Product Pros 01 | Berlin

👋 Hello!

In this series I ask product pros from different cultures just three questions. I hope you enjoy these insights and tips!

Saptarshi Baksi Product Manager

Meet Rishi: Lead Product Manager at Kenjo, based in Berlin.
‘My Ikigai lies in creating social impact and building human-centric tech products and teams.’

😊 How does your country’s or culture’s uniqueness influence product design and management?

I’m from India and I’ve been living in Germany since 2017. In India, we people have a resourceful mentality trying to do more with less.

I remember in one of the startups I worked for, we used Google AdWords to do our ads. Google was offering 25 euros in credits for new accounts, so we created accounts for all our employees to run ads when we did not have a huge marketing budget. So it’s basically doing more with less.

I also come from an engineering background where it’s more about problem solving with whatever resources you have in hand. You might not have everything that you need but you somehow have to solve that problem.

All in all, if I kind of summarise the approach from India, it would be building good relations, because relations are important when you don’t have as many resources. Building relationships has been one approach I have tried to focus on, in my company.

For example, one of business team members in my company recently said that “a prospect is coming back and said hello to you”. And this was one customer I had pitched to over a call almost a year ago… So within one call, I was able to build a relation with this person and I’m from the product team, I’m not even from the sales team. So I was not in touch with the prospective customer all this while. And when this customer decides to come back, they say hello to me — I felt that the relationship building is one reason for that.

Another recent example, when a colleague decided to resign he called me first and said, let’s have a talk. And he shared the news with me saying that it was great working together. These relationships had helped me to build what I built because as a PM, as a designer, you need to know the problems faced by different teams.

The sales team, the customer success team, they are the closest with the customers. And if you build really good relations with them, you are able to influence the product but also have, I think, a really strong effect on what the final result is.

So I see relationship building is one aspect which I bring from the Indian culture where relations and community are important. And what I have adapted to is more transparency and directness which helps because people trust you. If they come to you with an idea and you say it’s a great idea but I don’t think we will be able to do it for so and so reason. The aspect to take care of is, how do I balance it in a polite way where the relationship is not affected but I’m also transparent.

This is where my Indian background with the German approach or West European approach merges.

⭐️ Your top 3 favourite products

Most of the products I like are around productivity around the work that I do, or the work that I produce.

A product which has made the most difference in my work with designers, product managers and the tech team is a product called Around. It’s a video calling software, but it approaches it in a different way, it doesn’t create these big screen faces.

When I did my masters, I studied human centric remote teams, and remote work in general. The cognitive load of seeing one’s own face and constantly being conscious and seeing faces over the entire day on calls has a stress on the brain. So when Around started, they took this approach of reducing this cognitive load. And wanted to give your work the centre space.

What Around did is so simple, but so powerful is that it reduced and created the faces into small bubbles of the people who are in the call. And they made it into an overlay on your screen. So your screen takes the centre stage, not your faces, and you don’t have to go to a screen share. So you don’t need another screen. On calls with developers, we could share our sprint boards with designers, we could directly discuss something and scribbled something.

And I mean, I look at Google Meets, they still don’t have a scribbling or pointing out feature. Around went very fast into a growth phase and got acquired — the exit was very smooth. You can keep adding more and more features, but sometimes you lose focus of your core product. And I think they never lost focus of the core product. So for that I really love Around.

Around.co

The second product is a tool called Loom, which just got acquired. Atlassian is acquiring them for 1 billion or some 990 million, it’s crazy.

What I think Loom does very well is creating or using the whitespace of the tool. What I mean by whitespace is that if you go to the Loom dashboard, they created the dashboard very nicely — It has all the elements but very good focus on the key tasks that you want to do and organisation of those tasks.

The recent AI integrations are also really cool.
So if you create a video, it automatically generates the title or creates the chapters, these kinds of things. It gives me an indication that they are constantly innovating.

Loom.com

The third product is kind of like an odd one. It’s Microsoft Teams for me. Even though many people don’t like Microsoft as a company and their products, being very clunky or, you know, like it’s not sleek and jazzy enough.

But what Microsoft Teams teaches is how to build ecosystem products. When the pandemic started and more people were working from home, Microsoft saw that the companies which have Microsoft suite (Outlook, OneDrive, Office etc.) were using external tools for remote working. And many of these tools were not GDPR compliant. So Microsoft launched the teams, which is the slack kind of product. And slack, in fact, launched a newspaper ad saying that you guys suck, you will fail - these were not the exact words, but they basically tried to say that we are the kings, and nobody can beat us.

‘Dear Microsoft’ anti-ad by Slack

And you have to just see that the growth of Microsoft was crazy. And slack is nowhere close to where Microsoft Teams is right now. They started from zero. But their major strategy was to introduce another product in the ecosystem and have a very good integration with the ecosystem.

Microsoft Teams vs Slack Daily Active Users

With teams, you have everything in one place, documents, email accesses and Microsoft drive integrated. And there are even more apps within the Microsoft ecosystem marketplace. So the whole idea of ecosystem products and growing and starting from zero, but still being able to catch up. I think that’s a huge deal, to build great software, being a large company, while still being very agile. I don’t know from the inside how they do it. But it’s really amazing to see.

Microsoft Teams

💡 What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to aspiring product designers or managers based on your experiences?

I could give one, which is for me, the most important one: Using listening as a power. People yearn to be listened to. And I’m not claiming to be a great listener and in my personal, everyday life I’m average. But when it comes to building products and doing the job of a PM, that’s what I feel is one of my strengths and I would recommend any PM to level up that skill: Because great products can be developed from listening and introspecting. Everybody says that you have to talk to customers, but apart from talking, the listening part is super important.

And when you listen, you acquire that data, you reflect on it. And I have had instances where recently one of the biggest clients we talked to got converted, because we took one and a half hours to have a research call on what are their expectations around the feature which is not there, but it is going to be there. So I think that was really powerful for them to be listened to. And we feel that when this feature is developed, they have a huge stake in it. And their demands or expectations have been listened to. So I really like to say that listening can be a great tool and a great power because you can gather knowledge and later on you can use it as a designer as a PM. So take as many chances to listen as possible.

There is a German company called Sennheiser they make high quality audio equipment. I really like their tagline:

‘Everything changes when you listen’.

I really like that. So if there is just one advice or practice you can follow, then this is it.

Connect with Rishi on Linkedin