The Need Cycle

Before we delve deep into the intricacies of products, let us first define what a product is. If Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive is to be believed-a product is an extension of a human being that helps do a certain job effectively. Taking an analogy, let’s look at how it makes sense. Let’s assume you want to listen to music and the only way to do it is if it can be played on a player, computer system, television or a device but can you store songs and conveniently carry it around wherever you go. iPOD solved the problem by creating a simple ergonomic device that could be carried anywhere without much trouble. It gave a lot of power to the user. It made him feel he is in control of his life. The illusion of free will wasn’t no more an illusion. In a nutshell every product makes a user supremely happy because the user is now able to do his job perfectly using the device. Keeping that in mind one would have to delve a little deeper in the customer’s journey map and look for a lot of things normally unnoticed.

We happened to define the purpose why a product is created. Clayton Christensen in his famous ‘Job Theory’ talks about the fact that a product designer or an innovator creates a product so that the customer could do his job well. If the customer can do his job really well with the help of the said product or service then the product becomes a really valuable product and over time if it continuously delivers then it builds a brand that can be trusted time and again. Incidentally the problem is that most product managers cannot understand what the real problem is. As Tedd Levitt says, “People are looking for quarter inch holes not quarter inch drills” but most product guys end up thinking creating a drill is the problem and that is why we have a very high failure rate in the product space. When Google launched it’s search engine, the problem was not that there wasn’t any search engine. Alta Vista and Yahoo Search were the dominant search players back then. The problem was they were cluttered and their search results were not accurate. Page Rank solved the problem of accuracy, the latency was as low as one can imagine and the minimalistic design attracted people to try it out. That’s how they turned from just a search engine to actually a verb or a noun. 

So if we were to talk about the stages of need fulfilment, we’d have to consider three different stages. First stage which usually happens because of a an external or internal trigger that motivates people to take action, Post the action the there is some amount of variable reward that prompts people to invest their money or reward in the product. That excerpt is taken from Nir Eyal’s ‘Hooked’ and is quite true for a lot of habit forming products. However what is to be noticed is that even after the user is prompted to use the product, it’s still a want for him. In his mind he still treats the product as a want. Most products that are launched become wants and find it difficult to go beyond that. In the product space we call it getting a product market fit. The ones that actually get a product market fit or a market product fit as Brian Balfour calls it usually become part of a need. They are no longer a want but are now needed by people to complete a certain task. The thing to be noted is that although it makes lives relatively easier for users but they can still do away if the product isn’t there to fulfil the said requirement or need. The third and the final stage in the desire fulfilment cycle is when the product achieves an iconic status as it is now required to avert an existential crisis. Users can’t do away with it easily. An absence of it would somehow lead to an existential crisis and will make the amygdala react to it due to an intrinsic fear. So fear drives the acceptance and usage of the product.

Let me cut an example- when mobile phones arrived in India sometime in the 2000s- they were expensive and a design nightmare but they provided instant communication on the go but to the Indian diaspora, they were pretty much a want. People would majorly use their PSTN phones and had no complains. Slowly and steadily as mobile phones became better looking and a little cheaper, most people bought mobile phones to communicate but had their PSTN phones as well. In most cases the PSTN phones were still used repeatedly but mobiles too found equal usage. Soon after the digital revolution made broadbands cheaper and data cards provided internet to almost anyone on the planet. A host of important services suddenly jumped to the mobile and within a a decade mobile phones became an integral part of our lives. Today every single part of our business or personal life is driven by the mobile phone in some way or the other. One can’t use UPI to pay your bills without a mobile phone. You can’t use a taxi hailing app without a mobile phone. One can’t order food easily without a mobile phone. One can’t order stuff online easily without a mobile phone. But in a way it’s fulfilling an important human need. Devoid of mobile phones life would be facing an existential crisis for a majority of folks these days. 

