Building a PM Career in India - Part 2 || Bhavik Kaul (ex-CPO at LazyPay)

Everything you need to know to build a great career in product - from choosing a company, the skills great PMs must have, and the specific skills required as a CPO

Welcome to the Product Roadmap #8!

Here’s the promised second edition of our conversation with Bhavik where we speak about how to think about your role as a PM, the skills that great PMs build, how to think about your career, and when to quit a job.

Bhavik has spent more than a decade building consumer products for the Indian user at Microsoft, Hike, Dunzo, and then LazyPay, and the conversation reflects his deep intuition and earned secrets about going from an IC PM to a Product Leader.

Read Part 1 here.

Here we go!

Here are the key sections we covered

1. Thinking about a product career: the 3D matrix of domain, skill level, and behaviour at each level.

2. How the PM’s role is multiplicative instead of additive.

3. Why great PMs are opinionated and think deeply about their work and how low bias, grit, bias for action, and curiosity are keys to success.

4. Building a framework for your career - understanding your strengths, the value you assign to work, and your risk appetite.

5. How to think about your career in the long term and how to think about money, and when to quit a job.

6. Bhavik’s tips to running large product org as a product leader.

Thinking about a product career: the 3D matrix

Mithun Madhusudan:
The next thing we want to discuss with you is a little on the softer aspect. We get a lot of these questions from young PMs and our teams in general conversations. You said you sort of drunk-walked into a PM career. How do you think they should think about their career in product? Why should they be here? What should be their goal?

Bhavik Kaul:
This is a great question. Also because It also ties into the overall question of how to hire PMs. I believe there are 3 dimensions that one needs to get better at which building a PM career

First dimension is the domain and stage of the company. PMs are at the center of a lot of conversations and information. The nuance of who you are (stage of company) and where you are (domain/ space) are supercritical to make accurate decisions.

The second dimension is “skill at level” for PMs. Most companies test this in interviews. But very few teach them well. Its imp for PMs to lay out a list of skills to get better so that by the time they are in leadership roles their ability to risk mitigate allows them to be right most of the time  

The third dimension, which I realized very late in life, is behavior at each level in the PM ladder. I realized that most people who were reasonably good at dimension 1 and 2, messed up at dimension 3, and that was the reason they were not growing in their careers. There is a large number of Principal PM/ Directors/ Lead PMs in the industry. Their ability to unlearn at this stage and start seeing their craft driven by needs of consumers, investors and employees all at once is what allows them to be successful beyond that point in their career

The reason it's so hard to hire top 1% PMs is because most interview panels focus on measuring skills at level and domain knowledge. PMs who portray their latent ability to think multi dimensionally and with empathy & honesty stand out as people that a company should bet on as future leaders.

Basic Skills - the PM role as multiplicative instead of additive

First basic skill which makes successful PMs is “structured decisioning framework”. I noticed in all the companies that I have worked in - everyone expects PMs to be the decision makers in each conversation. This requires them to have a framework in each conversation. Decision making eventually becomes a process of elimination and creates incredible democracy and speed in the organization. I was teaching this course in GrowthX, also “Visual decision making for growth leaders”

The second thing that I have noticed, which makes very successful PMs, is obsession in detailing. Again, the same thing. Nobody else is interested in doing it. They're like, "PM kar dega". But the reverse is also true: If nobody does this, this can lead to disastrous effects. So no pre-mortems, you didn't think of risk, you didn’t establish the different cases for common problems like “the user had a bad experience” or “retention dropped”. If you don't have an obsession with detailing, it will be incredibly hard to solve complex problems. 

And the third skill, which almost all of us talk about & which is masqueraded as leadership skills, but effectively is influencing people. So, people who are great at influencing other people, whether they're your team, or they are peers, or they are upward management eventually become solid PMs. 

