The Ashish Sinha Show

Koo’s Aprameya on building, scaling a global product

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On How Can Founders Go about Managing Teams | #Shortcasts

Understanding Bharat: how to speed up your GTM

Kunal Shah On Maintaining Journal And Decision Making Process | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On The Thinking Behind Zerodha's Scalable Architecture | #Shortcasts

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On Attributes That Define A Great Startup | #Shortcasts

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Idea Evaluation & Delta 4 | #Shortcasts

Sumit Of Chingari On NFT'S : All You'd Need To Know | #Shortcasts

Prukalpa Of Atlan On How to Control CAC In The Early Days | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On Zerodha's Way Of Making Technical Decisions | #Shortcasts

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On Prioritizing Tech vs speed: How Does One Go About It? | #Shortcasts

Scaling your GTM for Bharat: With Reverie’s leadership team

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Founder - Cofounder Relationship | #Shortcasts 

Sumit Of Chingari On Lessons Learned Building Chingari | #Shortcasts

Sajith Of Blume On - Is Growth Really An Important Part Of The Product Market Fit? | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On How Zerodha Approaches Product Development | #Shortcasts

Ajey Gore Of Sequoia Capital On Building Empathy In Teams | #Shortcasts

Sumit of Chinagri on DAO and impact of Chingari’s token on the structure | #Shortcasts

Sajith Of Blume On Measuring PMF And It's Process | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On How Zerodha Hires Engineers.

Ajey Gore Of Sequoia Capital On Staying Focused In the Early Stages Of Startups | #Shortcasts

Reverie co-founder, Vivek on building for Bharat market [Part 1]

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Fund Raising | #Shortcasts

Sumit Of Chingari On Lessons Learned Building Chingari | #Shortcasts

Prukalpa Of Atlan On Atlan's GTM In Early Days | #Shortcasts

Kailash Of Zerodha On Early Days Of Zerodha | #Shortcasts

Ajey Of Sequoia Capital On Decisions That Help Early Stage Startups | #Shortcasts

On Building For Bharat: Vinay Singhal Of Stage

Kunal Shah Of CRED On Building A Great Design Team | #Shortcasts

Each and every startup has its own unique journey of finding Product market fit. But a broader theme is to understand what goes inside PMF, what are some of the core challenges, decisions that a company can look at and more.

In this episode, Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures and Prukalpa of Atlan share their experience of PMF - Sajith as a VC and Prukalpa as a founder

Startups are an act of balance – especially in the early days when you are setting up the foundation for scale.

Are you spending the right amount of effort in engineering? Are you *over-engineering* the product? How can you get the architecture right? Well, there are no right or wrong answers – but all we need is access to great perspectives.

In this conversation which happened at Productgeeks conf, Ajey Gore, CTO/tech operating partner at Sequoia and ex-CTO of Gojek brings you actionable wisdom on engineering. Some of the topics Ajey will discuss:

• Approach to software architecture
• Approach to building the right engineering and people org.
• Build decision/models around people / engg orgs.
• Understanding what are 1-way, 2-way decisions.
• TTL value of decisions and people in the organization.
• Build vs Buy vs. Assemble decisions.
  and a lot more.

This conversation, recorded as part of Productgeeks Conf brings you a lot of great insights from Kunal Shah. Some of the topics we discussed:

• What is your take on fund raising spree?
• How do you build a team?
• How did you build a good design team?
• Do you maintain a journal of sorts, what's your decision making process and how has it evolved?
• Being a founder, how do you maintain the spirit and motivation for your team always up to the mark when the things are not working fine?
• What are your thoughts on single founder vs multiple founders?
• If you are evaluating an idea, what do you look into an idea beyond delta 4?

Zerodha defies all standard norms of building a tech startup. While the world is going gaga over number of engineers, Zerodha builds and scales with..well just a handful of engineers.

33 member team powering the country’s largest stock brokerage platform! In this deep community cast, Zerodha's CTO, Kailash shares it all in conversation with Ashish Sinha.

• How has Zerodha evolved over time, from the v0 of the tech product to today?
• How do you think cos. Should really approach Engg? Right now, the mentality is to throw money at the problem, but what’s the elegant way?
• Being bootstrapped, how did you hire quality talent and later manage to retain it. Also in the current market how are they dealing with it?
• Zerodha that it allows its tech team full autonomy?
• how to build the right team that embodies this sentiment?
• Design principles
• Release Cycles and Technical Decision Making at Zerodha
• How to use customer feedback for product improvement?
• How to approach product development from the user's perspective? 
• Consumable APIs: Building an ecosystem. 

Bharat is not a homogeneous lump of 500+ Mn basis access to Internet, Socio-economic background or a vernacular cut.  It has more refined layers and sub-cultures that drive it. With a stronger aspirational participation to the Indian economy & shift to producer mindset than consumers - building for Bharat means getting away from the mindset of stripped down version of products for affordability - but to re-engineer a suite of products from first principles needs, wants & desires of these users.   