So to sum it all every product has to move through these three stages of need fulfilment before they become a sustainable product and eventually the company becomes sustainable. But the sad part is that only 1% to 2% products actually convert to a sustainable version of themselves. Most products fail to make a mark in becoming a tool to avert existential crisis. But what exactly is the problem that stops them from becoming one. Well we’d have to write a new blog for that but it has a lot to do with customer centricity, customer happiness, continual innovation, reducing friction, adding more and more value to products or services. A lot has been written about why products fail but it’s equally important to understand the need cycle to understand how a product in its lifetime will drift toward it. The fact is that a very few percentage drift to the last part of the need cycle. The journey from the first part to the last part of the need cycle takes years and years of innovation, cultural upheaval, formidable leadership, favourable socio economic and geo political situations and above all relentless focus on execution. But here is an exception to the rule. The need cycle typically exists for products that are trying to operate in the blue ocean space. They are typically trying to create a market of their owing to the disruption they are promising. But as we have all seen Geoffrey Moore’s Product Adoption Lifecycle, we know that by the time a product manages to reach the late majority, it is believed to have become an integral part of the human value chain where people can’t live without the product. 

Having spoken about the three different stages of the need cycle, it’s important to know that most products that stay relevant for a certain period of time in the need cycle be it the first phase of wants or the second phase of quasi need or the third phase or real need, typically fall out of it due to market dynamism. The order in which they fall is again dependent on which phase they are in. Products or services typically in the first phase fall out real quick. It is followed by products in the second phase. The products in the third phase of the need cycle are products that stick around for a very long time. These are the products that create a brand value for a company in the long run. We see these brands all around us. They are quite high on the customer happiness index. Now that we have tried to explain deeply about the need cycle. It’s important to understand that one does not need to operate only in a sequential way but one can choose to operate in either one of these phases. Like for instance, in the current pandemic, companies creating products that help people with the pandemic would surely see sales skyrocketing and fear would drive most people would procure things they would otherwise not consider buying. But the phase is quite temporal in nature and there might be a day when the product might languish. More so every great product has had to cross the three phases of the need cycle to become a brand. 

As a product manager one needs to be extra vigilant in the context of a need cycle. One needs to see how the product is interacting with the environment and how it is solving an important customer problem. One has to continually validate the customer satisfaction rate to keep up with the dynamism. One has to truly keep on delivering for a consistent period of time for a product to reach the third phase. It would help if a product manager understands a bit about behavioural psychology, game theory and data science to understand a bit about the enigmatic nature of human behaviour.  At PLabs we help our students understand human behaviour in detail that helps them take their products to the market keeping in mind the the need cycle.

How to get into Product Management?

We have spoken to over 500 plus people over the last 7 years, who wish to make a sound career in product management. A majority of these guys work in different roles. If someone is a designer working on the Ux part of a mobile app, someone else is a business analyst trying to do some market research on the FMCG segment. All these individuals who do not seem to be in product management seem to have their eyes fixated on product management as a viable career. The larger question is that they somehow do not have the skills required to get into product management. Add to that the fact that there isn’t any viable outcome or impact they have generated in the context of a product release. Owing purely to the above reasons it becomes a difficult job to convince the hiring managers otherwise. 

But let’s see why would someone need the aforementioned in the career graph of an aspiring product manager. Well technically product management has been defined as the point of intersection between business, design and technology. A product manager is supposed to have an overall understanding of design, technology and business. This helps in steering a product from conception to release. It’s a creative role. As much as it relies on data, it banks a lot on intuition as well. But what’s even more important is a grip on realism and human psychology. The reason being realistic helps is because sometimes we become victims to our own biases and underestimate/overestimate our products and that could be really dangerous especially when a lot of time has been sacrificed to support a hypothesis which might be incorrect. On the other hand the end user or a consumer of a product or service is a human being. Human beings exhibit different range of behavioural patterns. Human behaviour is complex, unpredictable and is a little difficult to understand. That makes the job even more harder. Top that with the fact that naturally people choose barely 2% of the total products based on how popular the brand is.That makes the job especially more difficult for a product manager unless the product has a compelling value proposition.

If that be the case then any form of theoretical training is not going to help. One needs to actually build and deliver a product or service to the market to understand more about what works and what doesn’t. In the process one faces a lot of failures. These failures are critical to a product manager’s learning. Failures teach a lot about customer preferences. It is through iterations of failures, that one actually gets to a point where the product or service usually works out. Having said that the rate of success is as low as 5%. 95% of products that we see around will eventually die. But one can’t derive that experience from an offline or an online course of product management because product management is completely experiential in nature.

