Ex-Policybazaar Product Head #AMA

Am working on a couple of ideas. Also, mentoring/consulting a couple of startups. Yes, you can say I’m on a sabbatical. Primarily utilizing my insurance and product knowledge/experience to build something for the pet healthcare domain.

Ah super interesting Pet healthcare but? Like insurance for pets? Interesting thought process btw, I have heard from a few pet parents that this is a need

Policybazaar is an aggregator whilst Acko is an insurance company (digital). Over a period of time, with extensive customer database, we were able to define/articulate the needs of the users and worked with a couple of insurance companies to define new insurance products which have a lower CR (Claim Ratio) and sells like hot cakes in Metros and Tier-1 cities. In terms of tech stack, PB isn’t a pioneer but not also a laggard. We were usually 3-6 months behind the curve in terms of technology adoption.

Hmm very interesting And the business makes money as an affiliate referral to one of the insurance companies?

My last CTC was north of 50 LPA, entirely fixed with an insurance company. I sold my stock options to Private Equity, yes did make decent money, enough to sustain for 10 odd years.

Was this sale facilitated by your company? How did you sell the options?

I do understand your concern, but that’s the cost of doing business. We need to understand Policybazaar isn’t a NGO or not for profit enterprise. But, I do get your point of incessant calling from PB. For a couple of LOBs, we took the completely unassisted route (low barrier to entry, low engagement and low ticket size products) and the overall CX was much better. That is where a PM’s credibility and worthiness comes into play, if they can communicate and take business stakeholders in confidence with their solutions.

I completely agree with the point that the business should make money! What my concern was that if the customer requests for no calls, they should stop and product can play an important role here! A seamless trail/history of outbounds and inbounds with access controls to hide communication details could have been a good idea! Ofcourse, this has its own challenges and legacy processes would make this task even more challenging!

Like how would you define this

This is a question that’s quite close to my heart. Cause majority of companies aren’t able to define the role of a PM hence it lies in an arbitrary state. IMHO, a PM’s role can be divided into primary and secondary categories Primary - - Product vision and roadmap - Market Research, competitive landscape, Analytics - Product execution - Wireframes, tech solutions etc - Stakeholder management - Aligning cross functional teams in line to the product vision. Secondary - Business mix - P&L management (at least understanding how their features are effecting the revenue and bottom line) Most products aren’t adopted or have insignificant user retention because PMs aim for perfection which hampers timelines. And non-communication or lack of stakeholder management leads to dissonance.

Yep. It’s the same. You got it. Sure, let’s speak tomorrow :)

whats cooking here, i m intrigued 😅

As a product owner, it’s imperative that you work with an open mindset and have as much cross-functional discussions as possible. For me, it was usually the Business Head, Sales Head, Ops Head and Marketing Head as my primary mentors. As I was responsible for the End-to-End user experience, hence I always kept their KPIs as my secondary KPIs apart from my primary product management KPIs

It was north of 2 Cr after taxes

Amazing. Ctc seems low though. Head of product making only 50lacs?

This is subjective in nature and depends on company, experience and your skill set. If I talk about me, I was making more money than my developers primarily because I was bringing more to the table. But, off late if one is a MERN developer, 4-6 years of experience they can easily better a PM.

Have you done MBA or directly after B-tech

To be honest, this is a call which rests in between Product, Sales Ops and Business Head. Typically, the product loses this battle. But if you back up your solution with data, prepare a hypotheses and have conviction you can always ensure that growth can be managed with user satisfaction. That is where A/B experiments really come into play. During my time, we ended up with zero calling (only inbound calls) on two LOBs and business never got hampered. The retention and repeat rates also went through the roof. Both these products were low ticket size products. So, this experiment worked as a POC, post that we did try implementing this solution across other LOBs, successfully managed to get 10% traffic diverted but a new VC changed the entire ecosystem.

Wow thanks for this really honest and insightful answer! I worked in an ed-tech as part of a product team and I can see what you mean when the product team loses this growth vs UX battle When you say VC you mean venture capitalist or did you mean VP actually.

Upon reaching the unicorn status, there was massive hiring. There have been retrenchment activities in 2015, 2017, 2020 and might happen this year as well. 2015 was the biggest. Culturally, it’s a mixed bag. Yashish has been a visionary leader but he usually spends majority of his time in UK now (family), 2nd generation of leadership isn’t visionary as 1st line. Off late, it works more like a corporate than a startup. In terms of office timings and work pressure, it was great except for release dates.

My question is how do I differentiate between actual PM roles and these disguised roles and how to spot these from afar

That is a million dollar query from time immemorial. Honestly, the role definition of a Product manager is quite convoluted. The ideal role of a Product manager entails - - Market research - Defining need of the user - Competitive landscape - Preparing a business and product use case - Product roadmap - Wireframes/mock-ups and Design flow diagrams - Defining test cases with QA team - Defining KPIs to measure product - Supporting cross functional teams with data at least for 2-3 months But, as a Product manager even I’ve governed sprints, scrums and daily stand ups which typically falls under the purview of a project manager. - Defining the product roadmap - Defining product and user stories - Wireframes/Mock-ups and Design Flow Diagrams The challenge is omnipresent irrespective of a startup or a large organization. Don’t overthink. Define your key responsibilities and share that blueprint with your reporting manager. The long term vision of success is BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer). You should be an expert in whatever you’ve built, that you can share that story in your sleep as well. Over a period of time, let it run on autopilot mode and then transfer it to move onto your next big feature/product.