If you add a designer plus an engineer plus a marketer, they would do a great job. In most cases, if they are really, really good, you don't require a product manager. So, then, what does a product manager do? I feel that a great product manager is multiplicative. As a 1% PM you make all of the other functions in the company more productive, more high quality work producing, more happy. Basically everyone spends less time on wrong things. And that can only happen if you are a 1% PM great at the other 3 basic skills : “structured decision making, obsession on detailing, influencing people”

Now, the thing is, because these skills are so basic (almost non function specific), most people believe they can be PMs, and that's why most people also at a later stage feel that they are stuck with a glass ceiling in their PM careers. (because they didn’t spend time early on perfecting these skills)

Introspecting on your role as a PM

Mithun Madhusudan:
So, how could one do some self-introspection? Because if you asked, "Do you have an obsession to detail?" everyone would sit up and say, "Yeah, of course. But then half of these people are now struggling, they can't get promoted in their companies. They don't know what they're doing in the job, the CEOs come and shout at them because engineers are shielded. So, how do you think one should self-evaluate?

Bhavik Kaul:
This is a really hard problem. Self evaluation (for the PM role) should start with the realization that eventually all PMs (product managers) become/ or are perceived as GMs (general managers) & as a GM the weight of making decisions for your team/ your company falls on you. 

Lack of a convincing decision making ability is what causes the glass ceiling in career growth for PMs. One way or another PMs need to find their own way to go beyond the glass ceiling. The framework I personally follow which can allow one to make this transition is a “decision maker/ leader” has 3 steps and it is as follows 

(step1) Arrive at the actual metric(s) that are at the heart of making a decision. Ask questions like “what success looks like?” or “what happens if we fail” etc. This is a longish process which requires one to ask as many detailed whys and be extremely honest and unbiased. I have seen startups go from “we want 10x growth in the next 5months” to “we want to raise 1.5m$ to survive the next 2yrs”. Honesty in important at this step

(step2) Create a MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) list of all options/ solutions which can help one get to success. I feel anyone can get better at this skill with practice. I personally recommend mind maps as tools to execute MECE

(step3) Carefully eliminate all options/ solutions which don't fit the constraints of the particular situation. This requires PMs to orchestrate group decision making meetings/ sessions. Everyone needs to feel empowered about how the decision is being made and their ability to influence it.

When PMs get comfortable with their own version of this framework & feel comfortable making decisions in low data and ambiguous situations ; they grow exponentially. So does the company

Role of a Product Leader: Defining Roles and Setting expectations

Vibhav V:
I mean, for me, it's just very simply at mid-management, is whether they're able to deliver or not. You give it six months. If you could ship you’ve been effective. That's your answer, because it's like a trifecta of the three things. And, I have PMs who come and say, I'm working so hard but nothing is shipped, and they say I'm fighting with this person, fighting with that person. That's very curious about the behavior part that you spoke about. Part of that is influencing, but you are not able to work with other people. You might be smart, but at the end of the day, if you can't ship something for six odd months.

That should tell you some indications that, yeah, there's something wrong.

Bhavik Kaul:
The first thing most product leaders in large companies struggle with is role definition for PMs. This is because these companies have several divisions which run as mini companies themselves. What's worked for me is clearly breaking down success at a company into a mindmap of success at each team and each person. The one non negotiable thing I maintained for each person in the product org was “Velocity of learning”.

I had the privilege of running a very large company with a team of almost 35 PMs. One part of the business was in full factory mode, (cash cow of the business). The focus in this part was to move metrics. Domain knowledge, Analytical thinking, Operational grit helped PMs here. Second part was building core platforms for the group. The focus in these teams was to think 1yr out and build platform products which allowed creating delightful experiences for users. In these teams Deep technical understanding, Inter team cooperation and detailed program management were skills that helped PMs. Third set of teams were tiger teams which were tasked with building innovative new features (eg: Credit on UPI in 2020 that my team released). With these teams skills in User research, Design & UX and Alternative marketing and growth techniques were what made PMs successful.

