than being very greedy about letting the new user try everything?” So that’s one.

The other thing that I feel a lot of product managers don’t do right is… “Forget about everything. Here’s my app. Go figure,” is how most of the products are designed unfortunately. Automatically, these things will happen without any intervention. I have created something which is so beautiful, and once you tap that icon, everyone can say, “That is my product that is so working perfectly,” but they don’t really think about, “At what moment do I actually get this user here, and will they use it?” Well, this user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

Lenny: That phrase reminds me of something I always think about. Marc Andreessen had this great quote that your user’s time is already allocated. They’re not looking for more apps to download. They already have a plan for the day. Basically, they have things to do. They’re not like, “Hmm, what’s another iPhone app I’m going to check out right now?” So somehow you have to convince them, “This is worth your time,” and I like this framework. Is there an example of a phrase you found really effective either at Swiggy, or Jupiter, or Flipkart, or anything just like, “Here’s a really quick example of something that had a big impact on either simplifying the value prop,” or if you don’t have an example top of mind, what was the impact you saw from implementing some of these ideas?

True Value of Working Backwards

Anuj Rathi: I’ll talk about a phrase that I now use with product managers a lot to simplify how they should be thinking. I think one thing is… and that’s not only for the consumers, but even how we operate. We are product managers, and we are in the business of influence. Users are doing something, and now we want them to do something else. Our engineers are doing something, and now we want to influence them into building something fast. Really, leadership has some plans. We’ll influence them to, essentially, look at a plan, and basically, sign off, and do something else. We are in the business of influence, and you are doing this all the time internally. Otherwise, you’re not successful even in shipping. Now, we have to extend this to our users and really think about it from that point of view. So you are a full-stack influencer and not only an external influencer. So we’ve got to think more like sales, more like marketing, more like influencers.

Lenny: One of the most important skills for a product manager is influencing people on team, and I like the point that you’re also trying to influence your user. That’s interesting. Just more reason to get really good at influence, so. I actually have a newsletter about how to get better influence based on Frodo Baggins and Lord of the Rings. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Okay. Let’s shift to a different topic. You have a really concrete way of actually implementing the working backwards process. We had one of the authors of the book Working Backwards on recently, and I’m excited to just hear what you’ve learned about how to actually put this into practice. It’s easy to hear about, “Let’s work backwards,” but doing it is a different beast, and so I’d love to hear what you’ve learned there.

The Power of Three Options

Anuj Rathi: So I think the people who invented working backwards is clearly Amazon. I think they started this entire process which are like, “Hey, why don’t you write a press release, and with that press release, we’ll work backwards from that one?” I thought that was a very cool idea, and I was trying to dig down into like, “Hey, why does it work?” My insight or at least the way that I thought about this one is it’s not working backwards only from a customer value proposition. “Will our customers love it, and will they pay for it? Is it noteworthy, and is it something that we should even be working?” While that is one of the most important things that the Working Backwards framework teaches us, but essentially, what you’re working backwards from is an entire machinery at a particular day that is working for… For the date of GTM, what do we need to do from here till that particular day so that the GTM is successful, but also, what will be the machinery we would have created so that this product is successful?

Now, because you’re already talking about GTM, you’re already thinking about, “How will users love it? What is the money that we’ll spend? What are the alternatives that we will… routes that we have explored that finally we have zeroed in on and all of those?” So they are all going to be a part of a PR review. If I take a slightly open stance on this one, what is a press release? A press release is you have a one-pager which talks about what are we building, what is a particular date, what is the exact value proposition, what will consumers say, what will the business manager say, how will they respond, how will they use it. But the one thing that comes out from this framework is that you can use it for a whole bunch of other things. You can use it for negotiation, for example, because you start with a date, and then you say, “This is the one-pager that I need to ship, and I want the consumers to see that.” You can use it to now go to our VP Engineering and say, “By this date, can we build all of this?” Now, they do not have all the PRDs and everything, but they can give you a sense that this is too aggressive or this is not and so on.

We can also use the quotes here to actually find alliances or find people who are going to actually derail this. So you actually use the customer quote to basically say, “I want my customers to say this. From marketing and from my pricing team, can we actually ship this so that consumers will say that?” Then, from the business owner’s quote, you actually say, “This is what we are shipping, but what are your goals? Can you say that within three months, we would have achieved this much?” So using that to build one entire picture is one way that I found it really powerful because if you find disagreements here, then say, “I can’t ship it,” then you change the date, and then you change the goals because all of these things are changing together. So instead of one, you find the other set of all the things that need to come together for that press release to go live is the real value.

The other part that I found interesting here is that I really truly believe in the power of three. So I actually ask my teams to write three press releases, alternative and divergent like, “What if we…” Suppose you’re launching a membership program. So, instead of two tiers, let’s do three tiers, or for example, let’s take another one which is instead of building a membership, let’s build up tiering pricing program with membership points. Instead of this segment, let’s use another segment. Let’s say within these three, and they all need to be fully thought-through, and that helps the leadership choose.

