Kumar feels that the consumer expertise of the Bharat viewers with respect to a product doesn’t want to vary however the ticket sizes, onboarding and go to market methods must be completely different
She says the SMB area wants microsoftware — merchandise which can be a group of minimal viable options and easy to make use of
Comparatively a newcomer within the VC world, she has led 4 investments until date — API maker Setu and digital ledger OkCredit, vernacular audiobook app PocketFM and product supervisor hiring platform Upraised
The HBO sitcom ‘Silicon Valley’ launched us to a motley set of characters that typify the tech startup world — the quirky founders obsessive about their merchandise, engineering mavericks who’re sparring with one another, sales-obsessed CEOs or VCs who’re in a continuing state of calculation, evaluating concepts and judging individuals.
Harsha Kumar, who’s now a accomplice at VC agency Lightspeed India, appears to have seen most of those in her profession. Not solely is her method of taking lengthy pauses earlier than making insightful observations very paying homage to Silicon Valley’s Laurie Bream, however she has additionally been by the journey of being a software program engineer and a product chief.
She began her profession as a software program engineer and product supervisor in IT firm Persistent Methods and the American on-line gaming startup Zynga. Whereas racing up the administration ladder, she additionally managed to sneak in an MBA diploma from INSEAD.
When Harsha began because the product head of Ola in 2014, the ride-hailing firm was doing 3K rides per day and was but to problem the dominance of Uber in any huge method. By the point she had ended her stint at Ola in 2016, it had scaled as much as one million rides a day and had achieved a unicorn valuation. Whereas clearly not all of that is right down to Harsha’s work, however the expertise of scaling up a product by such a multiplier could be price a lifetime of labor expertise for a lot of.
Since July 2016, Kumar has led 4 investments with Lightspeed India companions — API marker Setu, digital ledger OkCredit, vernacular audiobook app PocketFM and product supervisor hiring platform Upraised.
Whereas Upraised’s goal group may be graded as a Tier viewers, the opposite three corporations are geared toward consumers and sellers who belong to Tier 2 and three India — generally known as the Bharat phase within the tech startup world.
Constructing For Bharat
When most tech entrepreneurs or budding engineers consider merchandise, there are fancy photos of polished UX and differentiated UI floating of their minds, however constructing merchandise for almost all of Indian shoppers and enterprise customers is about determining which inherent downside a product will face. Given the disparity in consumer behaviour in city and semi-urban/rural context — so-called India vs Bharat debate — product builders want to consider fixing area of interest issues.
The product class can be key when contemplating these two disparate markets. Kumar says publicity to know-how and software program is just not new for the Bharat viewers, notably given the penetration of social media apps like WhatsApp, Fb, YouTube and TikTok. However in commerce, the product has to additionally push them into altering a few of their behaviour equivalent to avoiding digital funds.
“A couple of things are still different — most of Bharat for example while using online products is not transacting online yet. They might not buy products worth INR 2,000- INR 3,000 upfront but maybe you can extract something that costs INR 10 or INR 50 from them through micropayments,” Harsha, who might be talking at Inc42 and TPF’s The Product Summit in October, instructed us.
So the product’s consumer expertise (UX) for the Bharat viewers doesn’t want to vary in comparison with the Tier 1 phase however ticket sizes, onboarding and go-to-market methods should be differentiated. Whereas each audiences may be reached digitally, Bharat nonetheless has the lingering sense that hoardings, print and TV ads are markers of a branded product.
Past reaching the audience, the technique to convey them onboard and make them engaged customers additionally wants crucial analysis. For instance, creating an e-mail deal with is tough for a lot of such customers, and it’s merely not intuitive, argues Harsha. “Onboarding flows have to be a lot more simple and you need to go down the route of pre-installs or let’s say working with electronics vendors who are traditionally the IT guys for most of this audience,” Kumar stated.
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Cracking The SMB Code
One of the vital vital segments that contains this non-tech-savvy viewers is the SMB area. India is house to roughly 63 Mn SMBs as per authorities estimates in 2015-16, presenting an $8.7 Bn alternative for horizontal SaaS suppliers, in accordance with an Inc42 Plus report.