Second thing that I think product leaders need to do is to be champions of “Expectation Settling” across the organization. At the company level this means that CPOs should ideally organize and drive town halls. At the team levels CPOs define process, cadences and formats of working together so that each team believes they are winning. At an employee level this means a clear definition of success, failure and constraints for the person. The definition of a framework allows growth of more autonomy for the employee. 

Clear expectation setting though is much much harder than it seems to be. I wanted to show my team that this can be done without much overhead. Eg: one of the things that I keep doing: in all the one-on-one & group meetings is to be the primary notetaker. I do this to make sure that there is no challenge in people understanding “what was said” vs “what was meant”. I do this by sharing my screen in every meeting (which everyone can see) and while they are talking I take notes. In a way this also subtly prevents people from going into monologues and focus on the agenda of the meeting. This is hard work though. But something that has been the top productivity hack for me.  

Mithun Madhusudan:
So, a sign of a great PM is somebody who does a meeting with you, and then sends action items, which are pointed with timelines. That's a good, then, and a primary input skill to develop..

Bhavik Kaul:
Exactly, and that's why I made this mandatory for all 1-1s between me and my directs to be a running document. Fun conversations are also important in 1-1s but when it comes to planning for growth for the company and the employee, if it's in print with a clear success/ failure definition with it then more often than not people feel empowered. This document I feel then becomes the blueprint of a PMs career plan.

Interview Process - What Bhavik checks for

The first part is base skills : structured problem breakdown, obsession on detailing. Generally people cover this in case study rounds. But I've stopped doing generic problems eg: increase swiggy’s average order size, or launch childrens books category on amazon. I think that’s relying a bit too much on a person's previous knowledge. Instead I try to get a sense of the base skills by the level of detail they can talk about their previous roles and the projects that they have worked on. I also test If the candidates are able to relate their work with the company’s OKRs clearly

The second part is thinking big & influencing people. On a job people sometimes get so typecasted by what's happening in the job that you're not able to break out. For this part I just extend the problem the candidate spoke about in the first part of the interview & ask them to extend the metric ask 100x in terms of scale and in addition give them 2-3 constraints. Eg : there was this PM that I was talking to. His job was to increase retention for Cult’s gym membership. So he told me what he had done, using rewards and using different features. D30, retention increased from 40% to 55%. My question for him was : remove all constraints, including money, and increase retention to 90%. What would you do? I find this format better than case study type questions because the candidate has knowledge of the domain, so they can really challenge the extents of their creativity

And the third part is role specific PM skills. Eg: PayU finance is a lending (bnpl + cc + term loan) business which is also building insurance, prepaid card and FD products. Candidates for some roles need to be familiar with designing a loan management system, a two-sided ledger which is a base of a core banking system, regulatory nuances & their impact on system design and reporting. With these roles i would then have to check if their tech chops within the scope of that domain are evolved

The fourth part on behaviors - I've tried it out in experiments, to gauge behaviors. I used to try to check whether people have grit and resilience and opinion by putting them under pressure, but it's not worked out too well. So now, I really resorted to reference checks instead which work better.

Great PMs - Think deeply about their work, opinionated, proud of their work

PMs who care about their work think very deeply about their work. Nobody has to pressurize them OR add a task in their work plan to get them to think deeply Eg: if somebody is building say a raffles feature, and rewards. Now they will have looked at all the raffles features that people have done - cross domain, different UI interpretations of the same, thought about different cases and pros and cons. They constantly reflect on why they did what they did.

Second thing is, they are very opinionated about what they do, but at the same time, they always feel very curious to know more. This is a very weird skill to have - holding both opposing points of you in your head at the same time. You ask them "Why is this?" they would be extremely gung ho, but if you told them there is a contrary version, they would not push back too much. They would say maybe you’re right - I'll go back and check. 

