Making the world flat, one programmer at a time. Vivek Ravishankar, Co-founder at HackerRank. #PNHangout.

Vivek from HackerRank I am one of the founders of HackerRank, formally called InterviewStreet, where we are building a platform for programmers to hone their skills and companies to streamline their recruiting process. Currently we are a team of 66 split across Palo Alto and Bangalore and we have been signing up companies like FB, Amazon, VMWare, Bloomberg, etc. as our customers while simultaneously growing our developer community. We originally started off with a platform for mock interviews but we pivoted based on customer feedback and we kept iterating until we found a gap in technical recruiting which we discovered had a huge market but was struggling from a recruitment perspective which is why we chose to go ahead and tackle this domain.

To aid in this recruitment process, we recently launched Codepair – a tool for real-time technical interviews. With this tool, you can view, edit and execute code in real-time in over 16 programming languages. When interviewing someone for a programming position there are a number of biases which both the recruiter and the candidate encounter. Factors such as the programming environment, spoken language, etc. can impact a recruiter’s decision when hiring someone. In fact, I remember my first interview where I wrote a syntax which the interviewer wasn’t familiar with. It was a new syntax and was correct but due to the lack of familiarity on the interviewer’s part we spent over 15 minutes debating over the validity of the program. Though I now understand why I didn’t get the job, that situation could have been avoided if I had a product that is so home to the environment of a programmer. Ultimately when you as an interviewer are taking a decision on whether to recruit a candidate or not, it is your bias right? You are processing a set of data internally to gauge if this person is going through to the next round or not and we want to make sure that we can eliminate as many of these biases as we can.

With Codepair, the primary bias that we are trying to eliminate is the environment that you put the candidate in. For example, you maybe interviewing candidates from outside your country and because of your accent they might miss out on a couple of words or they can miss out on certain catch phrases in your challenge or in your problem. So we built a problem statement based on this issue where you can actually view their code in real-time and you can walk through the different scenarios in the candidate’s code, i.e. for this particular scenario this maybe the output and for this particular input this maybe the output, etc. The idea of Codepair beyond the fact that it can be a pair programming, support on-video and video integrations and so on is the fact that we can eliminate all of those biases and give both the recruiter and candidate the best tool or product which is so close to what they would be use for programming in their normal day and objectively measure the ability of a programmer or candidate to come on board. We have a lot of features which might not be so obvious initially but when you start using it the experience just becomes so much better. For instance, a lot of people conduct phone interviews or attend phone interviews with their phone between their ear and shoulder and that’s not the most comfortable way. So we brought in the ability to call and have a video. So a lot of these features are implemented with great care which is why using Codepair for technical recruiting is an absolutely great experience.

In terms of customer acquisition, we at HackerRank are focused on building an amazing content team. We tried running ads in the past but through feedback from our customers, we realized that that wasn’t the way forward for us. I am really excited about the content team and I think that that will be a great way to increase our customer-base. With respect to enterprise customers we have a very strong sales team. We have a SDR team and so on and that has definitely increased the customers coming on to the platform but for the hacker side of things, things have been relatively organic

We have learnt through experience that data beats intuition and market averages because of which ours is a very data driven organization. As a result, everyone in our team has a complete understanding, almost to the granular level, of how many new people we are able to attract to the site from different sources and what constitutes a success namely a user who keeps coming back to our site regularly and how do we make sure that everyone falls into this cohort. This is what I wake up to. This is what our product managers’ wake up to. To process all our queries in a day while staying on top of our game, we rely on this very data. We care a lot about ensuring that the customers, whether it’s a programmer that’s hogging a challenge or an enterprise company which is trying to make and view reports, have access to features as quickly as possible as product is essentially a function of user experience and the speed at which you are able to help users get things done.

HackerRank has scaled rapidly, though not systematically and obviously there are a lot of things that are broken but we are constantly learning from our successes and failures. Now is the time where we are scaling at such a rapid pace that things have to be in order for it to actually get the effect of the scaling. Moreover, technology is such a critical part of everyday life and it is only going to get more critical as the world moves on because every industry is being driven by technology. Consequently, it is critical that a company hires the right people by stream-lining their recruitment processes. This way we intend to act as the backbone of organizations by aiding them recruit better and smarter. We want to make the world flat completely based on meritocracy and this is the problem that we are tackling at HackerRank i.e. how do you make the world flat?