We have been studying the intricate nature of learning over the last 2 years. We found out in our research that most education institutes that have created experiential learning frameworks or drills have been able to produce an exponentially fast learning curve and corresponding student outcomes. Take Ecole 42 for example-a coding school based out of Paris. Ecole started with a cent percent experiential model. Most students who are picked up after a gruelling selection procedure are subjected to a gamified environment with 21 levels. The focus is on problem solving at each of these levels. Since there are no teachers at Ecole, most students learn things on their own or by virtue of peer learning. The students graduating out of Ecole are picked up by the top companies in the world. Ecole 42 has been constantly delivering by producing some of the best problem solvers. 

Two of the most important benefits of experiential learning would be deeper insights and long lasting learning. This researchgate report conducted at Elon University talks about how breadth and depth of knowledge improved for students after they were subjected to experiential learning methods. Experiential learning methods have proven to be a boon in disguise for students as students could now use the learning to produce viable outcomes. 

Keeping that in mind we built PLabs. We were very clear right since the beginning that the only way aspiring product managers can learn about products is when they release products in the market. In the process every time they fail, there would be a new type of learning that could give them deeper insight about different aspects of product management. The rigorous 16 weekend program pushes the candidates to work cohesively in a team comprised of people with different competencies and from different backgrounds. The diversity brings about additional learning. As a team after several failures when students release a product to the market and end up getting paid customers, is in itself a huge achievement. 

At PLabs we don’t have any exams or marks to rank students but we do have demo sessions where students present their progress to a top industry leader and receive feedback to understand more about the redundancies in their approach. Students after graduating from PLabs would develop a set of skills which they did not know existed. These skills would help them get into some of the top product companies in the world. 

PLabs in a way is solving a huge problem for people who want to get into product management by providing them a platform for releasing their own products to the market. This could help them up their game. This product release could be shown as an impact to product companies that want to hire product managers who have product releases on their resumes. It would place PLabs graduates at the top of the value chain. 

So typically PLabs could solve this problem that people from other backgrounds face when it comes to getting into product management forever. Did I mention we also help our students get an audience with a hiring manager to test his luck out. The idea is to build rapport with a product leader so the chances of getting an offer increase exponentially. 

If you want to get into product management and feel you need the skills and a corresponding impact to flaunt on your resumes. This is your chance to become part of an ideology that believes in learning by doing. 

Hours Away From PLabs Launch

We can’t believe we are finally launching PLabs. It’s been close to 7 long and arduous months of planning, brainstorming, unlearning, relearning, manoeuvring, failing and retrying. But we savour those moments. We had planned to launch PLabs in March but then COVID came knocking and we couldn’t launch since we had an element of physicality. We had no clue what we should do. We tried thinking of a viable solution but none of that happened over the next one or two months. Then as we were watching Steve Jobs biography ‘Jobs’ on Netflix, a thought occurred to us. What is it that we could do to provide more value to people who wish to carve out a career in products.

We have earlier written about the futility  of online courses but seems that also applies to offline as well. People need to have tangible skills they can use to produce a viable outcome that could create an impact. It could be building a mobile app that touches the lives of millions of lives or a web app that could teach kids to code. The problem is that most people right after their engineering or management courses barely get a chance to build their skills. When it comes to product management the situation is far more confusing. The reason has to do a lot with the enigma surrounding product management for starters. On top of that there is an explosion on the web when it comes to online literature and online courses. Aspirants are seemingly confused and most of them end up doing a course or reading a book or article and realise they don’t have the necessary skills required to conceptualise, build and release a product in the market.

That’s where PLabs comes in. We are here to build skills that people would need to be self dependent. These skills would come handy and help you earn your livelihood even if you lose your job. It would help you start something of your own. It would help you build something you can be proud of. It will reduce your dependency on companies for your livelihood. You would be able to dictate terms because of these skills. Ninety three percent of people who went to an experiential school like PLabs ended up working with some of the top organisations like Google, MI6, Microsoft or started their own successful enterprises. 

This is your chance to change your life by being a product leader responsible for creating some of the most iconic products in the 21st century. Sounds interesting-do contact us from the website

Online Education:Is it really worth a shot?

Hope you are doing good. Here is wishing you a very good evening. We are just 2 days away from the launch.  As we were brainstorming on what to write for the newsletter, one of our close friends called us up to inquire about a good digital marketing course. He had done a lot of research and did not know which one to go for. We couldn’t solve his problem but we managed to get the topic we’d write our newsletter on.