And the third thing that I've noticed about great PMs is that they're extremely proud of what they do. They cannot stop talking about it. They have this infectious energy, they keep talking about how what they have been working on is the best thing ever. This is the kind of behavior set which allows them to be leaders later on in life, because their locus of indirect control is very large. Nobody directly reports to them. But every mid-manager PM is managing indirectly, like 30, 40 people. So, if they don't have this positive enthusiasm about their work, it does not eventually work out well in influencing people.

Great PMs - Low Bias, Solution Orientation, Grit, Curiosity

Vibhav V:
I am curious about this behavior piece that you are talking about earlier, to talk a little bit more about that because that is something that is not spoken about enough. And I think in the startup kind of environments I think it's really an important skill.

Bhavik Kaul:
You are absolutely right, Talking about behaviors there are so many of them which are incredibly hard to build & harder to measure for managers

Some behaviors enable PMs to locate the right problems and solve them better than others repeatedly. The behavior that helps them is having low bias & very high solution orientation.

Another one is being centered, knowing one's northstar and having grit in adverse times. Most often than not things will fail, and the PM is not going to be appreciated. In fact, they get more brickbats. How do you survive but also thrive in such an atmosphere? It's a very hard thing. 

Some PMs have an insatiable curious nature. Recently I hired this one product manager from a well known fintech company. This person had un-ending questions about everything from the time I gave out the offer. I was actually pleasantly surprised that he had no apprehensions or considerations of being perceived as not intelligent. I feel people like him will eventually be amazing leaders.Intuition cannot be hacked - I think it's a process. The more one asks & the more one consciously thinks eventually leads to better intuition. It's this whole process of randomly thinking & asking in a longer time frame leads to the development of a product sense or a product muscle memory. Maybe this is what makes great product managers.

Mithun Madhusudan:
I think I would say grit is important, especially in consumer product. What I tell people who want to get into consumer products and my team - if you try 100 things, 99 are going to fail, so you need to be ready for that. And I will be very hard on you if things fail, but that's the life you are signing up for.

Ownership - Positive and Negative

Vibhav V:
The thing that I've noticed which is quite stark and the positive way is to call it is ‘ownership’. The negative way to say this is ‘victim mindset’ because they always have reasons why something didn't work. Engineering said this, the founder said this, but the person who's launched or shipped something has had the same set of things to work through, but they have launched it.

Bhavik Kaul:
You are right Vibhav. In fact with ownership i have seen a spectrum. It's very interesting. So ownership has a negative to positive spectrum. There are people who become insane taskmasters under the guise of ownership. They believe that their job is to slave drive people to get to outcomes. I've seen cases where teams have reached out to me saying, Bhavik, we cannot and tolerate this product manager anymore. But, there are other people for whom ownership is like jugaad. They are always positive about the big picture. Never allow a negative thought. Don’t know if this comes from family or friends or upbringing OR just DNA. They keep telling people how they will become great together. Everyone is someone on this spectrum. Driving company goals while being a happy camper. That really is something all of us want to become no?

Mithun Madhusudan:
Do you think that is an important skill, jugaad or hackiness? Is that something that you, you rate PMs highly on?

Bhavik Kaul:
I think it works, but then again, for every one case, you find another case. If you were a product manager in OpenAI, maybe you don't need this. Maybe, just raw skills are the reason you're getting paid a million dollars a year. And that's why there is no one way to become a product manager. There are several ways, and potentially all of them can create successful professionals.

A career framework - Understanding your strengths, the Value you assign to Work, and your Risk Appetite

Mithun Madhusudan:
So now, the question a lot of people have is, yeah - I joined a Series B company thinking it's a large company, but it has the same problems as a startup. So what is a big company? What really changes, and how should PMs think about whether they want to get into a big company or a small company?

Bhavik Kaul:
I think there are three things to keep in mind when choosing between startups and large companies. All of them do generally require the person in question to be introspective. 

