Episode 24: Deboshree Dutta- A product manager's guide to building a start-up and a successful blog
About Deboshree Dutta:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Deboshree Dutta. She is Group Product Manager at Paypal, Founder & CEO of RoomPlays and blogger with 150K Instagram followers.
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In this conversation, she talks about:
What is product management and how to access product success?
How she built her blog Design Play took it to 150K followers?
Her experience being an entrepreneur and building RoomPlays.
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Deboshree: In a world where we live today, where a consumer has so many choices for making simplest of things, making a show to watch, or hailing a taxi, these are things that are so basic and yet you have companies like Uber and Netflix like breaking through. How are they doing that? And I would say there's credit there for the way a product manager really understands customers pain points, like what options they have today, identify what pain points they're facing, and convert those into sort of technical requirements and work with your technology partners in engineering with UX designers to design the application, and the business to really come up with a solution that actually has dollar impact. So I would say together that it sounds like you're almost like the entrepreneur in the product of sorts. But in a nutshell, a product manager, someone who sits at the intersection of customer, technology and business to really come up with what the vision strategy and solution would look like to really bring about impact for our consumers.
Pritish: You sit at the intersection of three things, the customer, the Business and Technology. How do you balance that equation between these three parts? And at some point, you would need to say no, how do you go about choosing what to do and what not to?
Deboshree: It’s a great question. Prioritization is one of the biggest skills you learn as a product manager. So as you're working through a problem statement, so what we do is oftentimes we do discovery, we sort of go wide, we go and discover sort of all the problem statements, we are likely going to hear from our customers. So once we do that we converge. So we've started this convert, divert, convert sort of a process. So we go wide and reconverge identify what the top problem statements are and when we distill our problem statements for our customers, we usually evaluating it by impact because as a company, you're trying to have a mindset where you're solving multiple problems with one solution versus one solution for one problem. So the intention is to really prioritize based on dollar impact based on essentially KPIs ROI, conversion adoption, it can be specific metrics that you are likely tracking, to essentially evaluate what features resonate for your business model for your sort of top line metrics.
Pritish: How do you assess product success?
Deboshree: It's varying. So data is at the heart of everything. So as we build out any of our products, we instrument them to the point, we learn from our users actions, we learn from the way our users react with something we also learn from when users don't interact with something. So if you think about success, we start from let's say top line metrics. If I'm aligning with Pay Pal, I pay value, obviously, there's revenue, there's churn, there's customer acquisition and depending on which part of the product or of the organization you sit in, I've said, I've worked in different portfolios, for example, prior to this, if you're going to consumer facing like PayPal, like the front end PayPal application or so on, then you're obviously directly engaging with like the top line revenue. Prior to this, I was working in risk. So one of people's biggest strengths is our fraud detection. So risk is essentially the metrics that we align to over there are essentially how we mitigate loss. I now work in Customer Success for people and customer success is a cost center. So here we're looking at how do we minimize cost. So our top line, like our top level metrics, and we're looking to see how we ultimately benefit paper.
From there, we look at sort of what our business KPIs would be in customer success. I can tell you our KPIs around operations, like how do we streamline operations? How do we abate a customer from contacting an actual agent? So what type of cell service mechanisms have been put in place? How effective are they in sort of resolving an issue versus actually transferring a call, and then it comes to a teammate, you have sort of obviously like case management, how many cases came to ask ticket resolution. So this is all like around operational and business metrics and then when it comes to product, so like, you kind of going down this sort of pyramid like top line, and then like broader metrics, and then you're going down to like product. So within product, we have a whole bunch of metrics, right? We're looking at conversion rates, engagement rates, we break users down by segments.
So we try to assess down to having a number like a ratio really doesn't tell you like 6.8% and you might you want to break it down by user segment, and really be able to understand what demographics or what personas are resonating with your product. How do they engage with let's say, a feature that you just released? So we have a ton of instrumentation that's done in to really understand what is resonating. We also look at sort of user behavior by channel because you may do a big loan marketing campaign and have a lot of engagement. But then building a great product is different and retaining. A user is key, if anything, so we look at like funnel analysis, we look at where do people drop off from the product experience. So really like hone in on what specifically can be improved to sort of engage that user the next time we have them. So and then there's a whole bunch of engineering metrics. So highly data driven culture, highly data driven approach. But all of this ultimately culminates to our top line metrics that we are trying to influence for people.