Today we are going to talk a bit about online education. It all started when Salman Khan the founder of Khan Academy in an act of serendipity made a few videos for his niece to teacher her maths and science. Much to his surprise he soon discovered that a lot of students across the globe were using his videos to learn. That led to the creation of online education industry.

Ever since MOOC commonly known as Massive Open Online Courses started, online education almost exploded. There were players like Coursera, Udacity, EdX and Udemy who captured the frenzy and started coming up with online courses for students. Soon every education company across the globe followed suit. 

Online education changed the face of education forever. It made education accessible to students from across the globe. Now anybody with a laptop or mobile and an internet connection could avail online education. All major universities understood how online is going to play out and quickly tied up with online ed tech companies and published their content on the fly. On one hand it was solving one of the biggest problems the world had grappled with over the course of the last few centuries-the accessibility of education for all. On the other it also ended up commodifying education. This massive explosion on the web decimated the qualitative aspect of education. It destroyed the value education provided students. It took out the outcomes education is meant to drive. 

Today students are seemingly confused about education be it online or offline. They are thinking hard about the value education provides them as opposed to the returns they get. Today in the US student education loan debt is as high as 1 trillion dollars. But I looked at it differently. Here’s what I think about what students need to have. It took me a while to form this opinion but its actually quite interesting. Today in this innovation economy students need skills to build products or services. Unfortunately online education isn’t helping when it comes to building those skills. I have personally taken a bunch of online courses and save the certificate part which you can attach to your LinkedIn profile. There isn’t much value in terms of what you can do with what is being taught unless an outcome is produced. The reason the outcome isn’t happening for most students is because they lack the skills to solve a problem in real time. 

Now most of these skills are developed when students take on problems by themselves and try solving it on their own. It is quite natural for them to fail but it takes them closer to the solution.Most of the problems in the past were solved in an experiential way. We can’t forget this famous quote by Edison before he got successful with the electric bulb “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work”. Any star innovator be it Nicola Tesla, Alfred Einstein or our very own Elon Musk have all stumbled across failures through which they learnt a lot about the problem and then went on to create history. Consider the example of Sabrine Pasterski. She built an entire aeroplane out of scratch from scrap when she was merely 13 years old. In a recent interview she confessed that most of how she ended up building a plane was because of experiential learning. She would have failed a million times before she put together a plane and flew it to meet some MIT professors in Boston.It is how humanity has learnt over the last 3.6 million years. 

One cannot change a primordial learning system and try to create an alternate reality where grades, certificates and degrees are more important than skills that will help you solve problems and become a harbinger of change. Keeping this in mind online education is worth a shot if you can use those skills to build something. If what you learn online can help you solve problems then it's definitely useful. Unfortunately that is not how things have panned out for a lot of students who feel they lack the essential skills.

At PLabs we are addressing exactly that. We are going to go completely experiential and let students build those skills by virtue of failure. When students would try to launch something in the market and face the forces of entropy that will make them fail, is the inflection point where they will learn more about how a certain problem can be solved. 

So brace yourself for the PLabs launch on 10th and buckle up. We are coming to change the face of India.

Take Care and Please Stay Safe.

Regards

Team PLabs

PLabs First Blog

I wrote this blog in March 2020 when we were at the cusp of launching PLabs.That time we thought COVID is a temporary thing but then in a span of 3 months we realised COVID is here to stay and this is the new normal. That’s actually nothing new and happens in the product space a lot. We pivot across these situations. We also changed our model a bit and now its going to be a virtual experience once we launch on 19th August. Take a look at this piece of history and see if it makes some amount of sense to you.

PLabs or Product Labs was an idea that we were toying with for quite some time. The reason for starting PLabs could be attributed to a lot of use cases. But most importantly if one single use case has to be cited, it would have to be innovation deficit in product organisations. As part and parcel of product organisations for over a decade, we witnessed an absolute absence of an innovation based culture in technology companies. Most of the discussions that we had with senior leadership of technology companies again revolved around a lack of an innovation based culture. Most organisations that we came in contact were ridiculed when it came to solving the innovation juggernaut. They had done everything in their capacity to boost innovation. They had tried out incentivisation programs to reward innovation champions. They had set apart separate funds for innovation projects. Some of them even emulated 20% per week concept from Google and tried it out. Some of them sent their employees for training on innovation management. With the advent of MOOCs, a lot of companies partnered with MOOC providers like Coursera, Udacity or Udemy to build courses on innovation for their employees. However most of these so called efforts failed to create a breakthrough when it came to innovation.

