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!

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

whats cooking here, i m intrigued 😅

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.

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

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

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.

It was north of 2 Cr after taxes

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