Siddharth Arora

Had a good time speaking at the 10th Edition of Product Management Summit in Bangalore a few days back. My session for seasoned Product leaders covered how to measure success of any product, creating and analysing segmented retention curves, how to nurture a set of engaged (and loyal) power users, and how closely episodic NPS is correlated with customer retention for high repeat businesses. Also spoke about the link between product strategy, OKRs, and KPIs.

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FREE Masterclass on Technology for Product Managers Big thanks to Ankit Shukla for curating this FREE Masterclass for Product Managers eager to strengthen their technical knowledge. This session is particularly valuable for new PMs who want to close gaps in understanding the technology side of product management. Topics covered include: 1. Technology stacks and how they work 2. Collaborating with developers 3. Clarifying requirements effectively 4. Navigating the development process 5. Preparing for interviews 6. Dividing responsibilities across the team 7. Explaining technical concepts clearly 8. Common tech interview questions You can watch this masterclass on his YouTube channel https://lnkd.in/dvfs7x6n Lastly, share with or tag a Product Manager that needs this information.

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The role of product managers is evolving fast. I sat down with Saurabh Agarwal (VP Product Management - JioHotstar, ex-Google and LinkedIn) to decode what’s changing and what will not in the field of product management in the next few years. It was exciting to interact about his decade plus learnings on building products for 500 million+ Indians that most of us use daily along with uncovering how they came up with the ideation of the much revered Max-view feature in Hot-star, that went from idea to launch just in 6 weeks, as first ever vertical content consumption for live sports globally! Not just that, we covered the following elements in the conversation ✅ Engineer → PM → org-builder: how the scope and stakes grow ✅ Judgment vs data: when to trust instincts over dashboards ✅ The MaxView story: from insight → prototype → launch in ~6 weeks ✅ Product trade-offs at true billion+ internet scale ✅ Designing for India’s Next Half Billion (NHB) users ✅ Where AI is actually reshaping PM & design ✅ Why simplicity beats cleverness in execution He also dropped a bunch of timeless nuggets on velocity, taste, and building for constraints. Thanks to Rati and team at Product x People for the invite. Link to the full conversation in comments. #productmanagement

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India may be the land of spices… …but the spiciest opinion in product management comes from Marty Cagan — the man behind Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed. In this week of Lenny & Learn, I went down the path of questioning my existence- all thanks to Marty. If no one has called him the father of modern product management, it’s a shame, as he is definitely like a father tough, brutally honest… and almost always right Marty answers a very important question that comes across the minds of both tech and non-tech world- Who really is a product manager and what do they do? The best product led companies work on four principles - Usable, Feasible, Valuable & Viable. Now, usable & feasible are what designers and developers respectively are responsible for, but the valuable i.e. Is the company going to make money and the viable i.e do customers need it, are the top most if not only responsibilities of product managers. Product managers need to think about problems, but they need to think more about solutions. Solutions that are not a list of features but those that create value. They focus on outcomes and not on output. To loosely explain Output vs Outcome- Output is the count For ex: number of features, number of campaigns, number of widgets etc and Outcome are the changes that result from the outputs i.e. Increased user engagement because of a feature, Increased sales because of a campaign etc. Understanding this concept, actually made me understand what makes someone a great product manager: They really know about the users and customers (Meet X customers before making a decision) They are an expert in data of how product is really used, sales analytics, marketing analytics They know the industry, the market in which business operates in and more They know the different parts of business- how is it marketed? How is it paid for? What are the complaints, regulatory requirements? The purpose of knowing and doing these is to innovate, make a valuable and viable product, but most importantly be able to approve or improve a prototype in the shortest period of time. The ability to innovate at the optimal speed is what differentiates a great company from the rest, and product managers are at the centre of that world. If I have to summarise, all Marty’s sessions, SVPG’s blogs- It would be that Product managers are solving What is just now possible For real users or customers In the ways that helps the business. And to do this the best and the only way is for them to have: Unencumbered access to users and customers Unencumbered access  to engineers Unencumbered access to stakeholders These sessions shook me (I am sure it did Lenny too), but sometimes you need tough love to do your best work. P.S: I would recommend Teresa Torres book- Continuous Discovery Habits, which comes highly recommended by Mighty Marty.