The first self question is to truly know one’s strengths.  Eg: I was just watching this podcast of Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot. His insight about himself was that he's a very creative person but he hates people management. To address this, he made an agreement with his co-founder that no one would report directly to him, allowing him to focus on other CEO responsibilities. This self-awareness and courage to structure his role around his strengths significantly contributed to his success. Similarly, understanding your strengths can help you determine whether a startup or a larger company is a better fit for you.

The second factor is the value you place on work as a component of your overall happiness. It's important to reflect on how much of your happiness is derived from your work versus how much is tied to other aspects of your life. For instance, you might find that you can tolerate work you don't enjoy if the compensation is high, but this tolerance has its limits. Consulting with trusted mentors or a "personal board of directors" can provide valuable insights and reality checks that help you align your work with your personal values. Understanding whether you see work primarily as a means to a better life or as a source of meaning can guide you toward the right type of company.

Finally, the third introspective question concerns your internal attribution and ability to manage risk. Startups typically involve higher levels of uncertainty and require a greater tolerance for risk, while larger companies often offer more stability. Reflecting on your comfort level with risk can help you decide which environment is more suited to your personality and career goals.

Vibhav V:
So, there's much more meaning to work, in your life, for the startup folks.

Bhavik Kaul:
Which is largely true. Because the nature of a startup is to continuously do what you think is right. That means it is you who's at the center of the decision-making. Sometimes you are in the middle of conflict but the only way for the company to win is to embrace conflict. Nature of big companies is to work like a machine. Be predictable. Big company culture is designed to eliminate conflict via clear rules.

Mithun Madhusudan:
I’ll just add the earlier on in your career, you can probably take more risks, right, and you can index a little bit more on the learning that comes with that risk. So you get into an
organization that is moving really fast, maybe in the wrong direction, and maybe doesn't work out, but the both positive and negative learning - both of those are very condensed in startups. Like, you will very quickly get those A's and B's, and the earlier you get that in your career, the better it is, because your career is a compounding graph. It's not linear. So, you can look back at those insights from the early part of your career and say, yes, I made these mistakes in my first 3 years and I won’t make those mistakes in the fifth year. That's the additional thing that I think people have found value in when I told them this. 

Thinking about your Career Long Term

Mithun:

The next question I want to attack is this, people are getting stuck in their careers and saying, I'm not getting promoted. I need to get to the next level in my career, and I have a certain way of thinking about the three axis that you said. You may have attention to detail, I have a little bit of grit. I have structured thinking, but I'm not able to progress forward. What, what kind of anecdotes or instances have you seen, like, that?

Bhavik:

The first career growth hack is to do a two-sided expectation mismatch. Most people don’t want to have these uncomfortable conversations—on both sides. Managers often avoid these discussions because they require a high degree of structure and role detailing which they dislike doing. On the other hand, in a culture like India’s, which can be quite hierarchical, employees find it difficult to ask their managers, “How do I get to the next level?” People often struggle to ask for what they deserve, but when they do, it can be magical.

I’ve done this 2-3 times in my career. When I started a new role, the first conversation I had with my manager was about how I thought about my career—whether my approach was good or needed adjustment. I always kept a running Excel file, comparing my level to others, identifying the skills required at each level. Every six months, I’d check in with my manager, asking them to assess my progress. They were free to tell me where I wasn’t meeting expectations, and I’d take that feedback seriously. This shifted the conversation from perception to fact. 

The second career growth hack is aligning your level and function with the market tailwinds. Is the business doing well? Is the market ripe? Am I in the right place? Eg: if you're a senior leader in fintech, being in India makes sense because the market is booming. For every hundred dollars given out by VCs, 50 is given to fintech. Additionally the platform systems are also fairly advanced compared to those in other parts of the world. But if you're a mid-senior leader in the core transformer ecosystem or the underlying Gen AI stack, you might need to reconsider your location. India might be a bad option. I recently spoke to someone at Microsoft who was hesitant to leave because she was getting exposure to AI products. However, she was essentially summarizing conversations in meetings using OpenAI APIs—something that OpenAI could easily automate in the future. Is that really a massively scalable skill?