When we took it as a task to figure out the reason behind that, the adventure took me to a different dimension. To start with, we found that the lack of innovation in a company is a systemic anomaly than a temporal redundancy. It has a lot to do with leadership, culture, processes, risk appetite and most importantly customer centricity. We read a lot of literature around some of the most innovative companies in the world like Nike, Semco, Amazon and Zappos. We studied a lot of articles written by pioneers like Theodre Levitt, Clayten Christensen, Geoffrey Moore on the innovation cycle and arrived at few conclusions.

Let me try to put it down one by one to show how innovation actually works. Innovation is not an intentional phenomenon that people directly dabble in. It has to do with just one element of the value chain- Customer Centricity. One would find it extremely surprising that a majority of product companies around the world lose track of customer needs with the passage of time, since most customer needs are dynamic in nature and tend to change with socio economic and geopolitical changes. Most product teams operate out of purely assumptions. They try to fix other variables but the most important variable which is at the epicenter of innovation management is where they miss the bus.

Now the next question that comes to mind is if this issue can be fixed. I would say it is fixable but it would take an entirely different approach to fix the innovation process. Now most companies want their product professionals to be part of either classroom trainings or online trainings to learn a bit about product management and how it can be used to build products that customers love. I really wish it were that simple but lately most classroom based product trainings along with their online avatars have failed when it came to understanding products. The reason is simple. One can’t learn about products by theoretical approaches, one has to experience products first hand in real time. After speaking with close to 1000 plus product professionals over the last 3 years, I concluded that products cannot be taught by the aforementioned methodologies.

We decided to look for answers elsewhere and that is when I landed across Ecole 42, a coding school started by French billionaire Xavier Niel. Ecole happens to be the first coding school in the world that is 100 percent experiential. It has no teachers or instructors, no syllabus and no exams. Instead it has gamified the entire experience of teaching programming to students. Students, the brightest in the world come from different backgrounds after clearing some really hard problems in their screening process and join the cohort. They are required to complete 21 levels to finish the program. Since there is no instructor or any kind of help , most students end up learning on their own by failing or by collaborating with their peers. The experiential methodology makes them subject matter experts and they end up taking some of the most interesting gigs with some of the top technology companies in the world.

We established a dialogue with Ecole and tried understanding how this experiential method works out. We spoke with the staff and the students and understood how students learn at Ecole and how that learning is tested while tackling problems at every level. This was a revelation for us. We took cue from this and decided to do something similar in the product space. Additionally, We took cue from how YCombinator, world’s top most technology accelerator runs its acceleration program and the methodologies it adopts while grooming its newfound batch of startups. We spoke to a bunch of YC alumni and read a lot of literature around YC. It game us a staggering view of how effective YC methodology is. Next We amalgamated the learnings we had made from Ecole and YC and built a platform called PLabs.

PLabs is a 100 percent experiential platform for teaching products to product professionals or product aspirants. It has no classroom teaching, no instructors, no syllabus and no exams. Participants walk in with their respective ideas and work on 5 chosen ideas in teams. The only indicator of success in PLabs is the market. Unlike other product courses in the country PLabs believes in participants failing more often than being successful and learning from each of these failures. The idea is to launch a product in the market by each of the teams. There are no set constructs on how one can approach the problem and thus PLabs will democratise product education. The ideology behind not creating constructs or defining concepts around products is because they tend to convolute the entire idea of experiential learning. PLabs wants people to learn from each other and apply brute force methods to solve problems that the face. PLabs wants to focus on the failures students make and wants to celebrate the failures as Israel does.