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We’ve largely solved payments infrastructure in India. Ecommerce execution, however, still feels fragmented and unreliable in comparison. I’ve spent years watching infrastructure succeed where product innovation alone couldn’t. The pattern is consistent: fragmentation creates friction, standardisation creates scale. India’s ecommerce today feels a lot like digital payments did before UPI. A friend recently launched a brand and asked me, “Which payment gateway should I use?” That question made something clear. Payments aren’t the real problem. They’re just one step. Commerce breaks in everything that comes after. Selling direct today means juggling storefronts, logistics dashboards, payment systems, courier tools, tracking links, returns workflows, and manual customer communication. Seven dashboards. Constant re-entry. Systems that don’t talk. Each tool works on its own. The handoffs are what break. Demand exists. Execution collapses at scale. Marketplaces bundle everything but take margins and ownership. Direct commerce offers freedom, but turns founders into operations managers instead of brand builders. This is the exact problem UPI solved: fragmented systems, manual reconciliation, unpredictable outcomes. That’s when I started seeing Shiprocket as an infrastructure layer for ecommerce execution, similar in spirit to what UPI became for payments. The problem isn’t fully solved, but the shift from fragmented tools to shared execution rails has clearly begun. A single system where core ecommerce workflows connect automatically, without merchants stitching tools together. Integration happens behind the scenes, and intelligence increasingly guides decisions that were earlier driven by guesswork Over 4 lakh merchants now operate this way, selling directly without operational chaos. This is what infrastructure does. It makes the hard parts invisible so founders can focus on building brands, not managing dashboards. India didn’t scale payments by building more apps. It scaled by standardising execution. Ecommerce is finally starting to move in the same direction.

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Harsh but the truth. Domain knowledge may help you win in the short term, true product skills help you win in the long-term.

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Blink and you’ll miss two things: a new AI model and a new Vertical Qcom marketplace. Ecom led to a wave of vertical marketplaces -  Myntra, FirstCry, Nykaa, Purplle, Urban Ladder, Lenskart, Swiggy, Zomato. Repeating trend with Qcom -  Swish, Slikk, First Club, Tyro, Cavi, Knot, Apollo/1Mg 10mins. One thing that’s surely different - VC money isn’t flowing like the Ecom era. Survivors will have to figure out how to scale profitably while maintaining CX metrics! The costs for Last Mile are quite high for Qcom than Ecom. And the competition is intense - Swiggy, Zomato, Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto, FK Minutes, everyone is competing for the same fleet. Sharing a few key learnings for marketplaces just starting up, from our journey of scaling Qcom. Had to split this into 3 parts! (Supply, Product, CM) Part 1/3 & the most important - Supply/Your Fleet 3 core things that matter to them - 1️⃣ 𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗼𝗺 - 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲.  • Enforce right behaviour while keeping the platform non-restrictive.  • Freedom of working hours - Accommodate 2Hr/ 4Hr/ 6Hr/ 8Hr shifts. Helps get multiple personas to your platform.  • Freedom of earning model - Build flexibility over Fixed Earnings / Per Order Earnings and around Weekly/Monthly payout cycles. 2️⃣ 𝗘𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 - 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗘𝗣𝗛  • EPH (Earnings Per Hour), what do I earn if I put “X” hours with a company? >80% work at 2+ companies, which company at which hour depends on EPH. 3️⃣ 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅 (𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀)  • Avenues to Grow - Make sure there is a path of career progression. Rarely does someone want to just deliver orders for long.  • Timely Payouts - Pay them on schedule as you would your employees. One delayed payout churns ~10% of your fleet.  • RnRs - Find ways to connect better. Deliver "X" orders & earn ₹"Y" is very transactional. Small gestures like monthly RnR, leadership connects go a long way.  • Insurance - Help them get life, health, and accident insurance. We aren’t perfect on many parameters; these are core things that are being fixed as P0s. Zomato currently sets an industry benchmark on most, 10X better at least providing citywide resting shelters, medical insurance, riders becoming part of product teams, and even tax filing support! Btw, there is a much easier way to launch a Qcom vertical marketplace.  Just use Blitz Qcom rails and launch in 10 cities on Day 1. You source, we deliver!