So the two things that work here. When you are in the product discovery phase, you would have heard from a lot of folks. Finally, if you show them just one roadmap, it feels like, “Hey, this person didn’t…” They listened to my interesting point which was valuable, but didn’t include it. But when you’re doing this three PR FAQs, I considered this, and this added up to a story that eventually is valuable, this alternative route. I considered your point of view, and I created a story, but unfortunately, it is not adding up so we rejected it. So, now, people can compare and contrast, and that’s a very powerful leadership tool. That, actually, is a very powerful tool even for CXOs. When they say, “Let’s build this,” you’ll say, “Here are three ways we can build this, and here’s the reason why I’m not building what you said because you would like these two more.”

Systemic Value of FAQs

Lenny: That’s a really cool idea of just using the PR FAQ and working backwards process to think very differently partly to make sure you’ve explored all the options, partly to just think through things that are in the back of people’s minds and see if there’s something there before committing to the one direction.

Anuj Rathi: So the FAQs also are very important to set processes in the system. For example, now, at Jupiter, we have a financial services app. So every FAQ will mandatorily have, “How are you going to make sure that it is fully compliant? Have you gotten sign-off from A, B, C people? Have you actually thought about legal aspects, and so on, and so forth?” So, for example, you can use the FAQs very effectively here. Whereas, for example, when it was Swiggy, and it’s a three-way marketplace, you have consumers, delivery executives, and restaurant partners. Now, any small change that you do on, say, delivery partners, for example, if you’re working on optimizing their earnings per hour which will lead to some changes in cost per delivery, but that may have a completely different impact on delivery fee.

I’m just making this up, but now, because of so many moving parts in your FAQs, you’re explicitly asking, “Have you thought about what are the implications on restaurant partners? Have you thought about what are implications on delivery partners?” We, in fact, also have that PR FAQ in terms of we write down the different segments of delivery partners, and sometimes it will have extremely weird correlations because those product managers on one side of the equation have started thinking or at least consulting the other part of the marketplace, “What could this mean for you?” It gets everybody together to create very crisp products that work for all sides of the marketplace.

Full-Stack PMs Own the Outcomes

Lenny: One thread I’m pulling out of a few of your stories so far is you often come back to this full-stack approach to many models. So you talked about how PM is like an influencer, but also, they’re influencing users. That’s a cool way of thinking about it. With this working backwards process, you can use it to think about the full stack of launch, not just what features you’re going to build. I know you also have some strong opinions about product managers, and they should be much more full-stack than most PMs. Does that ring a bell, and if so, can you talk about that?

Anuj Rathi: Yes. No, I think it is the same thread that is connecting the first and the second. I think product managers have to own outcomes and not only features and parts of the problem. Well, they will own some parts of the problem fully, but if they need to work with everybody to make sure that eventual product that they launch is successful and not only successful from the point of view of, “Hey, we launched something that works for users,” et cetera, that’s not the definition of success. Did it work in the way that it really changed the behavior of the kind of user that we wanted to achieve a business outcome that will build a capability that is important for us? All of those things combined will not happen if the product manager is only thinking about their part. So they have to think about external users, they have to think about competition, they have to think about other product managers and product leaders about engineering, about marketing, and so on because it’s such a diverse field.

Unless you really… and I’m not saying you need to be an authority of that. Either you are very, very good at that, or you have built partnerships, and have run your ideas or product through those people and gotten weighted from them, and finally made a decision around that part, I don’t think you’ll be very successful. So, in my opinion, the full-stack product managers are the ones who are going to be more successful rather than product managers who are doing very good at one particular area only. So there’s one book which is Range, right? I’m sure you may have heard about it, right? Even the first chapter, what they talk about is… They take two examples. One is the example of Federer, Roger Federer. So, with Roger Federer, for example, I think I’ll just continue that, that till 18, he played a bunch of racket sports, and this wasn’t even tennis. But then, you bring in ideas from one racket sport to the other, and second to the third, and so on, and so forth, and now you have such a range of ideas that you can connect a lot more dots and actually ship it. I think that’s a better playbook for being more successful in product.

Show, Don’t Tell

Lenny: I was just watching a documentary on… I think it was called Greatness and had Wayne Gretzky. He had exactly the same experience actually. When he was young, he played hockey just during the winter times, and during summer, he played other sports. Hockey was just like one sport he played, and then eventually started to focus on it, and they talked about how people that played different sports in their childhood actually ended up being much better at that one sport that they chose. So a lot of parallels. I know you also have a lot of interesting ways of thinking about coming up with a roadmap ideas, and ideating and building a roadmap backlog. So you already talked about this idea of going in very divergent directions and seeing if that leads anywhere. There’s a couple more someone shared. One is you have this idea of show don’t tell. What is that?

The Four BB Framework

Anuj Rathi: Actually, show don’t tell is an idea which is an extension of what we are talking about from what backwards. When we’re talking about working backwards, one is a PR FAQ which is a written documentation of what we are trying to achieve. Show don’t tell is essentially a way in where the product manager starts ideating with the entire experience, and they actually create all the collaterals together of a user they need to begin with if you’re working on a single-play product which is a single-user product. Then, you actually start bringing together your marketers and others in terms of, “What is literally the first screen, and how is my user getting here?” It’s not as simple as he imagines somebody who will be doing this and reaching here. We try to recreate an exact situation.