#PNHANGOUT is an ongoing series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the products they work on and the role they play in defining the products success.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to email me at appy(dot)sg@gmail(dot)com.

26/06/201426/06/2014

Interakt – an all-in-one customer engagement platform, Sudhanshu Aggarwal – Product Manager and Founder @ Fizzy Software, #PNHangout

Fizzy Software was founded in 2007 when I was doing my under-graduation in the US. Back then the Facebook platform had just come out and we saw that this could be an excellent opportunity to build some interesting apps on their platform and the first Facebook application that we built exploded well on the market resulting in us developing more Facebook and I-phone applications. We eventually sold most of those applications because those platforms were very new and we weren’t sure what this would end up resulting in. So we saw an opportunity and we cashed out our applications. I then decided to join Zynga as a Product Manager, where, for over a year, I worked on their internal gaming social network initiative which was developed to compete with Facebook. This turned out to be a great learning experience – lots of very smart people, lot of insights, focus on scale, speed and analytics, etc. However I chose to return to India in 2010 and resumed operations with Fizzy Software where I started a team in 2011 which focuses on design, analytics and feedback to build products and solutions for ideas that we came across.

Interakt.co

The idea for Interakt arose from a recurrent pain point that we observed while developing our products at Fizzy Software. Just to clarify, Interakt is an all-in-one customer engagement platform that brings lead capture, user data, email automation, live chat, web notifications and feedback under one dashboard. Over the previous years when we’ve built products, our goal was always to solve some problem. So we would find that one simple problem or pain point that we were facing and we would build solutions around that.

Across all these products that we built there was one underlying theme namely “customer engagement.” No matter what product we built, whether it was a B2B product or a B2C product there was always an angle of customer engagement involved i.e. how do you capture customer information, how do you understand what are they up to, how have they used the product, etc. Typically you would engage with your users by maybe sending a marketing email, automated email, informational email or transactional email. They might also have a query so you would want to respond to their support queries, get their feedback or engage in live chat. So there are currently a lot of different methods that websites and mobile apps use to engage their customers. Once we had built a number of products we saw this as one of the main underlying issues that we had to deal with every time we built a product. That is when we started diving deeper into what other solutions were out there and we learnt that we could build a solution which was probably better and more comprehensive and delivered the right value because of which we decided to build Interakt as a central customer engagement platform to allow you to capture, engage and entertain users.

Picking and Choosing

Currently, in terms of customer acquisition for Interakt, we are doing a number of things as I think it is too early to predict what is going to be the biggest customer acquisition driver in the future for us but content writing is a very big thing for us. We are also now trying to formulate a social media strategy where we use Twitter, Quora and other tools to generate more leads and reach out to more people and get their feedback from there. Other than that we are constantly parsing and collecting information about start-ups from blogs and other sources and putting that in our database and reaching out to them. Another big segment for us is our integration partners. We’ve integrated with Shopify, Prestashop, bigcommerce and we are going to be going after their customers and will hopefully win some partnerships and cross promotions with those platforms where we sell it to their customers. People are already used to SaaS based platforms and they understand the value of having everything in an integrated solution. So just like Shopify handles all the inventory management, sales, payment transactions for e-commerce stores, etc. hopefully Interakt could be the place where you manage your customer engagement, supporting your customers, sending them more personalised offers, etc.