PLabs as an experiential bootcamp program would be extremely rigorous in nature and might see a lot of people exiting the program, which is natural. We want to have the brightest and the most innovative minds to come and be a part of this program. In 12 weeks, after running from pillar to post to launch a product in the market, most students will understand what it takes. We are specifically focusing on failure because some of the world’s most creative people namely entrepreneurs, designers, technologists learnt everything on their own and most of their failures taught them a lot about what it takes to build something that works in the market. We believe that any participant who graduates from PLabs would be in a position to spearhead innovation projects inside an organisation. PLabs would not provide any certificates or any documents since we do not believe in pedagogical artefacts to prove someone’s competence. We believe solely on outcomes. PLabs would start its first cohort with 2 product companies and subsequently scale up the number of cohorts per quarter based on the learnings we make while running them. Wish us luck and if you’re interested in learning more about PLabs, feel free to contact me.

Aatmnirbhar Bharat:Karega Bharat Tabhi Badega Bharat

Today as we were thinking of writing this blog, we didn’t know what to write on. I mean seriously it’s a huge problem. But then as we cracked our skulls to arrive at a topic, we stumbled upon Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ slogan which is slowly catching steam. Although the context of ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’ or self dependent India largely came up during the heights of the Indo-Sino tensions, it did give the entire nation a perspective. Business leaders across the country and the globe started discussing it and within 48 hours it was trending across social media like anything. 

Come to think of it, it isn’t a bad idea at all. If we start building almost everything for the domestic crowd then we don’t need to rely too much on exports. China is a classic example of a self sufficient economy and their growth curve has been entirely dependent on building products for their countrymen first and the rest of the world later. But somehow due to policy paralysis and increasing revenues from outsourcing and offshoring over the last 3 decades we as a country could not focus on building products for our own people. Luckily over the last 2 decades entrepreneurs have built products for India and today a major population of the country is using these products. In a way we have been able to achieve it if not in full throttle. 

But that brings us to another important topic. Do people in tech have the necessary skills to be self dependent? To answer that question I’d recount a conversation we had with a friend with close to 2 decades of experience. He complained that at this point in time he doesn’t have any skills apart from the usual rigmarole he has been part of over the last 2 decades. We also noticed that this seems to be a universal problem with a majority of folks across the technology industry. It got us thinking about the reason why this deficit exists. We concluded that over the last couple of decades the focus was entirely on delivery instead of reskilling or upskilling. As a result of that most people could not adapt to the world that was changing rapidly. Today as I speak with people in tech, I seem to understand that many people are stuck in their jobs without any idea of how they can have a hockey stick career curve(I know it doesn’t apply to individuals but then you get the point). 

To answer that question, we’d have to apply some first principles thinking. The reason is as apparent as Softbank pulling the plug out on the Weworks deal. It has to do with skills that people don’t have. More precisely tangible skills that can help them build a career on their own. As I was speaking with a friend who has been running a coding school a few weeks back, he was telling me that people need to have skills through which they can exist with or without a job. If you look at people in the unorganised sector, you’d find that most of them have learnt a skill that is actually helping them earn a living. An electrician can confidently open a shop to provide service because he has some kind of an expertise in fixing electrical equipment. A plumber can provide plumbing service because he is an expert in plumbing activities. Unfortunately the same isn’t true for a lot of folks in the tech industry. A large number of people would find themselves out of a job as automation kicks in and would find it incredibly hard to find a new one as we move toward an innovation economy. 

One of the contributing factors behind this is the information explosion that has happened in education tech over the last decade or so. Most education tech companies that have built trainings for people, haven’t thought from the perspective of providing value to people. A majority of people who upskilled themselves through these trainings and upskilling programs find themselves devoid of the skills that the job demands. 

In our research we found that most skills in today’s world are more effective if they are learnt experientially and are outcome based. The focus should be on making things work and the failures which are obvious should be used as learning lessons. Most great entrepreneurs learnt skills on their own. 

Having said that we don’t have experiential programs in our country where people can discover skills on their own and get an opportunity to use them to build something and release it to the market.The most powerful judge of failure or success is the market. 

At PLabs we wish to do exactly the same thing through our offering 42. We want to ensure you develop skills that will help you use your creativity and innovation to build products that customers need, all on your own. The idea is not to give you a fish for a day but we wish to teach you fishing so you can feed yourself for a lifetime.

At PLabs you will become self dependent and develop a volley of skills on your own. These skills will help you earn a livelihood whether times are good or bad. So even if you lose access to a steady income because you were laid off, you could still use these skills to make a steady income. Just to give you an idea- the gig economy is going to be 455 billion USD growing at a CAGR of 17% by 2023. There is going to be sufficient gigs around for everyone. The larger question you have to ask yourself is- Do I have the skills to take a gig and deliver it?