There’s a concept of person, not personas. So we’ll talk about personas, but we try to go to, “All right. No. Don’t think about agentic user. Let’s say Lenny, 30 years old, doing A, B, C things, earning this much, et cetera, et cetera. His relationship with this category of food delivery is X. These are the things that he has done in the last month. In the last three days, there were the needs, desires, aspirations, fears, frustrations, et cetera, et cetera.” We say, “Okay. It’s 11:00. What’s happened? Why is this user open, or what triggered this particular app, and then what happened?” So you literally start from there, and I think 50% of my product reviews are on that part, and then when we say, “All right. Then, this app got open. Do we have the right kind of way forward for Lenny to actually achieve what he came here for?” Literally, each pixel, and each copy, and each word is going to be in service of that part.

So that’s showing the entire journey rather than just staying and assuming. So that is something that I’ve found really powerful with respect to even designing products or even thinking about why are we building something. What it also helps is when we are building complex products, especially in marketplaces because once you are building this for the user, simultaneously, something is happening on the other part if it is simultaneous, if it’s a real-time marketplace, or something like that. So you’re building something for the user and saying, “All right. If this guy ordered, now there’s a 30 minutes time when our delivery executors will come to the user with food. What is happening? What’s the emotional state of the user, and let’s plot out the 30 minutes time, and let’s create various scenarios. Is it like, ‘Hey, maybe he went to the restaurant, and the food is delayed,’ or the dude on a bike, his bike got punctured, et cetera. Now, what is the consumer thinking at this time?” So you show all of those things in real time, and that cuts out a whole bunch of random ways in which the product could have looked like if you’re creating even a chatbot. So just having that showcase of all journeys coming together helps a lot in building your products in the right way.

Sharing Counterintuitive Viewpoints

Lenny: So, essentially, just getting very detailed and very concrete with the product experience that you’re building thinking about the user experience. Sounds like a lot of work. I can’t imagine you do this often. Is the advice here to do this once a year or once and just keep it updated? It sounds like you did this at Swiggy, and that was a really impactful way of building the product.

Anuj Rathi: Yeah. I think there’s not only one way actually. I think I recommend this every product manager to do a show don’t tell version of their current version. At the same time, there’s a new version all the time. So they can compare and contrast, and very easily explain to everyone why they’re doing something. In fact, that wall… So it’s called a wall. It also becomes one common place where you can get all the stakeholders in because it becomes… Instead of just doing the elevator pitch, you can actually do detailed discussions on why I’m choosing this versus something else, and so on, and so forth. That’s a product manager’s version of doing this.

There’s also a product leader’s version of doing this thing which is recycle strategy on a page, and a lot of people call it like growth loops. Right? Don’t show our user’s journey. Now, let’s see the entire strategy of the company together on one page. “All right. This is what the market looks like, and why will we get what kind of users? What is our activation budgets, and how many of them are we going to get to this next stage and get them to use it? How will we get them to cross-pollinate into different sections? Do we need a membership program? Are there any different levers which will press more or less and so on?” So that also is a show don’t tell, and not only one, but usually, I like to create three of them as well like, “Why did we choose a strategy versus the other?” That, for example, is a very good way for our product leaders to get to one strategy that their CXOs align with and something that they can essentially tell the entire product and other teams, “This is what we’re going to follow.”

How to Develop These Skills

Lenny:

What kind of impact have you seen from implementing something like this, or is there an example of something that came out of this that was a big unlock? Again, it’s probably a lot of work for someone to put together a whole board, keep it updated, screenshots, marketing, funnels of where people are coming from. What sort of impact do you see from doing this either on growth or people, what people think?

Can’t, Won’t, or Not Empowered

Anuj Rathi: I think the largest impact that happens here is on alignment, so how CXOs are thinking if that is not very clear, and that can be a document, and so on, and so forth. But for a lot of people, it’s not very clear on… I can see one part of the funnel. I can understand… The marketing team can understand the best why we are acquiring those users, but they don’t fully see the picture of, “If I attract this kind of users, why will these users become loyal, and what does that entire thing look like or, say, some other team which is building a part of the product? Where do I come in and so on?” So I think the largest impact that the show don’t tell has is on, basically, getting the entire company together on the same page and them being able to understand why I’m doing, and which part of the entire picture I am working on, and why others are working on so that I can actually work with them to solve that part. That’s one.

The other thing that it helps, Lenny, is it also helps in choosing directions, like I said, because we are not doing one, but three of them. I’m choosing one alternative versus the other, and sometimes these strategic discussions, they can get going all sorts of different ways, and maybe you will talk about one particular unique point and go deeper rather than look at the entire picture together and say, “This is good because of all of these five points that we presented in page one versus the other one.”

The AI Angle

Lenny: I think the other benefit, just one of the benefits of working backwards in Amazon’s whole written-down memo approach is it forces you to crystallize ideas and not stay superficial because there’s so many good ideas in theory. But then, when you have to get really concrete, that’s actually a terrible idea. Basically, it’s the same benefit in a lot of ways of get very concrete. What are you actually going to do? That will help you identify, “Okay. This isn’t going to work. What are we even thinking?” So I like that. Awesome. Okay. Another framework that you have is something that you call the four BB framework for product strategy. Can you talk about what that’s all about?

