Anish Chadda is a product leader with deep experience in MarTech. He was recently VP of Product at Bird (formerly MessageBird), a CRM tool for marketing, sales, and payments. An “engineer by education,” Anish has a computer engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon and found a love for product management’s intersection of business and technical requirements. He began his career at advertising company Ambush before his eight-year tenure at Sprinklr, where he held various product and leadership roles and helped the company through its IPO in June 2021.
In our conversation, Anish talks about the importance of having a “bias for action” — forming an initial working product, starting to ship it, and iterating quickly based on feedback instead of focusing on creating a perfect prototype out of the gate. He shares that while KPI-based feedback is used to make quick iterations, qualitative feedback affects design work and informs the long-term vision of the product. Anish also discusses his leadership style to eliminate the more abstract components of being a PM by holding his team to specific KPIs.
I was fortunate to spend a lot of my early career at some of the first few companies to focus on social media advertising. I was able to establish myself as a subject matter expert in that area and worked with brands such as Samsung, Dell, and Microsoft to manage a lot of their social advertising efforts. When my previous employer, Sprinklr, was looking to start building out a product to help brands scale their efforts on these different platforms, they asked me to consult their product and engineering teams to help them better understand requirements and differentiators. That started my transition from being an SME to joining the product team.
At Sprinklr and at Bird, I worked very closely with customers to understand their business problems and challenges related to marketing. Seeing the product actually solve those problems has been so gratifying.
Everyone would say table stakes are the most obvious one — being very close to the customer. I’ve seen this time and again where teams build a product based on intuition and without doing sufficient market research. That does not drive a lot of value for the end customer. Putting customers as a central focus of what you’re building and why is incredibly critical. The second part that comes to mind is making sure the product is not built for just one specific use case. I’ve seen teams go in with a very narrow mindset. Making sure you have a medium and long-term strategy as you’re building the product, as opposed to having a microlens on it, is important.
At Sprinklr, we were building across multiple different social channels, trying to support Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. We could have said, “Let’s build a product that works well just for Meta because that’s the largest social advertising channel.” Instead, we built it thinking about how this feature set will be scalable and repeatable across multiple channels as we add them to our platform. It’s imperative to have a clear vision for 12–18 months from now, as well as further out in the future, and ensure that your feature set aligns with that.
When it comes to developing a long-term vision, you need to have clarity on two things. One is who is the customer that you’re going after? There’s such a large breadth in terms of going after specific industries or customer sizes, like mid-market versus enterprise, or even a mix of both. Second, be very clear about what you want your differentiator to be in terms of how you solve a customer’s problem. Customer’s challenges are pretty well known and there are always several solutions in the market trying to solve the same challenge. You need to be very clear on your approach toward solving a challenge that’s actually going to help the customer and will also help you differentiate against your competition.
A lot of competitive research. At Sprinklr and Bird, we had existing customer bases who were customers of other services that we provided. We could always get access to their marketing teams to better understand the business problem. I learned the importance of having a bias for action. It’s especially important in the early days, when you are coming in with a lot of theoretical knowledge about what the competitors do. You know what the customer requirements are, but you haven’t actually launched a product yet. Be nimble in terms of the prototype of your initial product. That worked well for us.
What’s perfect in the eyes of the development team is often very different for a customer. The mantra that we followed was as soon as we had a working initial product, ship it and then iterate quickly. Bias for action and being able to iterate based on feedback is almost more important than the initial research because initial research has already been done by everyone out there.
100 percent. This might sound a little bit blunt, but at the end of the day, the number one priority has always been revenue. No disrespect to our engineering friends — if you have a product with no revenue to it, it’s really many lines of code. Being able to have a sellable, adoptable product is very important. The number one metric has been how to have the product team be like a mini owner where they’re tracking revenue.
That’s our primary metric, but the leading indicators that help you get there are secondary metrics. From an enterprise product perspective, it’s all about adoption. Think through which features are the most critical to help drive customer value because that ties into the revenue of the product as well. When it comes to mid-market and SMB, it’s a bit more self-serve as opposed to a sales and marketing touch motion. We’ve looked at additional metrics across the entire user journey, not just the final metric — like sign-up rates, activation rates, retention, etc.
