Mayur Kamat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, I'm going to take us to another recurring segment on the podcast. It's called Fail Corner. And the idea here is folks like you come on this podcast, there's all these wins, killing it, CPO, this and that, and just moving into Thailand, it worked out incredibly, what a win all the time. In reality, that's not how things go. So the question to you here is just what's the story of a failure in your career when things didn't go well and it was a big deal for you, and then what you learned from that experience, how that actually impacted you? Yeah, so from the product side, my probably most spectacular failure was I was the first PM on Hangouts. And if you ask Nikhil, he'll probably say he was my boss then. It was an effort the size I've never seen before or after in my career. We had thousands of people working for me. We had entire power of Google. We had Larry literally sitting with us saying we can do anything we want Chrome to do. And we still didn't manage to build a great messaging product. So when I look at pure product-sense, product decision-making was, there's several reasons now I'd had luxury of 15 years to analyze that on solving for the wrong audience, solving for the wrong DNA of the company. I have this premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, it is just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there. I would've said Google with enterprise as well. But then Sundar came and Larry was no longer the CEO and that's when the enterprise took off. They literally had to change the CEO to win in certain segments, but more, and then again, I worked in Nagoda during COVID, so travel company during COVID, Binance during its probably most tumultuous area of compliance and government scrutiny. There's a lot of missteps there around externalities. I think one of the main kind of learnings from that is just don't take on projects that are going to be six months, a year, because you just generally don't have control over the macro. Things just move way more faster. And that's probably cemented my kind of now product philosophy of just doing small things very quickly, spending most of the times doing that. You still launch big products, but even over there we try and get early signals as soon as possible. But because in Nagoda, like one of the big projects we launched was we wanted to control the payments infrastructure for all the hotels and we thought if we had that device in the hotel's desk, so not only for bookings made online, but for everything that happens at the hotel, if we control that infrastructure, not only would we make money, but we had a touch point with the users that went beyond booking the travel. Travel as you know, is not a high frequency activity. You book once, then you book six months later and most of the time people would not come to Nagoda, they would just go to Google and go to some other website. So we wanted that touch point that stayed with them and thought payments would be a great avenue to do that because that's something you do every day. And again, we did it in the Nagoda style. So we did an experiment. We started very small and literally went to the mall and bought these $50 Android devices where we ran our software that people could just scan the credit card by a camera and charge it. It was incredible. We had thousands of hotels use it. And then COVID hits and then there's literally nobody going to hotels anymore. t people could just scan the credit card by a camera and charge it. It was incredible. We had thousands of hotels use it. And then COVID hits and then there's literally nobody going to hotels anymore. But it took us like six, nine months because of the licenses, and so to launch it. And in hindsight probably, I mean you couldn't have thought about COVID with that sense, but still the amount of time it took to launch the product was something we could have done better. So learnings for most of it is don't take too long to launch, don't take too long to validate your hypothesis.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.