Pritish: What were the three key products trends of PayPal and PayPal in the late 90s was an outlier in the payment gateway process. So how has that evolved?
Deboshree: I would say, I don't want to speak too specifically because PayPal actually is much larger knowledge base, PayPal, Inc. So we have Venmo, zoom, Braintree. There are several acquisitions that comprise PayPal. So I would say largely what has worked for us is some of the core principles that our technologists within the company employ. We are extremely customer centric. So depending on being a financial company, you need to understand different parts of the world have different fiduciary requirements and different parts of the world have different ways. They look at transactions. Some places that we operate in our cash, heavy economies. Some other places are completely cashless economies, they only operate with credit cards. So really tailoring our solutions in ways that makes sense for those geographies has been huge. I would say another thing that has helped largely is I do think we have evolved as an organization like Initially, I think we were very sort of focused on building product and shipping. But over time, we've really, like there's a lot of work that happens within PayPal, and I'm part of many of these work streams, where we really focus on product excellence. In the product excellence, we mean that our dedicated workshops where we conduct user research, conduct user studies, people actually travel out to like Mexico or actually live and learn from our customers, they learn about how transacting or like sending money overseas is so difficult in certain economies, which are sort of developing economies.
So there's a lot of effort invested in customer discovery, and really immersing ourselves in customer lives, which has helped shape a lot of the products and PayPal has 100 plus product offerings. So that's why I want to speak about one or the other, because it's pretty comprehensive, because now we're at a much larger ecosystem. But I will say I think our biggest strength has been and continues to be our risk control management. So we have some incredibly advanced fraud management machine learning models, we have a huge data science team that pretty much is dedicated to really studying and quickly assessing fraud and I think the sweet spot is basically, our algorithms are tailored in ways where it is because you've left the country doesn't mean you're gonna be blocked. So we learn enough about our users to say that this is a good to assess that this is a good user. So we're always trying to optimize for a positive user experience and even like managing our sort of Lost Levels, like we had the last threshold to ensure that a good user is not declined. So there are many sorted so I would say a fraud management is I think, our superpower, basically.
Pritish: Let's transition into your blog, design play. It's amazing how you have been able to actually grow it to 150,000 followers on Instagram, in a lot of verticals, fashion, food recipe. Travel marriages, well, there's so many categories. How have you been able to actually dedicate so much of time build it? And what did you learn?
Deboshree: Thank you. Firstly, I will say Instagram was a friendlier place for content creators back in the day and I started several years ago. Instagram was a little bit more predictable and it was a wonderful and it still is. It's still my primary platform to engage with users, but I'm trying to grow my Instagram even for like my company. Now, It is a little bit of a tougher market space today. One is because it's far more competitive and also the algorithms rhythms are far more personalized today. So discoverability has become a challenge. But I'll go back to a few years ago where it really started with one is there's two aspects to it to be honest and the reason I want to talk about it is one is obviously you learn how to create content, you learn the whole magic of social media. I was an engineer. When I started this I wasn't even a product. So I pretty much didn't know what fashion is didn't know I was a good note I still have Instagram is so inspiring. Like you see people around you like I was inspired by a couple of Indian bangaloreans who actually came about and started their own blog and I was like you Wow, like I'm learning from them, I think I can try it and my husband was used is hugely supportive and at the time data was very reliable, I could understand very quickly to see if I have certain type of content resonates very well with my users.
I had Google Analytics hooked up with my blog. So I could tell very quickly what parts of my blog is resonating. So I know travel, for example is incredibly popular, recipes is popular, personal life like marriage is popular, as much as my biggest part of my blog is fashion. People don't seem to care about my fashion. But it is like data has told me what time my users come on board. What is the demographic of my user base, which I discovered is a lot like me, it's mostly immigrants. It's mostly brown girls who are likely in the course working and so on. But the other part that I learned to answer your second part of the question was, it is a really hard world to be in social media. I actually took off from social media sometime, because it was just so hard to deal with the faceless trolls like there is a lot of internet gives. It's wonderful because it gives voice to everyone and it gives voice to people without faces, which is kind of dangerous. So it was hard for me to essentially work through this to a point where I figured like, you're not going to be able to grow unless you actually learn to like this is the world we live in. So learning to deal with what comes with social media. But once I was able to overcome some of that, it's been a wonderful journey, growing to 150. Honestly, it's snowballed after one point, it just you keep reading through the data, and you just work through it and to be quite honest, it started. I think mine is unique. It's a unique skill set. Today, there's a ton of amazing people who are like me, and much better than me. When I started, I think I was one of the few so it worked for me.
