Leader Spotlight: Building truly differentiated products, with Aashir Shroff

---

Aashir Shroff is the GM & VP of Product at Eightfold, a company that’s leveraging cutting-edge innovation to redefine how organizations harness talent. Aashir’s journey began in the fast-paced world of startups, where his passion for product management was ignited. He then took his expertise to Yodlee, revolutionizing mobile products in the digital financial services space. Aashir has since led dynamic product teams at companies like Wells Fargo, GigNow, and EY.

In our conversation, Aashir talks about how to avoid building features or products that replicate what’s already in the market but, instead, truly stand out. He discusses the importance of storytelling in product management and how it can emphasize that you’re not just building a product, but solving a problem. Aashir also shares how his team at Eightfold is leveraging new technologies like AI to scale quickly and efficiently.

---

Creating products that drastically change the user experience

To start, could you talk about your approach to ensuring the products you build are genuinely differentiated from others available in the market?

Oftentimes, as you look at the products that you’re building in any space, you can be put in a situation where you’re making slightly better versions of something that’s already out there. I don’t think this is a huge net improvement for many organizations. Similar to when mobile came around or when payments went from physical to digital, there are a lot of opportunities to think about ways to improve functionality overall. How can you dramatically change the user experience? Tools like AI are really pushing that modality forward.

In a new world where you’ve got an infinite amount of computing power and data at your fingertips, how can you leapfrog to that and not just become a “me-too” feature or product — one that replicates what’s already out there in the market?

Could you share a time when you achieved this type of differentiation in your work?

Sure. At Eightfold, we’ve been in the talent acquisition space for the past eight years. Over a year and a half ago, we decided to enter the applicant tracking system (ATS) space, which is well-established. We had an opportunity to build a simple version of an ATS that hit all of the baselines and checked all of the boxes to be a “me-too” competitor. But we wanted to think about where we could redefine this and drive efficiency and differentiation.

We had conversations with customers to identify their biggest pain points. Oftentimes, they talked about siloed data — they felt like the resumes went into a black hole because that’s how applicant tracking systems were constructed originally. You apply to that requisition and that requisition only, and the resume disappears. Now, we have the cloud, data, and AI, so we thought about how to leverage all of those tools to build a better overall experience.

We asked, “What if a CRM, ATS, and AI all worked together in a single package?” We wanted to derive the product to not only answer basic questions in the talent space but also make it so much better that it dramatically reduces the time to hire by 30 or 40 percent. If talent professionals can find candidates faster, they can move them through the funnel quicker and improve engagement and collaboration between hiring managers.

Uncovering the ‘need behind the need’

Besides examining your company’s core strengths and talking to customers, are there other approaches that you use in the ideation development phase of a product?

Oftentimes, it’s figuring out the right fit. Start with core strengths — talk to customers and prospects, as well as people who decided not to go with your product. Also, look at parallels in other industries.

Around 12 years ago when we were building mobile for Wells Fargo, there was an option to look at what had already been done in online banking and translate it directly into a mobile experience. But, at the time, we were seeing the evolution of smartphone use and the consumerization of technology rapidly increasing. We realized that consumers expected to have something easy and intuitive to use.

How could we ensure we were pushing a text so people could easily view their account balances and stay in the loop without having to sign onto anything? That was a sort of new and vital way of thinking. As technology advanced, we thought about things like how to reduce password fatigue and how to use things like touch ID, face ID, and biometrics to make it easy for consumers to get information.

When you’re talking to customers or prospects to understand their pain points or what they might be looking for, how do you go about uncovering the ‘need behind the need?’

This is something that I spend quite a bit of time on with my team. I believe that at least once a week, you should have one or two conversations with an existing customer or prospect. These conversations will help you determine if what you’re trying to solve is the symptom or the root cause. Oftentimes, when more junior PMs hear a customer talk about a pain point, the wheels start spinning in their head about how to solve the symptom when instead, they should think about the root cause.

For example, at Eightfold, we’re currently talking to one of the largest video-streaming media distributors in the world. One of their challenges has to do with the way their recruiting practice operates. It was previously focused on this idea that they need to have a global search to find candidates. The product that we brought to them uses AI to automatically do that behind the scenes. They can open up a requisition, set the requirements of what they’re looking for, and we provide a funnel of people that meet those criteria.

Previously, they were doing keyword searches, boolean searches, etc., and hoping to find the needle in the haystack. On the surface, they were simply telling us, “When I run the search, I’m not getting what I need.” By making the investment to solve for the root cause versus the symptom, we were able to show them a new experience. We could have simply improved the search to pick up on additional attributes from the keyword search, but that would not have solved the problem broadly enough for additional companies to benefit from it later.

Storytelling and looking outside of a traditional lens

At what point in the process do you start working on that product narrative? How does it take to develop an idea and roll out with insights to back it up?

I’ll start by saying that storytelling is a must when it comes to product management. I’ve played at all different levels — from raising funds for a startup to working in large organizations. Whenever you’re defining a feature, think about the story that it’s going to unlock. For example, we had this idea that employees struggled to see their career path inside the organization. The storyline around this is always linear. “You do well in your job and you get promoted to the next level. Keep doing well in that and you’ll continue to get promoted.”

