Anuj Rathi: preference

Transcript context

…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? 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. ybody 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.…

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