Third career growth hack is figuring out your endgame. Everyone’s path is different, but once you know where you want to end up, your path becomes clearer. For instance, if you want to be a VP at a big company like Facebook, you need to know that it typically takes 10-15 years to reach that level while being in the same company. They rarely hire externally for those levels. Once you acknowledge this, your career path becomes more focused, and you can make decisions that align with your ultimate goal. This also reduces anxiety. The way to force oneself to make this conscious choice is with the “Next Next Job Framework”. Essentially you never make a career decision considering the jobs right in front of you – you instead do this by considering the jobs 5yrs out OR next next jobs. This enables you to avoid making the obvious mistakes of settling for higher designation with a bad salary OR bad learning potential. Eventually all these micro considerations cause one to get caught in the career glass ceiling.

Money and Other Things

Mithun Madhusudan:
The role, and the kind of work aspect is one way to think about it. This is what I want to do in five years, 10 years, next job, next, next job. The other framework also found useful for a little bit more, maybe for the restless kind of people is - how much money do you want to make? And then you do math backward from there. 

Bhavik Kaul:
Actually, I did this social exercise. I took my team out for three different parties, because I wanted to have this more intimate setting. And then I asked everyone how much money would make you happy in life. Everyone had really large numbers. Clearly, this startup ecosystem has made people very optimistic! Average age of this team of 30 odd people is 28 years. At least 30% said they wanted to make 100cr! I was quite surprised and delighted that people had high goals for themselves. But I followed up to ask how they would get there. Almost everyone had the same answer. “I’ll startup at some time in life!”. People read stories of 100 people in a startup ecosystem of over 1.5m and think they might become one of them without a plan. 

Mithun Madhusudan:
It’s easy to quote that number, but you have to actually put it in Excel and do the probabilistic math around it. If I have to do 100cr, the company has to be this much, in this many years, for it to compare against what I am giving up as opportunity cost, over everything else. I don’t think people have done this math, and I agree with you. It's because the startup ecosystem has really screwed with people's heads.

When to Quit a Company - have a north star metric

Vibhav:
When should you quit a company? This is also another question. A lot of people are in companies which raised a lot of money in 2021, and now suddenly they're like, okay this is a dead end. The company is not going anywhere. All the smart people in the company have left.

Mithun Madhusudan:
So, how should you think about it? What are the different axes? For example, one axis I can think of is your boss. Like, if you're in a particular company, your boss is good, you're already learning, the other is that the company is growing. How would you think about this?

Bhavik Kaul:
One way is to obsess about 1 north star. I always got into a company thinking of some company metric which can be a legacy builder for me -or- a big enough challenge for me. For example, when I got into Hike I felt that if I made this gaming & chat experience product lovable by users at a scale of 10s of millions of DAU then I would have learnt something valuable and built a legacy. At Dunzo I joined with a single minded goal of making India's more memorable quick commerce startup while scaling from 10k orders to 3 million orders per month. Dunzo for me was a masterclass in survival and building startups frugally.

At LazyPay I wanted to use all my combined skills in product building and growth to take the company from 100 million to 1 billion in valuation. The ambiguity of this statement and the enormity & vastness of problems to solve really excited me.  These big dreams have made me stick to companies, even through really bad times.

But sticking with this north star metric can also be a con. I am so emotionally obsessed about this one north star that I cannot seem to see obvious issues in a company. Like, if somebody's either underpaying me, or the work culture is bad, I take time to notice. This system in a way also tells me when i should exit a company. Eg: the day we clocked 2million orders at Dunzo i thought if i could take up a larger goal and if that would make me happy. The answer came out negative and so in seeking a larger and more fulfilling next challenge I quit. Serendipitously this has worked for me. 