Ditto 😂

That is quite patronizing. We can always connect, you can drop me an email on - [email protected]

Not necessarily that you need an MBA degree to venture into Product management space. As I’ve mentioned earlier as well, MBA is more about soft skills (leadership, working under pressure, networking etc) For a PM, one needs to have a keen eye for detail, have empathy for users (irrespective of B2C or B2B), have a vision (can think from both a macroscopic and microscopic lens). The tech skills that one needs is - - Basic understanding of APIs - DFDs, Flowcharts - You can use tools like Balsamiq, Draw.io to chart out user flows - Google analytics, Tableau, PowerBI, Mixpanel and Flurry (for mobile apps) - Jira/Trello/Asana/Confluence (from a project management perspective) - A/B or Multivariate testing - Invision - again for mock-ups - Research tools like Hootsuite, survey monkey, Google forms and research techniques like Focus Group discussions and Depth Interviews At the end of the day, it’s all about mindset and how deep you want to explore the role cause there are generic PMs, UX PMs, Tech PMs. There’s a lot of spread in the product management ecosystem as well. Hope this helps :)

I did my MBA from a Top-10 B school (non IIM, somehow faltered in DI sectional cut-off). We need to understand that MBA isn’t a tech/skill course unlike B.Tech/CA etc. An MBA program is about learning soft skills, working under pressure and building a network. The reason I did an MBA directly after B.Tech was that I didn’t wanted to code and I knew that if I start working, I wouldn’t be able to study further. Considering the opportunity cost and direct cost involved in today’s day and age, the immediate economic sense isn’t there if one is seeking admission in a Tier-3 college. One needs to realize that you start breaking even typically after 36-45 months (majority of the bell curve).

In my case, the VC defined/appointed role was for a CPO who was a lateral entry and honestly, he didn’t add much value to the product. He was usually gaslighting or moonshining his way around. And that became a major deterrent for me and a couple of other folks and we moved out. I left PB as a VP, would’ve made a Director in a couple of years but the learning curve had gone flat, the monetary factor was exceptional though. I’m definitely in favor of working in Europe/US/Singapore/HK as it expands your horizon towards a global ecosystem and typically (it is witnessed) that majority of product innovation happens in the Western countries and is replicated here in India. I’ve worked in France/Germany for a couple of years with an insurance company and it did help me in understanding finer nuances of the game. In terms of my future scope, I’m planning to do something of my own. Fingers crossed that it works out, else would go back to a job :), although this time around I do plan to explore a new domain rather than sticking to insurance or insurtech. The future is definitely bright for a PM role, if one sticks to their strengths and becomes a Subject matter expert. Migration for monetary benefits is one aspect that does catch up with you over a period of time. One should choose a domain, a function and reach its pinnacle in order to be future proof.

Checkout this post on Grapevine - https://share.gvine.app/EymrL8bVCr5DCMBSA Have answered here. Hope this helps. From the primary responsibilities a PM should be good in at least 2 quadrants of the 4 mentioned.

Thanks for your query. The key difference between a B2C and B2B product manager is the vision and lateral thinking. When you’re building your product for the end consumer, you need to define their clusters and cohorts, identify your target audience and build a product/feature accordingly whereas for B2B or B2B2C, you need to think more from a macroscopic lens and your requirements are usually defined. The key soft skills for a B2C PM are - - Communication - Empathy - Lateral thinking - Rationality - Decision oriented - Ownership The key tech skills are - - User flows/DFDs/Mock-ups - Data Analytics - User stories - UI/UX - more focus on UX, but the 7 design language principles are good to know - Market research tools - And AI now There’s a free certification course by BCG, you can opt for that in order to upskill. But, the best way to learn is on the job, working on as many products/features as you can.

yep

Haha…technically, an organization never sells data. There are counter measures to prevent data leakage or theft but it exactly isn’t a vault of Fed. There are a lot of employees in contact center who are techies and know how to write/execute SQL queries. They just need access credentials to the Database. There are multiple other methods as well which I won’t disclose, don’t wish to be the reason that some company faces a data breach :)

Yes, they’ve ventured into offline distribution centers as well. The entire Indian startup ecosystem got it’s unicorn level valuation on the premise of our population and the scope that they would be able to penetrate to last mile of Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities/towns as well through an online channel. The harsh reality is that we are a price sensitive market coupled with trust issues. Without a physical presence of a brick and mortar store, trust cannot be built, hence we witnessed online players like Lenskart, Healthkart, Policybazaar opening offline stores. The distribution cost does go up and that is passed onto the online users but in case of Policybazaar, the cost is borne by PB or insurance companies as the pricing of the product is regulated by IRDAI.