At Fizzy software, we have a diverse portfolio of products. So when building a product, we first ask ourselves if we are building this as a viable business or are we building this just because we see a problem and we are really passionate about it. This is something that has helped us determine things going forward. Consequently, we have built products like EmailList.io, LaunchGator, etc. where the idea was we wanted a simple solution where it just did something for us where other solutions didn’t satisfy our need, irrespective of generating revenue from the product. In these cases we built these products almost as hackathons and just opened up these products other people. We sometimes even open source the code if we think it can be beneficial to others to see how we’ve done things. In the extreme cases where we do come up with ideas where we think these are really models or opportunities that could be big, then that is when the decision is to see if this a B2B product or a B2C product and based on that the revenue model decision or the business model decision comes in. We have clearly defined that any B2B product will be a SaaS based play and with respect to any B2C product we want to stay away from advertising. This is an internal decision that if we are doing a B2C product it should be something where there is an alternate source of revenue rather than just advertising dollars because in order to make a lot of money on advertising dollars you need millions and millions of hits on a daily basis.

While building our products, what has been important for us is being clear about the objective. What I have noticed through various discussions that I have had with regards to a MVP is that people have over thought the scaling aspect of things. For example, when I have 100,000 users or 500,000 users I should be able to do this which, in reality, is technically not part of your MVP. The whole idea of your MVP is just to put something out there and figure out your product market fit because getting to a 100,000 users is a very big challenge and it takes probably lakhs of rupees or a brilliant product or some other product features in there which will allow you to grow that rapidly. Dropbox had its own referral system. Evernote just had a great product to capitalise on. So a lot of people focus on scaling which is one thing that we’ve never thought of. Whenever we are building something we prefer to just plug-in basic features that work for that moment and if we have to re-do it once the product goes live, that’s fine. So scaling is definitely one thing we pushed back at.

Product Roadmaps are driven by customer feedback

The core philosophy has been about being able to build that basic MVP in addition to having transparency across the board. We want to make sure that whenever someone is building something they have a clear vision in mind and that everyone in the team is aware of what the other person is doing. Before we build anything however, we require thorough research into the competition and what tools are available in the market in order to enhance and build our product at least on par with what is out there today. I think doing enough market research and gathering enough feedback from people that is basically what should be your first step before you decide to build anything because unless you have Steve Job’s capability of just envisioning something and coming up with a break-through product on your own, most people rely on customer feedback and there is really nothing better than that. So just getting out there and talking to people and figuring out what their response is in order to shape your product’s future is important. A lot of times we’ve been guilty of not doing that. We just went with our gut instinct when we thought that the idea would make a cool product but then we’ve realised, from a big picture perspective, that customer input and feedback from all the stake holders is ultimately what should be driving your product roadmap.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to email me at appy(dot)sg@gmail(dot)com.

16/06/201416/06/2014

Reach, Revenue, Retention – Sampad Swain, Co-Founder and CEO at Instamojo. #PNHangout

Sampad Swain is co-founder and CEO at Instamojo – a platform that lets you sell & collect payments instantly by just sharing a link. Today, individuals & businesses are using Instamojo to sell & collect payments for digital downloads, physical goods, event tickets, services, subscriptions & much more. He was also the co-founder of WanaMo.com and DealsAndYou. In this #PNHangout he spoke to us about his journey at Instamojo and the Instamojo Mantra.

The marriage of commerce with payments

The basic premise around which we started Instamojo was – how can we help the common man accept online payments from his customers. Payments typically have always catered to people who understood technology or who could afford to have a team who understands technology. So our aim was to cater to the rest of the world who are not tech savvy. He or she wouldn’t necessarily use technology but he or she would accept payments from her customer and it is around this hypothesis that we have been building our product ever since.

Now what we were doing at Instamojo is bring the convenience of online payments to the common man which essentially meant marrying commerce with payments. Moreover, as we had started the company in the US and not in India, we realised that we had to funnel our core hypothesis to one of bringing payments to a non-tech savvy person. So we knew we had to build a structure around this. India is the first market we are trying to get a strong foot hold in and we are working on expanding to other geographies using the same model where you can share a link and you can collect payments with it. We are skimming the surface of what we are trying to achieve at Instamojo but the last two years have been a brilliant journey of us not only building the product but also learning how the payment system works as there are a lot of stakeholders (such as the banks, regulators like the RBI, etc.) involved and more importantly, our customer base has expanded to over 10,000 customers worldwide and it continues to grow.