Mithun Madhusudan:
I think maybe we can go a little bit deeper on the fact that you become a little blind to niggling issues. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because the other framework I look at is, for products to mature and for things to play out, it takes time. And, generally, in a product role, I've seen that time to be between two to four years. You need to get wheels moving, and then, the consumer product has more failure, etc., and till you find that one compounding thing that really takes off, between two to four years. Do you suggest that people stick it out with niggling issues, saying I came here to do this job or move this metric, or is it a more subjective thing - I don't want to take all of this pain of working with people who are not respecting me, for this personal goal. Because, anecdotally, what I've seen is people who stuck it out through bad times, personally, and for the company, have generally had a better outcome than those who quit.

Bhavik Kaul:
Anecdotally, yes, I have also seen that those who stick it out tend to see better financial outcomes. It’s tough to see through the mist of today—where you might be a PM or Senior PM who’s unhappy—but you could potentially become the head of product in just two years, simply because of how things play out. You can’t predict that, and it’s hard to see the potential future from the present.

We discussed two ways of looking at this. One way is my approach, where you have a North Star metric, and you stick to that as your definition of happiness or dissatisfaction, unless something significant happens—like a health issue or extreme unhappiness. If you generally stick to that framework, you’ll likely end up being content. The second framework involves a massive market mapping strategy. For instance, if you’re in fintech, you recognize that there are numerous opportunities, and many people approach it this way.

Like companies, careers are quite forgiving about job switches until you reach a certain point in life. I’ve noticed that now, at this stage where many of us are, people have become more sensitive to it. Earlier in your career, you might be seen as a missionary—someone who comes in to solve a specific problem, like retention. I believe if people think about this more mathematically, they can achieve the same objectives.

Vibhav V:
Yeah, for me, what I have done with the people who quit - I sometimes will evaluate their decision with them. So, I give them three axes. I say, "Okay, you have compensation axes which is like Equity plus cash. Then there is the title, for some, reason. This is this craze around title, which which some people weight a lot more, some people weight less. Then, there's, actually, type of work or the role that you're playing, 

I think, as people progress, they have different weights that they put on different areas. At one point, he might weigh doing compensation more, but the other two I am ok. I help them holistically evaluate, between the three, because you want to score, between 7 and 9 between the three. And, you don't want any single one to fall to, two or three, or zero. So, I feel a lot of people attrition, because, in one of the three axes, they are doing really badly.

Choosing your next job

Bhavik Kaul:
I approach job selection using a framework. I maintain a running Excel file where the columns represent different companies and the rows represent what I want in life at that point—things like money, mentorship, fame etc. I assign different weights to these factors depending on where I am in life, moving items up or down as my priorities change.

For instance, there was a time in my life when I placed a very high value on mentorship. I felt that certain things couldn't be learned from books, and I wanted someone who could teach me those things. In some cases, I even took a pay cut because I believed that the opportunity to work with a particular person was invaluable, something I might never get again. Thankfully, these decisions worked out for me, though they could have gone the other way as well. Many people use similar frameworks, but the issue isn't the lack of a framework—it's that people often don't do the necessary research to fill in the details to make a decision.

This framework is very similar to conjoint analysis used in Marketing. This job search conjoint analysis evaluates the function, value, and features of different job options. The challenge is that it’s difficult to make a comparison between things like happiness at work and opportunities for learning. Assigning values like "five points for learning" and "six points for money." and eventually adding doing a sumproduct basis probability is tricky but it's still better than having no structure at all.

Top Hacks as a People Manager in Product

Bhavik Kaul:
I believe there is no single formula for product management. If you define product management as solving large, unsolved problems in the world, it's clear you can't do it all by yourself.

People management isn't default. It's a conscious choice. I do see two tracks with people: deep thinkers and deliverers. Deep thinkers are necessary because not everyone can dive into every detail. However, this doesn't necessarily require people management skills. The issue in India today is that there aren't many roles for deep thinkers. On the other hand, people managers, who are effectively delivery managers, need to focus on putting the right person in the right role. This is the hardest part of the job. One of the biggest challenges I see, especially at the GPM and director levels today, is that many don’t realize that a large part of their role is ensuring the right fit between roles and people.