Anuj Rathi: We essentially saw that if a startup actually usually wants to do a bunch of things across the border, there’s always like, “Hey, I should be investing in tech debt or building core platforms. That would really help my product in the long term. That’s super important,” and that’s my engineering managers and largely, people asking for that bandwidth. Then, there is the product manager themselves who’s basically saying, “I want to do feature enhancement, bug fixes, my version twos, a few areas, experiments, and so on, and so forth.” That’s a regular product backlog that would work on screen by screen, and there’s this leadership which will say, “You know what? Now, we have a suite of products. Now, I want to take a large delta bit that may work. It may not work, but we need to make sure that it works, but I need work across teams, and it’s not only one person that needs to do it. I need contribution from four or five of you that come together and deliver that,” or there are places where a company is just reimagining their identity, or they’re pivoting which is like, “All right. We were doing X. Now, we are doing X plus Y. That’s how we want to be known,” or, “We were doing X. Now, we want to do very little of X because current consumers, okay, we will take care of them, but now we want to pivot into Y.”

So it usually is in four of these buckets, and what really happens is it gets down to product managers eventually prioritizing between these four. So I don’t think it’s a tactical prioritization product manager call. It really is a product strategy call, and the conversation that needs to happen is between, say, the head of product and the CEO or even the leadership. If I gave you a hundred focus points, how much will you put in each of these buckets, and what are those four buckets? Those are the four BB buckets, so what are the ones? We call them… First BB is Brilliant Basics. The reason why we call it BB, Brilliant Basic, you need to brand… You cannot brand it as tech debt, so it feels like very off because these are brilliant, these are important. That’s what the company’s built on, and the company needs to invest in that. So that’s one.

The second one is Bread and Butter. So that’s your backlogs. If the product managers had no big ideas, and they just were left on their own, what would they come up with in terms of just improving that line of business that they’re given? Then, there are Big Bets. Now, that’s where your larger ideas that have come together, but how many big bets should we take, or is this big bet even a big one? That’s where you’re working backwards or PR FAQs start becoming even more important because those are the kind of bets that cannot be taken without everybody basically signing up, working backwards, and saying, “We will all make this successful.”

Breaking Bad essentially is a different world altogether. That’s where you want to redefine your company. For example, in Swiggy, if we were doing food delivery, now we want to do grocery delivery as well. It’s like these are two companies working together, or from a food delivery company, we wanted to become a convenience company. So that’s almost breaking bad. Again, like I said, we got cheesy, but the good thing that happens is now what you can do is, along with your leadership, take stock, and the head of product essentially can say, “You know what? In the next year, I can invest a lot less on my brilliant basics, and we should as a company focus a lot on this breaking back because that is existential.” But then, we should not look back and say, “Why were tech systems a little bit broken this time? We had a little bit more down times.”

You can basically blow it out and almost showcase what to expect. For example, if we are just working on a whole bunch of bread and butters, so you’ll start seeing a lot fewer bugs, customers will be a little happier. You worked a lot more… drill in basics. Tech systems are nice, but you didn’t create any differentiators. Well, none of your bets went out, and your competitors are catching up. So does that sound like a better future? These are hard questions, and these privatization questions… I don’t think of product management questions so much as product strategy questions, but in a lot of cases, executors don’t know what they’re trading off against.

So if you are able to create the conversation around which buckets do we want to put in and create three alternatives… I have tried to do that a bunch of times. Let’s look at strategy A, and we see how to be divergent. Suppose we were putting a lot fewer focus points in brilliant basics and a lot more on, for example, big bets, then there will be a risk that they will be like, “We won’t have any experiments or very less experiments. Bugs will stay bugs, but we will get a shot at changing the game.” Is that a future that sounds better or something else which is like because you’re pained also by a lot of bugs and constant down times, which is more secure, but we won’t build something amazing, so which sounds better? Because you are able to drive that, now the clarity to the product managers is way clearer in terms of what will they do. Also, they would know that if they have been signed up for a big bet, then they will need to contribute to the PR FAQ. They will need to contribute to the actual working on that irrespective of what their product was, but now they’re part of something bigger.

Lessons in Building Marketplaces

Lenny: Awesome. I love it. Okay. So just to summarize so people can have just a very short definition of this framework. Brilliant Basics is essentially tech debt and things that you just have to do like hygiene almost. Bread and Butter is essentially optimizing the product, existing product. Big Bets are big bets, and Breaking Bad are just future big rocket like moon shots just transform the way the business works?

Value Orientation Across Marketplaces

Anuj Rathi: That’s right.

Some Final Parting Words

Lenny: I love it. It’s also interesting. Another thread that comes up again and again in your advice is exploring all the options before committing to one like you always… I think it sounds like you always try to recommend three. I guess let me say what I always find is important there is I think it’s important for the product manager to recommend one along with that. It’s not just like, “Here’s three. You tell me which one you do.” It’s like, “Here’s three. Here’s my recommendation why.” Is that your advice too, or do you see something-

Anuj Rathi: 100%, 100%. So when you have explored the three, you essentially have done the work one like, “I have covered all bases and also crystallized them into a concrete option. Now, I’m choosing one on the company’s behalf on the basis of whatever I know about the market, about the company, about our strategy, and about how we will make it successful.” Now, if I miss something, it’s also a time where you can actually work with leadership and other product managers to essentially get that knowledge complete, or if you’re 80% right, you can actually use elements of strategy two and strategy three to bring into one. So that’s always the way that your thing that… one very concrete option, but because you have these other tools so that you’re not missing and bringing it together. But ultimately, you’re the one who is going to champion this, and that’s where the other leadership element of Amazon comes in which is disagree and commit. But once we have aligned on this one, we’ll all commit to launching this, and then the leadership should not go back and forth on that part.