The evolution of Instamojo

Our journey from when we began to where we are now has had three distinct phases:

The idea phase:

When we started, we wanted to release a product to the market which caters to non-tech audiences collecting payments and we realised that the easiest way to do this was to give the Instamojo user a unique URL (a.k.a. imojo.in payment link) which he can share with his customers over sms, email, social media, etc. which they can click on to pay for his product. This was the core product that we started building.

Sampad Swain BW We were not concerned with releasing a perfect product when we began as our main focus was to test if our hypothesis was correct. So we knew that we had to release the product as soon as possible and then iterate rapidly based on the feedback we received from our customers. In fact from the idea to the release it took about 3 weeks to roll-out the product to the market. We would talk to our customers’ everyday through social media channels like twitter and blog posts where they would give us their feedback which we would then allocate to one of three different buckets – reach, revenue and retention. Reach was our primary focus early on, so we built features at Instamojo which accentuated that portion of the business model. We had to ship products which catered to the statement of reaching more people as early as possible. Take feedback, iterate and make it better every day, so that when somebody comes back to use the product again they would see that it is a better product compared to what they had used previously.

The product building phase:

The product building phase started when I went to Silicon Valley for six months where we were part of the 500 start-ups accelerator program in Mountain View – California. At this point we had crossed the reach phase of our three buckets and we were looking at enhancing our revenue channels. So we focussed on features that helped us increase our revenue month over month and we released around 24+ features which aimed at increasing our revenue base. After Silicon Valley, we went onto to raise almost $500K from our investors and now with some money in the bank, we decided to focus on retaining our customers.

The business building phase:

We now had gained traction in reach and revenue. So we began building features to retain our customers. For example if a user had previously faced issues while using Instamojo, he would consider using a different product. So the idea was to keep the platform as simple as possible without demotivating the user. The user would share a link and collect payments; nothing else thereby providing a simplified user experience. This is how the product has evolved from idea to conception in the last 18-20 months.

The Instamojo Mantra:

At Instamojo, our philosophy is very practical i.e. release those products which are more data driven to the market because the chances of getting a product right in the market increase significantly as data never lies. Consequently, we do everything based on the three buckets i.e. revenue, reach and retention. It is critical to understand what matters to the business because when you are a small company, your resources are limited and your bandwidth is limited. Since you have to do more with less, it is very critical that you are aware of what the business needs right now. Also, I have seen very few companies who have succeeded at focusing on these three aspects together early on.

So when implementing features, we keep a tab on the customer feedback that we receive as we already have thousands of feedback requests from our current customers. We then try to tag the feature request to the three buckets and we analyse which bucket’s problem this feature will help us solve. If our focus is revenue and the feature falls into reach, then it would not be worked on at that instant. Implementing a feature because I love how to engineer it is something that we have never done.

There are three specific traits that we look for when adding someone to our team

The person should be more engineering driven in their mind-set. When I say engineering driven I mean that his software should do more work than human effort should.
He or she should be an independent “tinkerer” i.e. he or she can work independently while working as a team and he or she can basically tinker with a problem statement.
The most important one for the company is a get shit done attitude – getting up and saying that I can get this done and doing it quickly.

These three aspects are what we really care about and this is what our Instamojo culture is.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to email me at appy(dot)sg@gmail(dot)com.

09/04/201409/04/2014

The Services Industry moved India back 20 years in terms of building Products” – Arvind Jha, #PNHangout

In 1986, when I graduated from IIT Kharagpur as a Computer Science major, I had picked up an obsession with building products. Soon after college, I had joined DCM Data Products. DCM like other players in the Indian market, were very focussed on product development, as the product culture for designing computers, or writing compilers, etc was prevalent in that era. We as any other product company at that time were focussed on the fundamentals, such as, what a product should do, who would use such products, how we would market the products and how are we going to support such products.

As the outsourcing business kicked off in India, in 1991, the focus had suddenly shifted to a services mind-set where the question had suddenly changed to how efficiently and effectively can we utilize the 40 man hours in a week. The focus in the industry had pivoted from building a product to becoming a programmer, from market access to talent factories. Although India had built a 100 billion dollar services industry in this time period, we had also effectively moved back 20 years in the product industry.