I hope this discussion was worth it. Do let us know your ideas on the same by sending us emails on [email protected] and [email protected]

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

What is 42?

When we posted the first version of the landing page which mentioned 42, a lot of people connected it to Douglas Adam’s bestseller ‘Hitchiker’s Guide To Galaxy’. Adams talks about 42 there which as per him is the ultimate answer to everything in this universe. But that’s not the only thing that inspired us. 42 also happens to be the Jersey Number of the first African American Player Jackie Robinson. We had a bunch of different names to choose from. We first landed with the name PL127 for Product Labs 127 picked up from the local IP address of your system to PLC which stood for Product Labs Classes. So after coming up with a bunch of macabre names we finally chose 42.

The reason we chose 42 is because in a way we are trying to change the system by coming up with a new method of learning that has outcome at its core. Our job is not to create the next set of product leaders but to create the next set of thinkers and doers. Unfortunately free thinking happens mostly on the job while solving problems. If one looks at the 3.6 million years of human civilisation on Earth, one would find that evolution taught us how to learn by doing things and failing. Every single amount of learning we have done is by virtue of observation, association and experimentation. Its only after the agricultural revolution that the mode of learning started changing. Even then we had a system of apprenticeship where people spent close to 15 years with an expert to learn from then and only post that they were allowed to start their own practice. 

That changed soon after as University education became popular and that led to a system where people spent a lot on learning a lot of subjects but a very few of them were being used to produce outcomes. In hindsight most of the knowledge did not result in a viable outcome that would solve a problem. Slowly the outcome of education was reduced to mere grades, degrees and diplomas. No one thought for a second about the skills that could help one produce an outcome. In India it was even worse because we carried on with the Macaulian Education System for 7 long decades without realising the impact it had on our innovation and creativity landscape. But sadly we aren’t going to talk about that. That topic is for another blog.

So we’ve seen over the last 10 years that product management as a discipline has emerged out of the blues and become widely popular with techies. A lot of people who had different skillsets other than programming could now become a part of the product management lifecycle and drive products. A classic example would be Marissa Mayer ex Head of Google’s Product division and ex CEO of Yahoo. When Marissa joined Google, in a small span of time she realised that she is not cut out for a career in tech. It was then that she shifted to products.Surprisingly she aced products. She brought about as much innovation to Google that helped them build some of the most revolutionary products in the history of computation. She started the APM program that brought in a lot of creative people inside Google from different backgrounds. Marissa had a lot to do with how Google became the next big thing in tech. But if one see’s Marissa’s journey she learnt by experimenting and observing. In fact HBR wrote an article on what prompts innovators to innovate. What came out was mostly self learning. Edison built things on his own and so did his nemesis Tesla. 

What’s rather melancholic is that close to 90% products that don’t fall under the realm of technology are built by the self learning model. But over the years we have created so many constructs around free thinking in product management that creativity and innovation seems to have disappeared from the discipline. When a startup starts building a product, it learns everything on its own by virtue of its failures. We have often heard about product pivots, business model pivots etc. But pivots happen all the time in the product ecosystem outside the realm of tech because they oscillate on the self learning model. We spoke to a lot of entrepreneurs running small product businesses for close to 6 months and came to know that most of what they learnt was by hit and trial. This entire self learning drill made them sharper and more realistic. Now they could understand the market quite clearly. They knew extremely well what their customers wanted. That got us thinking about one single question. If these not so educated gentlemen could know so much about their respective customers, why is it that in tech close to a majority don’t really understand their customers let alone empathise with them. We kept on speaking with people till we arrived at this video by Professor Brene Brown. She is a global authority on ‘Empathy’. We understood that most people in tech or outside tech take sympathy to be empathy. Empathy is the art of experiencing the same amount of pain a person is going through or be able to relate to it since you’ve had a similar situation in the past. That is exactly where most product management gyaan backfires. You can’t empathise with a customer without getting into an experiential mode. 