Rapid Fire Q&A

Lenny: Awesome. I want to go in a completely different direction. It feels like you have a lot of contrarian opinions about how to build product, and how to build teams, and build companies, and things like that, so I just want to start broad. What are some things you have contrarian opinions about, things you believe that a lot of other people maybe don’t believe or seek differently?

Anuj Rathi: So one, for example, excellence and speed. There’s always a question around that. “Hey, would you rather ship faster, or would you rather ship better?” In my opinion, when you have to make a choice, think more and ship better. Most experiments should be thought experiments. They should not even be tried out because they’re obviously going to fail which is contrary to, “Let’s try it out, and then let’s see.” I think that wastes a lot of company time. If you had smart people who could do metathinking, a lot of experiments would just not even be like… It’s not a rule, but it’s a preference. I think speed and excellence are two different axes. Ideally, you should be better at both, but if you had to choose one, choose excellence.

There’s another contrarian opinion which is… I think most product managers, and again, I’m probably talking a little bit of the kind of people that I work with and have interacted with in product. Most product managers should not even be product managers. They should think a little bit more around whether this is actually the right field for them because I think a lot of people from other areas have entered the field without fully realizing what it takes. So there is definitely a way in which you can coach yourself, and then work your way upwards of that one, but it can make you quite miserable if it’s not right for you.

Favorite Interview Questions

Lenny: Is there something folks should look for there that will tell them you probably shouldn’t be a product manager? Either motivation, or skill set, or background, or anything?

Favorite Products and Life Mantras

Anuj Rathi: No. I don’t think about particular domains that you come from. I have, again, a simple framework of three. I think the first thing is essentially raw sharps, and that can manifest itself into problem identification and problem solving. That’s one, and also, higher-order thinking and all of that. I think that is super important. The second one is what I call drive or grit. I think with that comes a whole bunch of qualities around curiosity, learnability, never giving up, consumer-backward thinking, “I really want to solve this,” and all of that that comes with that. Third, which is a little difference, we talked about that, is influence. You’re in the business of influence, and if you can see yourself that, “I’m built this way,” or, “I want to really get better at these,” that’s when I think this field is going to serve you well.

Lenny: I love that everything is three. How handy.

Anuj Rathi: Only the BBs are four. I wish I could compress them three.

Lenny: Yeah. There’s too many things to do there. Essentially, these are maybe your perspective on the most important PM skills. A good way to think about it. Influence, grit, and just being smart.

Anuj Rathi: Mm-hmm.

Lenny: I think what you said here is not like you have to be amazing at these to get into product and do well. It’s you need to be excited about getting better at these skills.

Anuj Rathi: Yes. That’s right.

Lenny: Awesome.

Anuj Rathi: Well, I think it’s not as if that everybody is born with a lot of influence. Of course, you can get better at it, but it’s a prospect of that, “Hey, I will need to be influential to succeed at this job.” That should excite you and not scare you away. You should not think like, “Hey, you know what? I can get away from this and still be very successful product manager,” because most likely, you will not.

Lenny: Maybe spending a little more time here. So, smart, you’re probably not going to be able to do a lot about. In terms of grit or influence, is there anything you can share about what you’ve seen most helps people develop at these skills other than just doing the job for a while, and then starting to get better at this?

Anuj Rathi: Yeah. I think even smartness, I think 80% of that smartness, I think, is something that’s very achievable. You don’t need to be outstanding on that. Domain knowledge, for example, is something just like… An average smart person with no domain knowledge versus you armed with a lot of knowledge around domain and so on can already take you there, but you can take better decisions. I think first one is more about decision-making, problem identification, problem solving, and all of that. So I think that really can be developed at least to a level where you are very effective. Drive, I think, is probably the hardest to coach, probably the hardest. I’ve not seen people with less drive actually eventually turning out with a lot of drive, et cetera, but they can be inspired. I think you need to be a person who can think about it that way, but the third one, influences, I think, there’s no negotiation there. You need to really think that, “I have to be good at this one.”

There’s another framework that, Lenny, I wanted to talk about. When I look at product leadership in general and how do you think about different people and so on. When is it a product manager problem, or your problem, or a company problem? There are only three reasons, again, why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. You can look at a person, and you would say either that person can’t do, which is a capability issue, or they won’t do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do, which is really your problem, that you didn’t set up the ways of working now design properly, or we are okay as such and such, and so on, and so forth.

So, as a leader, it’s almost the opposite of what we talked about, great influence and raw sharps. Do you have the right people in terms of capability? If not, is the right answer for us to coach them or to really put them… or mentor them and so on, or move them to some other place because maybe their capability is suited elsewhere? If they won’t do, why won’t they? Are they not aligned to you? Do they not agree with your vision? Do they not just have enough time? So on and so forth. So you need to really go deeper there. Why won’t they do?

There are different answers for that, but if it’s a setup issue, and at least I’ve realized that apart from what product managers can do, almost 70%, 80% of problems why things don’t happen are a setup issue. Product leaders or other leaders have not thought through what OKRs are doing to my company, not really fully thought through around org design. If you’ve read the book called TEEN Topologies, that’s one interesting book which starts with Conway’s law and essentially saying, “Show me an engineering architecture, and I will actually tell you what the org design of this company is,” but that also manifests itself in products that you can basically look at a product. In most cases, you will be able to say what was org design that led to this kind of product.