Market Understanding is the key to building products

I had joined Polaroid – the leader in instant and chemical photography in the late 90’s. I had first-hand seen a how a dominant market leader was blindsided by major disruptions. Polaroid had a tough time adapting to the shifting consumer trends towards digital. The company had spent lot of time and resources in converting film’s to digital and digital to film, however, what the executives did not see that the Polaroid, was that film had no chance to survive in the digital medium.

Eventually the company filed for bankruptcy and was sold. I had moved on earlier to Adobe, a company that was a leader in the software product space and was just setting up shop in India. Adobe was a solid product oriented company, with a lot of innovative products and a lot of leverage in the market. We had almost 5-10 million users for each products, and just sitting in on such big products gave us a huge amount of education. The challenge we had against was, could we build a product culture at the India office. The opportunity came after a couple of years after working as extension teams to the major products. We got the opportunity to “own” a full release of PageMaker. Since the core team was busy with building InDesign 1.0, PageMaker had been neglected and revenues were declining as the ecosystem of operating system, creator applications, graphics, printing etc had moved on. The task was to update the product on an “old” and complex code-base with minimal resources such that the revenue decline could be slowed down, enough to give InDesign a good chance in the market. We identified a lot of opportunities in the usage workflow, which our competitors did not take advantage of. These along with in numerous byte sized elements that had incrementally improved the product allowed us to present a case to the executives. The management had fortunately agreed to take on this mammoth task of transforming page maker. It turned out that the PageMaker 7.0 release increased the revenue 1.5x times and extended the long-tail significantly far in excess of the expectations.

The Innovation Bug

When you get hooked onto new and innovative stuff it gets harder do the maintenance sort of stuff. I started Adobe Connect, and also Adobe Enterprise Effort. Adobe in India had however at that time moved its focus in maintaining some of its older products, and I had then decided to move away to join a video start-up and learn how to build a product and a business from grounds-up, with a view to move to my own start-up in 3-5 years. The start-up was in video play-shifting, a similar solution to SlingMedia, where a user can take a video signal and encode it, and using a wire transmit the signal remotely to where the he is. We implemented a local area, wi-fi based video streaming and a peer-2-peer protocol for tunnelling video to a remote user. We got a NASSCOM innovation award for this product. However, one of the founders of the company had a tainted record with an IPO/investors and though we had great technology and user traction, it was impossible to raise funding unless the founder was removed from the company (which he did not want to let go). Since I was directly involved in meetings VCs and investors at that stage, I felt that the possibility of collateral damage to my professional reputation was very high given the founders manipulations and therefore I decided to exit from the company to launch my own start-up.

We launched Movico where we tried to establish ourselves in the video transactions space. The idea was to build a tool that would allow content owners to build scene based metadata and indexes for their video collections and we would offer tools for the users to extract, join, create new content online. In hindsight, we were way ahead of our time and especially after the 2008 economic turmoil, the funding needed to build the product and business had dried up. We had to can the product and look for alternate ways to keep going. So we turned our strategy around a bit, went into OPD services, built a reasonable revenue base and started looking at mobile apps.

Filmy Filmy!!

A couple of years ago, my friends started a mobile distribution company, Lava, focussed on brining tech/manufacturing from China and building a distribution brand in India. They did rather well and scaled the business to top 5 local Indian brand level within 18 months. In 2011, they asked me to help setup a smartphone team/capability for them since it was clear that android was going to be huge disruption for the phone business. I got the chance to understand the phone ecosystem – from chips to software. I could see that for Lava to be successful in the smartphone space, we would have to move into a premium zone. So I helped build an Android R&D / competency centre. This attracted the high-end players to speak to Lava. One such player was Intel, who were looking to get into the phone business but not finding any takers. I realized that Lava could gain significantly with Intel as a partner. The profile could change. We negotiated to bring the Intel technology to the market under a new brand, Xolo, pitched as a premium brand with “Intel Inside” (Xolo today is a well known brand by itself).