Most of the entrepreneurs we spoke with spoke to their customers daily. I will cite another example. Tamago Ya is a luncheon service in Tokyo that serves lunches all across Tokyo with less than 0.06% waste. Funny thing is that Tamago Ya delivers lunches successfully every single day without fail even though they have zero computer systems. The question most people ask is how does Tamago Ya manage to cut down on its waste so efficiently. The answer is they manage to talk to the customers everyday to understand more about what they like. Every single thing about their operational excellence has to do with experiential learning they make on a daily basis. They strive to understand their customers intimately because they try to talk to them daily to understand the nuances of their eating habits. 

So in  a nutshell most of our research kept on taking us toward ‘Experiential Learning’. We therefore decided to start India’s first School of Experiential Learning. Our first offering 42 is all about experiential learning. Its a 3 month bootcamp where you will teach yourself how to build and take your product to the market. We will throw breadcrumbs at you that will take you toward the answers to your question but unlike a typical school or college, you’d find answers to everything on your own. In these 12 weeks we will invite some of the biggest leaders in the product ecosystem to come down and talk to you about their apparent failures that could be a breadcrumb for you to take cue from. We hope 42 will be the answer to every single question in your life. We hope you will be able to create a dent in the universe post the program. We hope you will help move the wheel of progress forward through your products. We hope 42 will change your life for better. And as Andy Dufresne says,”Hope is a good thing, may be the best of the things. And good thing never dies”.

Origin of PLabs

I remember speaking to a lot of people before starting PLabs. There has been an information explosion far as product management is concerned. Everyone seemed to offer a course on product management. Every course was more or less similar. Most of these courses run by Indian institutes also had affiliations with American Ivy League and students would receive a certification, an alumni email and have some classes in these universities live. People were sold out on something or the other. But then it got me thinking. I read a lot of books. I spoke to a lot of entrepreneurs. I ended up coming to a very different conclusion. I felt that outcome was more important far as someone’s career is concerned. Everything else that is hypothesised might lead to an outcome or it will not. But if knowledge has to boil down to an outcome then what kind of knowledge will play that role. I realised that the answer to the above isn’t easy to articulate because we are talking about undermining 200 year old institutions that have largely rendered knowledge to the world and created some of the best leaders in the world. Most of these leaders went ahead and produced viable outcomes in their respective fields. But then there was another sample set of maybe a far greater number of people who did not have the necessary pedigree but still produced an outcome. It was becoming a hard problem and most of my arguments were falling flat on their faces. It was then I read ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari which talks about the history of mankind. 

It was fascinating to read how human beings have learnt everything on their own. Evolution made us learn things by observing, experimenting, associating and by failing. So in a nutshell I understood that human civilisation has learnt everything on their own by discovering, failing and rediscovering. From fire to light bulb was discovered or invented by virtue of experiential learning. If that be the case then that is perhaps the only way that can lead to an outcome. Next thing I wanted to do was to find out if there were schools or institutions that had used this fact in teaching their students. Turns out Ecole 42 a coding school in Paris had used experiential learning and it worked out really well for them. It turned out to be a win-win situation for the students who were learning everything on their own by failing and relearning and unlearning and companies who were more than happy to hire such super competent people. I wanted to do something similar but in the context of products. I spoke with the Ecole 42 guys and gathered a few details and they were kind enough to tell me a lot about how Ecole works. That is when the idea of PLabs emerged out of nowhere. I wanted to create a platform where product guys can produce outcomes. Most of the entrepreneurs who had succeeded on their own had learnt on their own about what works. So what the students needed wasn’t gyaan but a platform where they can build a product and bring it out in the market. Let the market decide if their product is really catering to a human need or a meaningless solution. 

So we went ahead and worked hard several months till we were about to launch our offering in March. But then COVID struck. We were devastated. Our offering had a physical angle. However I realised that what had happened was a boon in disguise because that is exactly what happens in product ecosystem a lot. There is always a high element of uncertainty associated with the release of a product. This was our moment of uncertainty. We could use this example when we release 42(that’s the name of our offering). So after 3 months of rigorous brainstorming we decided to launch 42 virtually. We launched two versions of our landing pages for 42 and C-POP(that’s another offering we have that our Canadian partners have come up with). You can check it out here . So we are also learning new things as we launch PLabs. We will keep on posting our observations from time to time. If you have anything to offer or suggest or recommend, feel free to shoot an email to me at [email protected]