Pritish: Usually when you have this kind of a followership, there is a snowball effect, did you stumble upon it? Or did you plan towards it?
Deboshree: They were a couple. So when I got to 10k, getting to 10k was the hard like the first 1K to 5K to 10k are the hardest. I think once I got to 10K, I think by then I understood how this works. So there are specific techniques that I was able to employ with like really reading with how people are resonating with my data, I was able to work those and I was able to grow from 10K to 50k with employing those techniques. After 50k To be honest, it started to pick up on its own, it has, I will say stagnated a little bit because now like the whole space is just very competitive and I'm also not investing as much in it. But I would say 10 to 50 was predicted I was almost able to estimate that I will reach this growth followed by the certain date. But after that, I think it kind of moved on its own.
Pritish: Yeah, I think this really goes back to what you said and I also hear from other influencers who have a similar following and more that you really need to focus on your first 1000, 5000, 10,000 followers, learn from them not get disappointed, because you know, everybody wants that 150 kale Mark like tomorrow. I think now everybody wants it today. But you will get to a point and in learning where you will understand how this works. But for that you need to reach certain milestones. You brought up Instagram and you brought up search ability has now become tougher because of the algorithms. As a product manager, what are your views about that? Do you think that's a good thing? Or how does it help the company? How does it help the user?
Deboshree: I will be careful about the way I respond to this because I am still a huge fan of Instagram, it is my primary source for reaching out to my audience. I will say the way Instagram has worked. I think when we started out Instagram was really I think catering to a few personas, mostly people who are looking to come and share content with their friends and family. I think now what they've gone toward like I also use Instagram as a business. So I have a business account, I have also created account. So depending on the type of persona you are looking at, I think as a user, I am not dissatisfied. As a user I am seeing feeds that I want to see. So if I can tell you I pull up my husband's Instagram and I know exactly what you were searching for bro and it's very clear I can tell it's not gonna be the same what I saw it was very specific I'll pull up I'll only see home decor I'll only see design which I like, so I'm not complaining though that as a content creator, I will say it has become significantly challenging because you only attract user bases that are similar. So you will see influencer taking up different types of marketing techniques. There's give aways as partnership with larger accounts, so that you are artificially growing visibility, which is another way, there's obviously other techniques that Instagram has done really well, is advertisements. It is so easy to create a sponsored post. So easy to say that I want to target this group of audience, it takes three clicks to create an ad. So yeah, it comes at a cost. But there are other things that Instagram has done, which makes sense it works for their business model. They're ultimately here to make money. So I think, based on their objectives, I think it makes sense for what they've done.
Pritish: Let's talk about the community and the chapter head you are of women in product. So why that community and do women think differently about product compared to men?
Deboshree: I started why that community? And your second question, I'll think about it. So why the community is, I think it made a lot of sense and it still continues to so the thing that product management, which I faced personally, when I was moving and a lot of people are is there is no school for product management. I mean, today there is product school. But technically, if you want to be an engineer, you go to engineering school, if you want to learn about finance in specific areas, you go do an MBA, there wasn't anything that actually launches you into product management and the second thing is you kind of don't know the stories of how people moved into product. The challenge was a lot of sort of product management job descriptions, are you looking for previous product management experience, you don't become to do a lot of change, to be honest, in the last three to four years. But traditionally, like product managers is expected to have an yours of experience because you can't start creating product vision is fresh out of college, or you can but it was not expected at the time at least. I think that's kind of why this community started and the second reason why we (inaudible) women in product is backed by a board of directors from Facebook, Google, PayPal name ETrade and the whole opportunity was there are people to ask, as women in general, and this is where I think that your second question comes in is it's not so much that people don't women and men think differently about product.