Effective people management requires systems. Templatized day-to-day operations. All operations should be foolproof—from writing a PRD, to running brainstorming meetings, to conducting weekly business and product reviews. It shouldn't matter who's in the meeting; it should always run the same way. That's the only way to ensure high quality always

People need to see clear goals and managers have to ensure attribution of work to those goals. OKRs have worked really well for me. But it's hard to only make them work for one team, especially one which operates centrally. As a product leader therefore i realized that it was my job to ensure OKR setting for everyone in the org. 

People's productivity is highly proportional to what they know and what they believe. As a CPO I spend 50% of my time on town halls. I had 40 direct & indirect reports who work with almost all people in the company. Repeatedly communicating the story of the company, its vision, and goals is essential to prevent miscommunication and keep everyone aligned all the time. 

Role clarity and focus is another big people growth hack. People often forget their roles or default to easier tasks that aren’t part of their job descriptions. Eg: PMs might fall back to program management when they should be thinking critically about market insights or customer feedback. I constantly remind my team that their job was to solve these tougher problems, not just coordinate delivery on projects.

Focus on hiring is the #1 people & company strategic objective. I devote a lot of time to hiring the right people. Being deeply involved in every single hire in my team and associated teams has at many times helped me indirectly create the right culture. This aspect of my role also involved making tough decisions, which many in the GPM and director levels tend to avoid. Transitioning from teaching people how to think about products to teaching them how to teach others was exponentially harder, but it was a necessary evolution in my role. That was the people's piece.

How do you build Strategic Vision, and plan for Big Bets

At some point, I realized that my job was more than just following the job description. A big part of my role is to anticipate problems before they happen—something that wasn't explicitly stated, but became clear as I noticed issues arising. I had to decide whether to stand by and let these mistakes happen or take responsibility to prevent them. This realization led me to focus on making big strategic decisions, or "big bets," as a crucial aspect of my job.

In this role, I don't spend as much time talking directly to users. Instead, I focus on gathering insights from those who interact with users regularly, like customer support teams and the user research department. I also seek advice from domain experts—such as bankers and leaders in other fintech startups—because learning from their experiences can help us avoid repeating mistakes. My position as CPO also gives me access to valuable insider information that others on my team might not have. It’s my responsibility to extract and use this information to shape our strategy, as no one else can do it from my vantage point.

This approach involves applying core skills like structuring problems, breaking them down, and detailing solutions. I now spend significant time working closely with the CEO and finance team to evaluate the feasibility of new initiatives. We discuss costs, timelines, and how these initiatives fit with our current goals and Annual Operating Plan (AOP). Although our AOP might be full, I have a few opportunities each year to push for new ideas, and it’s up to me to take those chances. This responsibility can’t be delegated to other PMs—it’s something I have to handle myself.

Previously, my job was all about hitting the numbers. For example, at Dunzo, my target was 25-30 lakh orders, and I was completely focused on that goal. It wasn’t about people management, strategic bets, or long-term vision—just the numbers. But now, those numbers have become more automated as our business has achieved Product-Market Fit (PMF) and turned into a cash cow. While I could still spend time identifying issues in areas like Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies or process automation, I’ve realized that these aren’t the tasks where I should be focusing my efforts anymore.

At this stage in my career, I’ve recognized that certain responsibilities can only be managed by me, and those are the areas where I now concentrate my efforts.

Mithun M:

Thanks a lot for your time Bhavik - this has been a superb couple of hours!

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That’s it for Part 2. We’d like to deeply thank Bhavik for the time he spent speaking to us and editing parts of the transcript to make sure valuable information was not missed - all this while he’s knee deep in building his next 0-1!

References:

1. https://maven.com/articles/product-manager-habits

2. Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)

3. https://andrewchen.com/the-next-next-job/