In this talk, Ekta shares personal anecdotes from user research,  defining the right goals, "living" their lives, contrast it with other matured products for different user segments and how to set yourself up as Product leaders to build products that positively shape the lives of these users.

Meesho is known for its strong customer-obsessed product culture.  While it might work in the early days, how do you scale that up given  the hypergrowth Meesho is going through?

How do you work across different teams ensuring they are all aligned?  How do you ensure customer obsession? Meesho CPO, Kirti Varun shares it all @ProductGeeks Conf, India’s largest conference for teams that ships.

In this session of Productgeeks Conf, Ranjeet shares the early days of Pratilipi, onboarding the early set of users and building traction on the platform.

We also discuss the metrics the co. is focused on to the thought process behind hiring and building a strong product culture.

Chingari is among the early players in Web 3.0 space and there are many questions around the model itself - for e.g with the launch of GARI token, what are the changes to Chingari model? In terms of business and product?

And how can a private company issue tokens? What does the community own and not own? And what about the creators in Chingari? How do they benefit?

How can I evaluate between ESOP vs CTC? 

How should I plan for long-term  returns while keeping short-term $ growth in mind? 

How does the equation changes with stage of the startup?

If you have questions around this, do give this episode a listen. 

How do you plan a product roadmap? Is there a better way? Listen to this perspective from Praful Poddar on his experience workign with different teams - right from product management to engineering, marketing and leadership.

We are currently seeing a lot of hypergrowth in the startup ecosystem. 

One of the main challenges with such a hypergrowth phase is that teams often end up working in a silo, as the common denominator of company/team culture often is overruled in the name of hustling.

So how does one look at this from a product leadership perspective? As with most things in life, there are no right or wrong answers - just perspectives.

Here is one from Praful Poddar, who has seen some of this hypergrowth phase at Snapdeal/OLX.

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How do I create an effective roadmap? Perspective from Movin, Phonepe's Director of Product.

The 'Moving FWD with Ashish Sinha' show brings you actionable wisdom from accomplished leaders - all delivered in a bite-sized format.

In this episode, Praful and I discuss how one can go about building empathy among product and engineering teams. 

Building Empathy among Product and Engineering Teams: With Praful Poddar, Ex-Director of PM @OLX. 

Zomato has gone public now - among the first Indian tech startups to go public !

If you truly want to understand Zomato's growth journey - go back 5 years and look at what the company was facing - a few wrong decisions, changing landscape (dine-in vs. delivery), new competitions and more.

What Zomato did 5 years decided its journey and here is presenting a great conversation between Deepinder (Zomato founder) and myself, wherein we talk about the journey..the challenges, the early days of ebay going after the brand name to everything in between.

Whatfix cofounder and CEO, Khadim shares the product-market-fit journey of WhatFix and how the company went about scaling globally.

Imagine this.  You are a Mexican chef and you have now joined a South Indian restaurant. Will you survive? Will you be able to thrive in the new company? 

On the same lines, how technical should you be to excel in a product management role sounds like a similar question.

It all depends on the company and what they need.  For example, if you applying for a role with Google, you are obviously expected to understand quite a bit of technology. 

More than most of us, actually !

But if you are applying for say a company like Salesforce, you are expected to know how to deal with multiple teams to how to engage with big customer accounts, to even how to up-sell.

Let me share a simple evaluation matrix for you.

If you are really good in technical knowledge and have a deep understanding of the same, go for companies that match your technology depth or even look at taking up the CPTO, that is Chief Product and Tech Officer route. 

But if you are low in technology depth, look for companies that are more process or operations-centric. For example, food delivery companies etc.

Of course, within the same company there will be multiple roles that require different levels of technical depth, but here are a few basic technology pieces you should be in the know of.

 📍 APIs  

Software ate the world. And APIs ensure good digestion. 

APIs are everywhere - all of the apps on your phone integrate with third-party applications and all of these work using APIs.  In this ever-changing world, you need to understand APIs to stay relevant. 

 📍 SQL

Half of the user research is about understanding what the customers are doing in your product. And the other half is about understanding what your customers are not doing with the product.

You can always interview customers, but looking at actual usage is what makes the world go round for a product manager. And this is where knowledge of SQL is helpful. 

 📍 Excel / Google Sheets 

I have said this a million times, and I will say it again. Excel / Sheets is the biggest no-code platform one can ever have. Just learn a bit of functions and you can do a lot more with data and  pretty much everything. It's the most important tool for any product manager - aspiring or experienced. 

To sum it up, the role and technology requirements change over a period of time, but having a great understanding of how things work and being curious about it is immensely helpful.

Hiring has become tougher these days. the quality talent is witnessing lucrative offers and the average stay in the company has gone to an abysmal low. 

How can one hire and retain great talent? Listen to this conversation between Ashish Sinha and Amiya Pathak on this *hot and burning* topic.

Amiya Pathak is the Founder of EzCred and is Ex-Twitter / Zipdial.

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