Lenny: I have heard that book mentioned a couple of times recently. I got to check it out just to the three you just shared, which is another three. I love it. Can do, won’t do. What was the third one again, didn’t do?

Anuj Rathi: Not set up to do.

Lenny: Not set up to do. That one is long. That’s a long one. I think what’s cool about these are they’re essentially ways to measure performance. Maybe if you’re a product manager, like performance reviews, it’s like, “Did you have the skills to do this? Did you have the motivation to do this, or is it something not set up for you?” You weren’t set up for success, basically?

Anuj Rathi: Mm-hmm.

Lenny: Okay. Let’s go to AI corner, something I’m trying to do with every guest. Is there anything you’ve learned about working with AI that you think might be helpful to listeners?

Anuj Rathi: Yeah. I think a couple of things. I think working with AI, many, many teams and companies get too excited about AI, and the possibilities, and so on, and it’s almost like a solution ready to find a problem within their companies, which also is fine because now you’re thinking about possibilities on what this particular technology can do for my company. So it’s a good way to start, but many people don’t actually use it in the best way possible and force fit it. Instead of that, you can think about, “How do I get AI to work with HI?” Again, it’s connecting back with… and this is something that Swiggy CEO, Sriharsha, invented this term called HI just to make sure that everybody understands.

Artificial intelligence is important as much as human intelligence. If you’re not humanly intelligent, you’re not going to be artificially intelligent or AI really help your company a lot. So, literally, any product that you’re building, even when it is technologically quite interesting, and exciting, and so on, it needs to be balanced out and work together along with a great UX, along with behavioral science. The combination of those two will actually make sure that you’re getting the best outcome of that, unless you are building something which is completely backed and with no human interventions. We’re talking about consumer products largely.

Lenny: You’ve helped build some of the most successful marketplaces in India and in the world. I’m curious just what may be a lesson or two about building a successful marketplace?

Anuj Rathi: One thing that I would definitely want to talk about is when you’re thinking marketplaces, it’s not as a one plus one equals two, it multiplies. We’re thinking about three-way marketplaces. You almost not need to think like it’s a two-dimensional plane going into three-dimension. It becomes that amount of complexity, and your regular product management and leadership principles start failing. So a bunch of usual suspects will not work. Let me give an example. OKRs will not work. Why not? So, fundamentally, OKRs are a way to think about objectives and key results, but the fundamental assumption here is that it is solving for a kind of user, and that kind of user, you can divide and conquer. Of course, there will be a little bit of tussle between different teams, but you can get them to work with each other. But if it is working for three different kinds of users, then all the goals will all the time be in conflict with each other.

Lenny: What are examples of the three users? There’s like the delivery person, the restaurant-

Anuj Rathi: The end user. So if you have… I’ll give you an example of. On the consumer side, we need to collect more delivery fee. What does that really mean for those other two? On the restaurant side, hey, we need to get more commissions because profitability is a goal. On the delivery partner side, it means pay them less or optimize a little bit more. But once you start moving one lever, those two are already stretched towards the other directions. They’re not independent levers in the first place, and the way to even model them out… How will it work? What if we choose X versus what… Ys will change. Y on Z. Z will change. It’s almost impossible to do that.

So I’ve seen OKRs fail multiple times when you’re running this kind of a marketplace. Big bets work much better. That’s when you say, “Hey, we want to take this bit,” but it’s all going to be… It’s all going to come together as… If we pull this lever, then something else will change. So here’s the entire story of, “Let’s go make this profitable by making delivery fee higher, but maybe not touching earnings per hour, or maybe not touching restaurant commissions.” Things like that. So I’ve at least found that’s a better way to choose strategically which direction we have to go.

The other thing is managing multiple empathies together that’s not straightforward. So, again, Swiggy being a real-time, hyper-local marketplace, and we discussed about that, right? As soon as the order comes, what happens between when user does this and when delivery executor is doing something else, and what are absolute different kind of scenarios that are going to be faced by the delivery executor? At the same time, how will I really work with the user to manage their emotions? So you need to manage a whole bunch of these things together, and product management here, you cannot have… The delivery executive product manager only care about that side. They also need to be a champion on the consumer side and vice versa.

Lenny: Yeah. I find with marketplaces… Uber went through this, Lyft went through this where the supply often just gets squeezed because they need to deliver for the customer. So drivers end up getting housed. Airbnb hosts get pushed to do things they may not want to do. Imagine delivery people, same thing.

Anuj Rathi: Now that you mentioned Uber, for example, one of the things that companies which were running taxi businesses. If you have just one limited pool of money, for example, and you want to get the marketplace humming with respect to number of orders per day, how do you decide, “Should I incentivize my users, for example, for the first ride, first 10 rides, and so on, or put zero money in there, but incentivize my drivers?” You need to come here, so you have to think about liquidity also in very different ways, and sometimes you need to pull the lever completely towards the other side. So the experiments also. A/B experiments also don’t work, and that’s a very unique thing about marketplaces. I mean, not work the way that you would expect them to work because there are network effects all over. So if you have to run A/B experiments on your drivers side, if you put half drivers on A versus half on B, but there is a network effect between the both of them.