But I think it is that women and men think differently about asking for help. I think women and men think differently about should I go for this opportunity, taking that leap, having that courage to just jump and not think too many times about it. I think I'm trying to obviously generalize. Every woman is different. Every human being is different. But I think that was like a space we saw where product management is considered to be a leadership role, you're in a leadership role in your little space. There aren't enough mentors out there that are accessible, that aren't enough people that can help you even with preparing for a product management job interview. What do you study? What was your transition journey? How did you were an engineer? How did you become a product manager one day? Oh, you were in finance? How did you become a product manager one day? So the need for this community was massive. Women in specific, I think the other reason for it was that a lot of women who tend to become product managers are around the age group that is slightly, I guess, you're not a fresher. So you're likely managing multiple responsibilities. Like you have a child, you have a family, you're trying to balance multiple things and there is likely hesitation we've seen in general in the industry, in the tech sector, there is attrition in this demographic. So the community also focuses on how do we share best practices? How do we create open spaces where you can talk about challenges with being a woman in the technology sector, especially with product management, which is such an influential role, you're dealing more, you're dealing with multiple types of people multiple types of problems. So it's different from women in tech, because women in tech have very specific types of firms are dealing with limited product is a bit more sort of a more holistic way of looking at it. So it's also multiple problems and for me, it was because I'm so active on LinkedIn, and maybe goes off also design play and so on, like people were like I sell a lot of our audience knows me through those channels. So they would reach out to me and say, Hey, can I get 10 minutes with you? I just want to learn what did you do to let's say, move to product. So this community was a natural fit. I was like, people should know about this, and we should be serving this group. So that's why.
Pritish:
Your entrepreneurial journey, room play which you recently launched, it was interesting for me to see that it is really playing it a very unique consumer segment. We all want to have a designer, how has been your entrepreneurial experience? I know that it Hitachi, you built a product. But I would say entrepreneur kind of an experience. Now this is on your own. So how is the entrepreneurial experience been?
Deboshree: Man, it's been like drinking from a firehose it has been setting, I have been able to do all the things I always wanted to do with this journey. What has been a little, what I didn't sign up for is all the things that I didn't want to do and I think what has been fantastic is, I have discovered the value of listening to my clients, I have also learned the value of what my engineering teams go through when they're trying to build a product. Because I've built every line of the whole code base has been written by me the design is by me, I enjoyed, it's not like I have to do it. I mean, I had because I didn't hire people until now. But the intention was building, every building block has given me an appreciation for the amount of detail it takes to actually create a product or even create that signup page, to build the user journey for a designer versus build the user journey for a client. It's helped me use all my product principles, all my engineering like days, like what have I learned, and then it's helped me employ the things that I've built a product, I need customer acquisition. I haven't done this for real, like what I have done is design play. So I started leveraging social media to sort of start attracting influencers and start coming to the platform and from there, I started learning techniques about how do I attract designers, because I have two different personas, I have designers and then I have clients. How do I cater communication for these different groups, I have to figure out pricing like what my competitors are doing versus what my pricing needs to be. But then I need to make it open enough because my designers like I'm not trying to be my competitor, I'm trying to create a unique space for independent small business designers. So they should feel like they are empowered to do what they want. But also meet my clients where they are. So very interesting journeys. There's parts that I didn't sign up for is like tax forms and stuff like that. Inventory bookkeeping, like I was not, I was like, Oh my God. That's also stuff that I need to but I think those are things I'm learning too. I'm learning now like how to what parts, I need to really start delegating, so that I can scale. So I have had some an excellent content writer, I'm looking at hiring some interns to help with managing some social media stuff. So it has been in short, drinking from a firehose, but an incredibly rewarding journey so far.
Pritish: Tell us about room play, and what is it solving? There are a lot of independent designers, as well as there are design houses as well. So where do you fit in? And what is the product deliver? And what is it for?
Deboshree: Primarily when and this started by when I started with design plan, I realize a lot of my home decor content seems to resonate with my client base, right. So what I discovered was, there is this x people are want to play this and especially now with the pandemic, for example, your home has now become more than just a place you live in. It's become where you do your work. It's become where you school, your children, it's become also that place where you want to like you want to host like a gathering. So now your home needs to be well designed, multifunctional and actually functional. So we're starting to see that a lot of people are seeking ways to design their homes. But typically, interior design has been for the affluent. When you think about interior design and hiring an interior designer you're thinking about, I need to firstly have a whole bunch of I need to have a huge home, I need to have a lot of money, to dispose to buy exquisite pieces and really have this extremely curated space and I'm trying to like sort of debunk that myth, you can DIY your space. So DIY interior design is becoming an incredibly popular and we're seeing that resonate heavily. So that's on the client side.