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Forget QR codes and PINs for a second—your voice is about to become your new payment method. The big news is that India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is integrating Voice AI, enabling payments through simple speech commands. This isn't just a cool tech upgrade; it's a strategic move for radical financial inclusion. In a nation with such linguistic diversity, this feature, supporting multiple Indian languages, will onboard millions of new users who might have found traditional app interfaces challenging. For anyone in tech or finance, this is a clear signal: the future of user experience is multimodal and hyper-accessible. It pushes us to think beyond visual interfaces and consider how voice technology can break down barriers in our own products. What's the next big accessibility challenge that voice AI can solve in your industry? https://lnkd.in/gwE4XBkA #Fintech #UPI #Innovation #AI #FinancialInclusion #VoiceTech

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***99% of funnel/growth PMs have rote memorised that if you have multiple options/variations to test in parallel, run a Multi Armed Bandit experiment. :) **** This is not how you need to run your experiments. Think about this what is stopping you from running a pure A/B/C/D… test. Why do you have to run an MAB? Have you stepped back and thought ever for a min why MAB? Don’t run MAB just because you have memorised multiple different variants = MAB. So let’s try to understand when to run a pure A/B/C… test 1. An A/B/C test works perfectly well when you have sizeable traffic to play with. There is no rush to move traffic to variants that seem to be doing well in early reads. You can split the traffic to the variants equally, it is always better to do a balanced A/B. 2. You can afford to take the hit on your core metric, imagine you are trying to test variants for ancillary attach and some of the variants will end up having funnel conversion drop, if you can afford a short term drop running an A/B/C is often a better option. 3. You want scientific certainty and you want to learn conclusively before making a decision. Ok so when does an MAB make sense 1. You want to run the experiments in perpetuity and keep moving traffic dynamically to better variants. You want to run experiments in perpetuity because you want a permanent baseline to compare against. Eg. Ranking of cards based on recommendations 2. You want to keep the cost of running the experiment minimal in terms of impact on core metrics such as conversions. 3. You have limited traffic to play with and so you want to accelerate the learning. For major product changes always A/B/C is better it is worth taking the short term hit for conclusive results. The risk with MAB is early noise can push the traffic to a bad variant. Also with biased allocation, supposedly inferior variants get less traffic Implies standard error is higher, confidence intervals are wider. Follow me for high quality content, not product philosophy but practical insights https://lnkd.in/gHweK_q7 or https://lnkd.in/ggUKftFq While you are at it grab my product assignments playbook, 19 real product cases, all successful submissions, real job offers, ~258 pages of content. ***Grab it now**** - https://lnkd.in/gHzyN-Xc #ABtesting #productmanagement #careers

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Finance teams are evolving faster than most people realise. What used to be reporting and reconciliation is becoming automation, intelligent systems and AI-driven decision layers. AI is starting to reshape how finance operates. At Razorpay FTX26, we’re opening up the Circle of Expertise - an open space where builders, operators, can discuss how financial infrastructure is changing and what the next phase might look like. I’ll be talking about the rise of AI-powered finance and if you’re building or running finance systems and have a question about the future of finance, send it through, I’ll answer it live! Drop it here → https://lnkd.in/gEU_9sNF The LaLit Ashok 🗓️12th March, 2026 https://lnkd.in/gcRM3x8K

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Good products grow on value and not just numbers. Sharing a quick carousel on value based product metrics that help to connect customer impact to business outcome.