Lenny: When you’re trying to decide which side of the marketplace to focus on and prioritize, do you have any lessons or rules of thumb of just focus on the customer and index towards their happiness versus the supply versus, say, the delivery person?

Anuj Rathi: There’s one thing that I think marketplaces need to realize is that, A, you need to be operating in a stable marketplace. So all sides need to be stable enough so that they’re not going to go away. So I think that’s a starting point, and that’s an important point because once we have established that, then after a stable marketplace, then we say, “Which are the kind of customer that we are in the service for? Which are the customer that we will really focus on?” For example, Amazon is very, very clearly a customer-centric company. If they have to make a choice, they won’t because they need to have a stable marketplace. So sellers also are very… as important, but slightly more important than the customer.

For example, if you looked at, say, Taobao or in Alibaba, their way of thinking is their aim in life is to create life-changing experience for 10 million Chinese sellers, and they will create a marketplace from the point of view of sellers which can actually sell. Again, they will have the same consumer app, and a seller work, and so on. They are in the service of sellers, so you really need to derive from the company’s vision. I think the way we had thought about it at Swiggy that we had to clarify in our values that the first value is… Initially, it used to be customer comes first, but that was very confusing because everybody is a customer. Even a restaurant is a selling customer and so on. We had to clarify that consumer comes first, the end consumer which is actually eating food because we are a convenience company that delivers to the end consumer, and when you’re thinking about restaurants or delivery partners, we work with them because we both are… When you’re talking with the delivery partner, Swiggy and the delivery partner, we both are in the service of the customer. So you’ll build that app also from that perspective and even the restaurant side also from that perspective that we both are together in the service of the end customer.

Lenny: I feel like you have probably a hundred more frameworks, and processes, and acronyms we can talk about, but I know you got to go. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on, or is there anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Anuj Rathi: Just last few words that I want to revise. Work backwards from an amazing future. So first thing is creatively imagine a future, and then work backwards from that, and essentially, think what will make that successful, and be paranoid about… that everything is going to go wrong. Hence, I need to just make sure that it all comes together.

Lenny: Only the paranoids survive. Great advice to leave people with. We’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got six questions for you. Are you ready?

Anuj Rathi: Yeah.

Lenny: What are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Anuj Rathi: One book is Working Backwards. We covered that. The other one that has shaped my beliefs a lot is called How Brands Grow by a professor called Byron Sharp. There are two paths to it, How Brands Grow 1 and 2, that’s both very good. The other book which I really love is… and recently, Kunal Shah, who’s the founder of Cred, an Indian startup, suggested is The Luxury Strategy. The reason why I love that book is because it gets into the depth of the human psychology behind hierarchies, and how lords, and kings, and those kind of social hierarchies have shaped how people think about aspirational products and so on. So highly recommend it.

Lenny: What’s a favorite recent movie or TV show that you’ve really enjoyed?

Anuj Rathi: I really like to do reruns of The Office. I was trying to think about this as, “What is a recent movie that I watched?” I’m like, “No.” I keep on going back to The Office and some other episode. Like today, I have a lot of stories from Michael Scott.

Lenny: Okay. The US one, not the British one, or do you watch both?

Anuj Rathi: No. I watch both, but the US one has a lot more seasons.

Lenny: Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you’re interviewing product-manager-specific?

Anuj Rathi: “Which are the products where you decide speed is more important versus which are the products where you have to say excellence is what’s important?” I think that gives me a good understanding of their frameworks and why they’re just saying what, and then we go back into concrete examples where they chose one versus the other, and then take it from there.

Lenny: Then, what do you look for In a good answer to that question?

Anuj Rathi: I look for, essentially, their assessment of risk, their assessment of how important or how well have they assessed the market and the competition or the competitive products in that market. If their answer is, “Let’s ship something, and we’ll find out, and so on,” that also gives me, basically, a point of view that they really don’t understand that this product, what they’re talking about with the shipping speed, is not really… The V part of the MVP is not viable or is not… I don’t know. How do you call the MLP or whatever? But it’s not differentiated enough that it can be marketed. It is not worth enough where we can take it to user. It’s not going to work for a lazy win and selfish user, and maybe that’s not the answer towards speed versus excellence versus, for example, there’s some products which are… There’s a very clear competitive differentiation that we can find. There was a clear market gap. I want to launch something even if it is half-baked. No problem. I want to go, take it out, get user feedback, I trade, and so on. So understanding of the market, A, but B, also understanding of the core orientation.

Lenny: It comes back to your ongoing advice of being full-stack in a lot of ways, and in this case, being a full-stack PM thinking about marketing, launch, and adoption, all those things. Next question, what is a favorite product you’ve recently discovered that you really like?

Anuj Rathi: The very recent product that I like is called RISE. It’s a sleep track app because I am half insomniac, and for the longest time, I was thinking about, “How can I track this? What am I doing, and how can I actually get better at this?” So I really like the way that they actually help the end user. It’s just been a week since I’ve started using it, but recommend it.

Lenny: Has that helped your sleep yet or too soon to say?

Anuj Rathi: It’s helped me track my sleep, so it’s… Now, it’s getting into the zone where it is actionable, but I like it.

Lenny: Okay, okay. We’ll see.