The association with Lava had given me some useful insights into what the Indian consumer was looking for, and based on this I decided to move away from the device side to focus on building a portfolio of apps that were primarily in the content space – News, Film, Movies, Songs, Indian books and Indian Magazines. My gut-feel is that once the smartphone pricing falls under Rs. 2500 level (I expect this to happen Q4 2014) the demand for consumption of this Indian/local/regional content will be large and we can build a large digital media business powered by apps/server side technology. Although we had many competitors in these areas like Gaana.com, we knew that our expertise with video, content algorithms, focus on integrating new technology to deliver consumer benefit would win in the long run.

An example of this is our app “Filmi Filmy”. The market has over 7-10 major hindi film music apps. However, none of them have a great video experience. At the same time consumption from YouTube has been growing rapidly. Content owners have published over 10,000 free movies and over 30000 free songs to YouTube. Using some smart algorithms and our video technology expertise, we have launched the first ever chitrahhar-on-the-go app, Filmy Filmy. It brings your favourite film songs with the original film tracks for you to enjoy in video. And we plan to build an ecosystem around this – sharing playlists, screen shots, quizzes, memes – ideas to engage the users and let them create new content. Make the video transactional (going back to our Movico idea). I’m happy to say that within 3 weeks of launch, we were the top new music app in India. We were featured at #8 in the indian app store in the music category in India and #1 in Pakistan. We are currently grossing over 1000+ downloads/week. Soon we will have Android and Windows version of this app ready.

Innovative Business Models and Market Understanding is Key

With Filmy Filmy, we have implemented unique business models built around in-app purchasing. We knew right from the outset that this was not an App we can charge a premium for. Even if we went down the advertising route, we would need close to 4-5 million downloads for the product to be sustainable. Hence, keeping this in mind, we went down the in-app purchases route, that allows users to purchase and create his own own playlist and share this with his friends. For example, on Valentine’s Day, we had allowed our users to create a playlist to express his emotions and share this with his beau. We were quite interested to see that this model had gained quite a lot in terms of traction and revenue.

We currently target the Indian Diaspora, such as the Middle East, SEA, etc. We provide limited content access for free, but we monetize through some innovative means. Product Managers usually play an important role in understanding the market and identifying the right channels to monetize this content. My passion is to be ahead of the market so I am always trying things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. But the team has a fun time all the time.

India as a Product Nation

A lot of young companies come to me saying, that we are doing an Indian version of a US business model. What sorely seems to be lacking in the pitch is the consumer profiling on how their unique solution will tackle a real world problem. I believe that one is to one direct modelling of US business models may not work. I would much rather here a pitch from an Indian company which states that they have the market insight to say that there is a large enough need in our Indian Audience, and our solution can meet that need in an innovative way. The focus should change from “we can do it” to “we know this about the Indian Consumer”. However, I’m very excited that the product industry has now matured and is no longer learning to walk, we’ve reached a point where we can run.

14/01/201414/01/2014

Office Chat – The App for Messaging Securely” – Vipin Thomas, Product Manager – MangoApps #PNHangout

With Office Chat, the goal was simple; we wanted to create a product like Whatsapp, but for enterprises. This app should seamlessly work between devices (mobile and desktop) and could also be sold alongside the other suite of apps offered by MangoApps (an enterprise social collaboration network). Although MangoApps has an IM client tool integrated in it, Office Chat differentiates itself by bringing out the social flavour from MangoApps, thus, offering a similar and robust IM Client.

Integration: The Key to Success

When we launched MangoApps, it was a Micro-blogging tool which had IM capabilities. As our customer base grew larger, we integrated modules that raised a lot of feature requests from our community of users. These feature requirements typically vary drastically from industry to industry. With over 8,500 customers from 28 countries, what has set MangoApps apart is its ability to integrate with almost 30+ applications such as SalesForce, SharePoint, Office 365, etc seamlessly. MangoApps architecture was built keeping in mind that any enterprise could plug and play with any existing solution that maybe used within the organization.

Office Chat gives companies a better way to communicate with colleagues and project members, by offering a solution that works across multiple devices. We have spent a lot of time in understanding the pain points of our customers and how our product could simplify their lives. The Office Chat team has also been dogfooding the app themselves by using the product internally, and providing relevant use cases to make the product simpler to use.