So how do we make interior design affordable, accessible and in a way that you can do it yourself so you're not slapped on by like a $10,000 bill, but you need to buy exactly these pieces from the specific designer because that's what they recommended. We give you a design concept and you work your way through to furnishing it at your own pace on the designer side. You're right there are huge design houses that exist. But I think my personal opportunity through my influencer profile has been I've gotten to work or come to know a lot of extremely talented, small business, interior designers, everybody has the opportunity to work at a large company. Some people want to make it on their own and they almost have no opportunity to meet a client base. So my intention was to sort of and another thing that I did read, and I don't know enough about this to comment on it, but I did read just like in the tech sector where the space is a little bit more dominated by men, the similarly real estate seems to have maybe not the same problem, but to the same degree, but to an extent, and I've heard that from my own designers. So my intention was to create a marketplace that gives small business like women lead small business, interior design firms, and opportunity to connect with global clients and the intention is with E design and technology, you can virtually render 3d models of the space that you want for the client, you can connect online, you can communicate entirely online, visualize stuff online through like iPhone, three or FaceTime and whatnot, and deliver a fully rendered design. So client can visualize what pieces they are going to get, what how to space, the furniture and the designers also offer a shopping list. So our clients actually can specify to them, I'm only going to be able to afford from IKEA or Wal-Mart, don't give me pieces from Restoration Hardware, I'm sorry. So our designers are not necessarily affiliated with specific design houses that have these specific affiliations, they are here to work with the client. So it's not that super white glove service, because you're obviously trying to do this as a budget, offering, but it meets the masses, it's meets, we've had some tremendous success, actually, people are really resonating with the platform. So I feel we're getting product market fit.
Pritish: Great. Now we're going to get into rapid fire three questions, one word, one sentence. Are you ready?
Deboshree: I will try.
Pritish: The hardest thing about your job?
Deboshree: Patience. I think a lot of times we try to have these brilliant ideas, and we want to see them in action. But like I said, you need to bring people along with you and you need to work through the kinks. It takes time to make magic happen. So patience is something I'm learning to do to have.
Pritish: One book or a blog that has influenced you the most?
Deboshree: Will say two books, if you don't mind me, one book was lean startup. I think that has been brilliant. From day one. From the time I started into product management all the way till I'm doing everything that I do even today, I treat it as a Bible and I'd recommend that to anybody who if you haven't read it. The other one that I really liked is by Arianna Huffington. It's called thrive and that is essentially about mental wellness, meditation, gratitude. It basically talks about how we define success only by typically just two pillars, which are like money and happiness or money and career success, but there's a third leg to this three legged stool, which is your mental happiness and I think her book speaks to me every day. I think it's I highly recommend if people haven't read it, I highly recommend reading thrive by Arianna Huffington.
Pritish: And the last question, your most favorite superhero?
Deboshree: Oh my gosh, such a non-superhero type person. Goodness. Sorry, I don't have someone. You've totally gotten me. Can you? If not superhero what would you think? What can I think of?
Pritish: As superhero doesn't have to be a comic, it could be a real person as well. Somebody who empowers you who you feel when you are in down in the dumps. You think about them, you look for them and that inspires you to move ahead.
Deboshree: Again, I don't have one. But I would say I love how I built this as a podcast. So every time I listen to one of Kendra Scott, or Kate Spade, or Reid Hoffman, or any of their journeys, and how they've gone from just giving it a shot, like not losing hope that has been that's really why I started replays, like learning from the humility and just for me that they are all superheroes, and I highly recommend how I built this if someone if folks are not listening to that podcast.
Pritish: You brought up Reed Hoffman, and I think he had an excellent quote on product. He said that "if you're not ashamed of what you have sent out to the market, then you're already too late". So I think that is an excellent way to close this conversation. Thank you Deboshree for being on the One Percent Project.
Deboshree: Thank you so much Pritish an absolute pleasure.