Anuj Rathi: We’ll see.

Lenny: Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with people, think about in either work or life?

Anuj Rathi: I would call it a life motto as much, but one of the things that I keep telling my people who work with me, alongside me, and so on is, “Stop externalizing.” That’s one, which also means the more artistic way to say that is you are the reason for your own misery. So that’s something that I keep using a lot more in a fun way. But if things go wrong, if that leadership meeting didn’t happen in that way, if my product bombed, and so on, go back and let’s ask ourselves what could we have done better, what I could have done better, and so on. Of course, because I’m also a poker player, so in a way, I understand there is half luck involved and half skill. But over a long period of time, if it’s only luck and you’re failing, and failing, and failing, you have to go and look back at your skill. So, yeah. You are the reason for your own misery.

Lenny: I love that advice. Be very empowering, and be responsible. Final question. I was stalking your LinkedIn. You host an event called The Secret Soiree, which is not that secret because you post about it, but I’m curious, just what is that all about, and what got you to do these sorts of events?

Anuj Rathi: So we just started, me and an ex-colleague of mine, Shivangi. So we essentially wanted to meet cool people around. So that’s how it started. Interesting people without agenda who can come together and discuss interesting stuff about entrepreneurship, about startups, about products, about connections, and so on, and so forth. So it just started like that, and now we are onto many, many more interesting things that we are bringing in terms of cohorts which will be team-based. So it could be around product management, around marketing, around growth, and so on. We are strictly keeping it not-for-profit for at least the next year, but long way to go.

Lenny: Amazing, and so for listeners, is this something they could join? Who should look into this? Who is this for?

Anuj Rathi: Absolutely. At that time, probably, we’ll not call it The Secret Soiree once we have probably expanded.

Lenny: No longer secret. Okay. Cool, and then I guess they just follow you on LinkedIn, right? That’s how they can keep up to date with these sorts of events. Okay. Cool.

Anuj Rathi: Yes, on LinkedIn as well as on Twitter.

Lenny: Awesome. Anuj, we’ve gone through so many topics. We’ve talked about breaking bad and full-stack product management, full-stack thinking, working backwards, bread and butter, rule of threes. I don’t know. So many things. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and follow up on anything we’ve talked about, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Anuj Rathi: Yes. So I’m on Twitter, so on twitter.com/anujrathi, and LinkedIn, you can just search my name. I’m pretty active on both of them. I do a bunch of… not podcasts all the time like you host, Lenny, but a bunch of other events as well as talks, so. I keep on posting on Twitter. They can find me there.

Lenny: Amazing. Anuj, thank you so much for being here.

Anuj Rathi: Thank you so much, Lenny, for hosting.

Lenny: It’s my pleasure. Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Glossary

English	中文
Big Bets	Big Bets（大胆赌注，四 BB 框架之一）
Bread and Butter	Bread and Butter（基本盘，四 BB 框架之一）
Breaking Bad	Breaking Bad（破局转型，四 BB 框架之一）
Brilliant Basics	Brilliant Basics（卓越基本功，四 BB 框架之一）
Conway’s law	Conway 定律（康威定律）
Cred	Cred（印度金融科技公司，保留原文）
cross-pollination / cross-sell	交叉渗透 / 交叉销售
CXO	CXO（首席高管，如 CEO、CTO 等）
disagree and commit	disagree and commit（亚马逊领导力原则：异议但承诺执行）
elevator pitch	电梯演讲
FD	FD（定期存款）
four BB framework	四 BB 框架（four BB framework）
Frodo Baggins	弗罗多·巴金斯（《指环王》角色）
full-stack PM	全栈产品经理
growth loops	增长飞轮（growth loops）
GTM	GTM（Go-to-Market，推向市场）
HI	HI（人类智慧，Human Intelligence）
Jupiter	Jupiter
Kunal Shah	Kunal Shah（Cred 创始人，保留原文）
liquidity	流动性
Marc Andreessen	马克·安德森（硅谷知名投资人）
metathinking	元思考（metathinking）
Michael Scott	Michael Scott（《The Office》角色，保留原文）
MLP	MLP（Minimum Lovable Product，最小可爱产品）
neobank	neobank（新型数字银行）
network effects	网络效应
OKR	OKR（目标与关键成果）
personas	人物画像（personas）
PR FAQ	PR FAQ（新闻稿/常见问题，Amazon 逆向工作法中的核心文档）
PRD	PRD（产品需求文档）
Range	《Range》（《范围》，David Epstein 著作）
raw sharps	基本敏锐度（raw sharps）
RISE	RISE（睡眠追踪 App，保留原文）
Roger Federer	罗杰·费德勒（国际网球名将）
Scott Belsky	Scott Belsky（Adobe 高管，保留原文）
Shivangi	Shivangi（Anuj 的前同事，保留原文）
show don’t tell	展示而非讲述（show don’t tell）
Sriharsha	Sriharsha（Swiggy CEO，保留原文）
Swiggy	Swiggy
Team Topologies	Team Topologies（《团队拓扑》，保留英文书名）
The Office	《The Office》（办公室，保留原文）
The Secret Soiree	The Secret Soiree（活动名称，保留原文）
Wayne Gretzky	韦恩·格雷茨基（加拿大冰球传奇）
working backwards	逆向工作法

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Reformatted by reformat_english.py