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Micro-Decisions, Macro Impact – Big wins come from many smart micro-decisions. Prioritize user empathy, clarify ambiguity, and avoid scope creep; every small decision propels the product forward. #DecisionMaking #ExecutionMatters #ProductCulture

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Everyone talks about products, roadmaps, features, and metrics. But some of the most critical work of a Product Manager happens behind the scenes: * Resolving unspoken conflicts in stakeholder meetings * Spotting potential blockers before they stall a launch * Mentoring team members through tough decisions * Anticipating competitor moves and adjusting strategy proactively * Building processes that quietly make everything run smoother This invisible work doesn’t show up on dashboards or in OKRs but without it, teams misalign, launches falter, and products lose their edge. PMs are part strategist, part diplomat, part mentor; the work beneath the surface is what truly drives success. #ProductManagement #ProductStrategy #Leadership #InvisibleWork #PMLife #StakeholderManagement #BusinessStrategy #Competition #Teamwork #ProductLeadership

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"Shopper trust has become a retailer’s most valuable asset." – Anisa Kumar, CEO of Narvar In today’s volatile economy, vague delivery windows and missed updates don’t just frustrate shoppers. They erode trust, drive up costs, and kill loyalty. In her latest Forbes article, Sharon Edelson breaks down key findings from our 2025 State of Post-Purchase Report. 🔒 66% of shoppers feel anxious after buying 🚫 40% abandon carts due to fear of package theft 📦 74% experienced a late delivery in the past year Article in the comments 👇 #Retail #Forbes #Ecommerce #PostPurchaseExperience #Narvar #CustomerExperience #SupplyChain 

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This shift from search & filters to conversation is exactly what the next wave of users needs, especially beyond metros. Engineering, at its core, is about solving complex problems with simple, intuitive solutions. "vaani” is a great example of that philosophy in action bringing natural, conversational commerce to millions. Big unlock for accessibility, discovery, and user trust. 🚀 #meesho #VoiceCommerce #DigitalIndia

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My Team at CheQ no longer writes a PRD. #Wisor our #Credit #Card #Advisor is a living example of the same. We use Claude Code/Lovable to build the first version of the feature themselves. Takes the feedback, gets the approval and then writes a detailed PRD for engg with the working prototype to understand. We have been following this for a while, and the results are simple. 1. Faster Approvals with clear understanding of how it will look and work when it goes to Prod. 2. Less your visual thinking vs my visual thinking. 3. No back and forth on Iterations by design and Engg. This is what happens when you eliminate 𝗛𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝗗𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘁. In a traditional org, the cycle kills you: > PM writes a spec. > Design interprets the spec. > Engineering interprets the design. > Each handoff introduces drift. Each handoff adds a week. The standard 4-week cycle (PRD → Design → Ticket → Sprint) compresses to 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 when the PM can "Vibe Code" and product results. The math is simple. If your experimentation cycle is 8 weeks and your competitor's is 3 days, they are running 13𝘅 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 per quarter. Compound that learning gap over a year, and it becomes insurmountable. You choose what works for you!! Did you try #Wisor as of now? Aditya Menon

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In product management, discussions often revolve around MVPs and feature releases, yet the true distinction lies in our approach to iteration. While some teams halt once a product is launched, exceptional teams delve deeper: 🔍 Evaluating what's effective ⚠️ Identifying areas of improvement 📈 Enhancing based on user feedback Iterative thinking doesn't aim for flawlessness but prioritizes progress, insights, and adjustments. This iterative process is key to transforming good products into exceptional ones. Throughout each phase, user input holds immense value. The question remains: Are we truly attuned to our users' feedback? #ProductManagement #ContinuousImprovement #UserFeedback #ProductCulture #GrowthMindset #Leadership #MVPtoImpact

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