The motivation to use Office Chat is driven by the increased productivity from using a platform that allows the user to perform better because all the information is tightly integrated. As Product Managers we spend a lot of time demonstrating use cases to our customers. We have a public domain that allows any customer to sign up for free and kick off a Proof Of Concept (POC). It’s only after an entire team uses the platform do they see the value in using it, hence, we spend a lot of time evangelising the benefits of this social aspect inside organizations.

Deployment Models to cater to diverse organizations

Office Chat as a product fits into any industry. To cater to our diverse customers we segment our audience on the size of the organization and offer solutions based on the capacity of usage.

Public Cloud: This is a SaaS based model where a customer can purchase the app and can start using it immediately. We offer the App in three avatars, namely free, business and enterprise. The advantage of moving onto a more premium plan is that you will not have any limitations with integrations with 3^rd party API’s or the number of users.

Private Cloud and On-Premise: This solution offers the customer the flexibility to choose his own hosting provider while deploying Office Chat. We also offer a range of on-premise solutions as well.

The Road Map

We spend a lot of time interacting with our customers. We try to understand the sort of challenges our customers face while adopting to the platform. When a customer requests for a feature, we usually take a step back to analyse if such a feature has been requested by other users to see if we can derive a pattern and based on this before we go about defining our product roadmap.

We are planning to integrate a slew of features (including real-time note pads) that increases the ability to collaborate between colleagues.

#PNHANGOUT is an on-going series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the products they work on and the role they play in defining the products success.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj

12/08/201312/08/2013

“Social Commerce – Enabling trust and higher conversions in online transactions” – #PNHangout with Vipin Agarwal

In this #PNHangout, we spoke to Vipin Agarwal, who is the co-founder of enMarkit and an ex-VC turned entrepreneur, about his journey in conceptualizing the product, his team, the tools and the product management philosophy and what a typical day in his life looks like!

Give us a brief introduction to what enMarkit does.

Enmarkit comes from a combination of the words: ENabling and MARKETing. We offer product based solutions to merchants who want to start selling online without these merchants spending too much time or money on creating their websites or struggling to deal with outsourcing agencies. We offer simple plug and play solutions to the entire eco-system of companies, SME’s and entrepreneurs using a SaaS model.

We have two live products –

enMarkit FAST (Fast Anywhere Secure Transactions) Payments Solution – helps anyone start receiving payments online instantly. This solution embeds seamlessly on any given website, blog, Facebook page or any social media page.
enMarkit ONE Store – The socially integrated solution that enables anyone to create an online store within a minute. This web-store has payment gateway already integrated at no upfront costs, giving the merchant a ready-to-use storefront that he can start sharing with his clients instantly.

Besides these, we have a couple of products under development that would, we believe, go a long way to revolutionize the online commerce ecosystem even further.

How did you meet your co-founder and how did you bring this concept to life?

As a venture capitalist I was exploring bottlenecks that entrepreneurs and companies faced in the online transaction space and in the midst of trying to find technology enabled solutions that could solve this I had met Ekta, who was the Amazon head for market places in India. It took about 6 months of back and forth conversation with Ekta before we started. Finally we chose to tackle the online transactions space head on.

We took inspiration from the user behaviour when a person shops for something from a mom-and-pop store. We realised that the entire product discovery, transaction conclusion and post-transaction behaviour of a person in real world is not reflected in the current transaction models of websites today. Buying is inherently a social phenomenon – and yet Social Commerce has distinctly been untouched in all e-commerce business models today.

It is very common to find founders juggling multiple roles in the early stages. What role do you play when it comes to product management?

In my current role I interact with multiple teams and different kinds of customers to bring our product to life. Although I do not have a background in coding, I do have a very strong opinion of the product features that come over from the use case scenarios laid out by interacting with our customers.