“The term SMB is used very loosely and the reality is SMBs can be sliced and diced many ways,” stated the VC who has led investments in Setu and OkCredit, startups that cater to this phase in numerous methods. The broad foundation of how SMBs might be differentiated is their tech consciousness and the monetisation methods that may work within the phase, in accordance with Kumar.
Whereas service suppliers usually tend to be comfortable with navigating a digital product, kiranas and blue-collar staff want a serving to hand on this. On the monetisation entrance, service suppliers themselves typically work with a fats margin, making it that a lot less complicated to extract worth from them by a digital product, whereas catering to different units of customers will yield completely different margins.
Harsha used the time period microsoftware in a 2019 LinkedIn put up to elucidate how merchandise may be constructed for the wants of SMB customers.
“Their [SMBs] exposure has been to very simple products and so the expectation is that whatever product or software you provide to this segment has to be designed extremely simply…I almost think of them as a collection of tools or a collection of minimum viable solutions,” she instructed Inc42.
One instance of microsoftware is WhatsApp, which is closely utilized by most small enterprise homeowners to get stock and connected quotes from suppliers and ship necessities and footage upon receipt to them. Harsha believes this may be changed by a standalone product. “This is not a category for which I will build an extensive inventory management solution but instead what I will do is provide a simple IoT device that automatically scans what’s happening on the inventory side”, Harsha added for instance.
Engineering a Excessive Progress Product Workforce
Clearly, understanding the nitty-gritty of a person’s or enterprise’ wants isn’t any simple activity, but the destiny of a product hinges completely on this. Whereas holding it easy is simpler stated than finished, how does a younger firm hack it in absence of buyer knowledge and expertise available in the market?
“You are looking for insights about the market…you are not looking for data about the market…I can’t remember the last time when I made an investment or did not make an investment only based on data,” she says.
When investing determination as a VC, Harsha stated she depends so much on an individual’s life’s story in addition to their very own early product journey to establish whether or not they have a development mindset — people who find themselves incessant downside solvers and know which issues to assault. Nevertheless, it’s not solely the imaginative and prescient of a founder but additionally your entire product design and administration operate that issues.
“I feel product teams are basically a bunch of people that are excited about solving problems… whether your problem is growth or retention, ideally a product person should be able to adapt,” she elaborated.
A product supervisor is commonly caught between being an aesthete or a designer and a supervisor who’s chasing engagement and conversion metrics. And today, product managers typically must be a designer themselves, given the standard crew buildings at many startups, the place typically the design operate is shared throughout groups equivalent to gross sales, advertising, content material, and product.
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One of many challenges in constructing a product crew is getting product designers and managers on the identical web page. If a product designer’s purpose is just to enhance the consumer expertise whereas a product supervisor is considering of a distinct objective equivalent to DAUs, it will likely be onerous to seek out alignment.
However anybody who’s critical about constructing a product must evaluate the construction of the product crew. For Harsha, product groups the place designers and managers are working collectively would result in much less friction as having the identical particular person on high creates extra concord.
Companies, the place product designers are used as sources to simply assist the product supervisor, would see completely different outcomes in comparison with different startups the place they’re an integral a part of the product crew. “In the former, you are just using product designers as a tool to help you whereas in the latter you are working with them to come up with a solution,” added Kumar.
She offers an instance from her time in Ola — a product crew that’s wanting on the onboarding movement would even have a product designer who’s a part of that crew. Ideally, the crew would include two product managers and a product designer and all three of them could be focussed on the fixing for onboarding movement. This may assist to make it possible for the managers and designers are all the time aligned of their objectives and no one is considering or working in a silo.
“A designer is solving his design skills whereas a manager is using his analytical skills to solve the same problem… Two product managers doing their thinking and then going to a designer and then saying colour it leads to a very smart resource being ridiculously under utilised.”
Harsha Kumar might be talking at Inc42 & TPF’s The Product Summit — India’s First And Largest Digital Product Convention, supported by Amplitude and AWS. Register Now.