We took a step back and thought, what if we could go in and show the linear path, which everyone wants, but map out alternative paths that other employees in the organization have taken to get to the same end goal? This concept played out well when I tested it in the real world. I was in the Midwest with our customer, a tractor company, in a small town where they are a huge employer. The night before the meeting, I was out to dinner and started talking to the person sitting next to me. I asked them, “What do you do?” They said, “I used to be at a large tractor company, but now I work at a remote technology company because I didn’t see a solid career path.”

The next day, at the client site, when we started talking about a forward-looking roadmap, I was able to share the story from the night before. I said, “Look, this person went to his boss, said, ‘I got promoted, great! Where else can I grow in this organization?’ And the answer from the boss was, ‘In the next two, you’re ready for your next promotion cycle.'” That was a forcing factor for this individual to leave the organization. The company lost out on a likely high-potential individual because it couldn’t demonstrate a more creative way of how it could address a path for growth within the organization based on the individual’s skills.

The client loved the idea and adopted it. I’ve used that same storyline time and time again as I talk to other customers. It’s a great example of solving a problem, rather than just building a product.

How can product managers get better at storytelling? Are there some resources you’ve found that are helpful?

I think it’s mostly about practice. But, think about short-form videos like TikTok — those are essentially 15-30 second elevator pitches. You have to consider how to use hooks to capture an audience’s attention. Mr. Beast, a popular YouTuber, is one of the best storytellers in the world. He made a guide on how to use YouTube’s tools to be as successful as he is. Reading that sort of material can be very helpful. You have to look outside the traditional lenses of technology, product management, etc., and rally people around an idea.

In your experience, is it best if product managers work on the storytelling alone, or are marketing or other functions brought into that process?

It’s great to have cross-collaboration. I like to ask for guidance and input from customer success, sales, sales engineering, and marketing. Anywhere that we can find more tidbits to stitch the story together. It works vice versa as well — sometimes, I know the stories that I’ve told in customer conversations, but I want to emphasize the “why” behind it back to our teams.

As you put on your product manager hat, you need to think about the two or three different stories you’re going to tell for each product or feature. Some stories may resonate with engineering, and others may work with the customer or end user.

Using technology to scale

You’ve had extensive experience disputing markets, especially in the mobile apps space. Are there strategies that you could share for finding innovative angles or untapped opportunities in well-established markets?

I believe we are in another big shift or moment of disruption. I see AI today where mobile was in 2007. In that example, if we had just started with the “me-too” approach and transferred what we had online into mobile, it would’ve been pretty unsuccessful. At Wells Fargo, by building a differentiated product that addressed end user pain points, we were able to go from zero to about 30 million customers in a very short period.

AI is at that forefront today. The moats that were carved out in the last 10–15 years are no longer there. You can do things with immense clarity and quality using AI. The large language models can be used to create products that feel a lot more human than ever before. There are two approaches you can take to leverage this.

One, you can carve out a smaller niche of the organization focused on that game-changing technology as you continue your business as usual. Large organizations that can’t move as nimbly tend to take this approach. Two, if you’re a smaller company or startup, you can build products right now using the greatest technology you have in front of you. You’re placing a bet for the future.

What about scaling? What strategies have you found most effective for scaling products globally, especially in culturally diverse markets?

One of the things that we struggle with, as a startup, is competing priorities. We have a relatively smaller engineering team compared to the Goliaths in our market. When we talk to customers about our product, they often ask, “How many languages does it translate into?” A couple of years ago, we struggled with this. We said, “OK, we’ll turn all of our content files into things that then can be translated.” We hired translation companies and went through tons of manual steps.

Then, about a year ago, we experimented with using ChatGPT for this effort. We called it through APIs, used it to translate the content, and then benchmarked it against the best language translation companies that we were using. In a matter of two weeks, we went from supporting 12 languages to 32. The bigger takeaway from it was that now, any engineer can do this. We can see what it would look like in the system very quickly because we can plug in the LLM to do that. Even more so, we were able to evolve the build to a point where the LLM wasn’t just doing translation, it was making the language sound like it came from a fluent speaker.

Also, scaling involves making sure, from a product perspective, that there’s a commonality between features. We can’t create a bunch of bespoke features for Japan or Korea that can’t be utilized by Latin America, so finding the commonalities around that is crucial. The third aspect is getting close to the sales and marketing teams approaching in those areas. Ensure that these teams are telling you there’s potential and that your product is 80 or 90 percent of the way there before ripping the bandaid off and entering the market.

Building the foundation of the product

Both in your work now and in prior roles, you have always promoted a culture of innovation with your teams. Can you talk about your approach?

Innovation is embedded in our everyday work. We do a couple of hackathons each year and encourage all product teams, designers, engineers, and GTM folks to be involved and collaborate. Also, innovation is the idea of where you can push these things. I don’t want PMs who are just going to ship the existing products that they see — you need to build the foundation. You should always be building the foundation of the product, as well as figuring out the next few steps that will massively unlock capabilities for the end user of the product.