Leadership Masterclass - Madhav teaches Products

The key takeaways from this episode on Product:

 

1. Product office is not a standalone function that sits to define WHAT to build; rather the primary role of the product office is to collaborate with customers, and define what is the most critical problem to solve in that market space.
2. It is important to always combine the product and technology office into one unit and have an agile development model that combines the WHAT(Product) and the HOW (Tech)
3. Product managers are not innovators, but they are the "process owners" that are responsible for the overall process of discovery, working with customers and the market needs.
4. Different companies require the three stellar pillars of a product - Innovation, Execution and Evangelization in different percentages. 
5. It is easy to identify a fad and a need, in early stages. How? Who is adopting it - Technology evangelists OR customers?
6. There is no one founding day; Founding has to be a continuous process and you essentially stick to a problem for several years - till the point where both customers and market knows what they want
7. Get obsessed with the problem and stay with it for long; Abstracting the problem statement into a product vision which is long term & inspirational is very critical
8. If you have the right vision, right execution model, you can be successful with the fund managers for long enough a time
9. Progress is important than perfection. Go launch with the MVP because customer is also new to the product and has not experienced a solution such as what you are introducing
10. Keep all the complexity and much of the innovation at the backend. Keep innovating faster but keep in mind the customer might not like it. Your pace of innovation can actually be a shock than a surprise. 
11. AI is going to be critical, no matter what product you are in. You cannot ignore AI. AI/ChatGPT is a great augmenting tool. It may not completely replace humans but it adds more time compression 
12. Big companies or small companies both are ideal places to innovate and build products if they have the right priorities.