With feature additions we constantly communicate with the registered merchants on our platform to get an idea of what their requirements maybe. We usually break our customer demands into two buckets, soft and hard. Soft requirements are minor changes which can be made in our user interface, which improve the user experience and aesthetics of the product. With hard requirements, that are more complex and require a larger change in the product itself, we consult with the front end and back end teams to ensure the changes roll out smoothly, these could be issues such as improving load times, etc.

It’s interesting to note that some of the biggest critics we have for the product are the internal team-members! Pitching an idea and getting a go ahead is one of the biggest hurdles our product has to cross even before we even start the test marketing campaigns. The benchmarks set by our team are very high and that reflects in our products as well.

When did you know enMarkit was a market fit?

I had personally made over 2000 cold calls, talking to merchants and demonstrating a prototype to target customers before going whole hog on product development. Even though our product was in its early stages, we received tons of feedback from our users. Out of the 800-900 people I personally met, almost 70 people had actually committed to using our product after it would be ready. Once we knew that we had their support, this encouraged me to continue building the product further. After adding the social commerce features in our future iterations the market for us grew larger.

From 2012 to 2013, your product must have scaled extensively. How did you ensure the product and teams also scaled the right way?

EnMarkit started off as a social commerce platform which was built with direct contact to our customers. How we ensured continuity and evolution of the product and teams was by not throwing all the features on day 1. We request for a feature, build it, get some feedback and if it does not work as planned, we junk it. It was this type of ladder approach that has allowed us to build our portfolio of products.

What has been your most challenging problem and how did you tackle it?

Our product development philosophy has always been to build, evaluate and either junk or deploy the feature depending on the feedback we receive. Some-times junking the product affects the team morale, as the team may have spent time and energy building it. The solution I’ve found to this is to make the team understand that even though the work was great, the market wasn’t ready a feature like this.

What are some of the tools you use to maintain communication between the tech, design, business and sales teams?

There are various teams that work on various parts of the same problem, so it’s usually my role to maintain these interactions between the teams and keep the teams in synergy. Team management internally is always a challenge.

I keep a Gantt chart with me to keep a track of the timelines of the proposed and actual build times and ensure that is matched by the team. I also ensure that if a task is a road-block for another task, that timelines are maintained so that there isn’t a delay.

Some of the tools I do this with are Trello(for project management) and although very basic we use Google Docs and Excel sheets track progress.

Could you briefly tell us what a typical day for you is like at enMarkit?

Before, I get to work, I usually allocate a little bit of time every morning to catching up on the latest news even before I leave for the office.

After reaching work, I allocate some time every morning for catch up meetings with my team. We evaluate the work we will do today and how the backlog looks like.

Around lunch time, we usually take a little a little longer break of 45 mins. We usually discuss all the industry news between the team.

Post lunch, I usually allocate a couple of hours to talk to our customers.

Towards the end of the day is when I sit with the many teams again, often getting into a detailed conversation of the progress made today.

How do you divide your time between: executing your current tasks b) planning for the future c) emergency

Since it’s just the first year of our product, we do spend a considerable amount of time in firefighting. I usually plan for the future with my co-founder Ekta to evaluate the roadmap of our product and what should be communicated with the rest of the team.

Where Ekta and I help each other out, is that I work as a product manager/salesman with a lot of ideas and demands for feature requests and Ekta is usually adept at giving me an idea of the challenges that we may face in implementing these features, and also the estimated time it may take for the team to do it. By the end of this meeting, we usually end up with a list of tasks in terms of priority that can be handed over to the teams.

Any advice for other product managers?

I think product management philosophies vary from company to company, and I would suggest each product manager to use tools, styles that suit his/her personality. There’s no one mantra that fits all. The longer plan is balancing the requirements of the customers and the capabilities of the team.

Editors Note:

Every member of the product team is important. To succeed, a company must design, build, test and market the product effectively. That said, there is one role that is absolutely crucial to producing a good product, yet it is often the most misunderstood and underutilized of all the roles. This is the role of the product manager. #PNHangout is an ongoing series where we talk to Product Managers from various companies to understand what drives them, the tools they use, the products they work on, how they go about their day and the role they play in defining the products success.

If you have any feedback or questions that you would like answered in this series feel free to tweet to me: @akashj