When it comes to new products, my go-to-market strategy has been very much focused on clarity around who exactly I’m going after. It’s important to work closely with the sales and marketing organization to define that ideal customer profile (ICP) in terms of customer segment size and vertical. You need to get clear on what the motion of customer acquisition is going to look like. Are you going to do a more sales-like motion, when the go-to-market becomes more focused having a clear value proposition across pitch decks? Or are you going to have demos that are readily available to consume? Having that ICP clearly defined is a very big focus area from a go-to-market perspective.
The other component of that is being clear on how you’re going to acquire them because the acquisition of the customer influences pricing strategy. When it comes to the self-serve motion, we focused on the simplification of price — trying to keep it to a single one- or two-line item at most and making sure the price can be digested by customers of any size. For enterprises, there are a lot more nuances around further add-ons and tier-based pricing. There’s room for negotiation and conversation if it’s a sales motion versus someone signing up on their own.
The execution comes down to making sure you have the right KPIs and metric tracking in place. You need to spend time with customers directly and iterate quickly if you see areas of the user funnel that are broken, notice people dropping off in an area, etc.
Definitely. Qualitative feedback was a huge part of how we drove the larger, longer-term vision. KPI-based feedback is used to make quick iterations, but qualitative feedback goes into two pieces. One, it goes into a lot of the design work. Two, it helps inform the long-term vision because when you talk to customers, you find out the biggest problems preventing them from achieving their KPIs today.
When I was at Sprinklr, a customer said that a large part of their campaign performance was dependent on the creative aspect. They’d say, “OK, image one performs better than image two, but why is image one resonating more?” Was it the fact that it had a blue versus red background? Was it a product message or a price-based message? That qualitative feedback of saying, “I don’t know what’s actually working in my creative strategy,” helped determine our long-term roadmap in terms of future solutions that we’d build.
It was a very rewarding experience. From a product and engineering perspective, it made us raise our bar. Before going public, we wanted to make sure we established repeatable processes in terms of fixing release cycles. We’d collect customer feedback and have a published roadmap that we’d stick to. Being a public company, we needed a repeatable motion in place, not just across our revenue teams, but also across product and engineering to make sure that we were consistently able to deliver against our commitments and our roadmap quarter over quarter. We had to put a lot of operational rigor in place.
Also, when you’re public, a lot of emphasis goes into hitting your forecast each quarter. A large part of that sits with sales, but we had to make sure we could deliver a product that was differentiated enough to help us drive additional pipeline, close existing customers, and be a reliable, valuable product. It required a huge mindset change to ensure that we could establish repetition and create more differentiating features.
New customer acquisition growth is what I would say the public market is most focused on. A large part of the product team was continuously evolving our thinking on how to continuously differentiate and drive even a wider TAM.
This is something that we looked into at Bird — thinking about offerings across channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and conversational elements. It’s something we were really excited about.
Traditional marketing has always been about getting your content in front of a specific user and then driving them toward an action. You can design the website to be as intuitive as possible and guide the user a certain way, but there’s a lot of self-discretion for the user to navigate how they deem fit. You’re guiding the user subconsciously toward a certain goal as opposed to leaving a lot of that decision-making up to them. Conversational marketing is also driving much higher engagement between the brand and the end user because now, you can use AI-based conversation streams to establish a deeper connection with the brand.
I try to make sure all the product managers on my team, as well as adjacent teams, are always thinking like a mini general manager. Once a product manager takes end-to-end responsibility for a certain product, that makes them really successful — owning the overall design, development, architecture, and thinking not just about releasing a feature, but feature adoption. Is it driving value for the customer? There’s a tendency to, once you’re done with the feature, just move on to the next one. Successful PMs make sure they’re the ones accountable for the feature’s success, which could either be driving new revenue or tracking adoption.
My leadership style is not to handhold the team across every single step but to review their performance against specific KPIs. Product management can be a bit abstract at times because you’re not in, say, sales, where you have a clear revenue target. I like to make sure that every PM has a very clear KPI that they’re working toward because that’s the best way for us to track the progress that they’re making independently, as well as in their respective product lines, toward the goal. That helps eliminate that abstract component of being a PM.
Two things come to mind. One is to get an understanding of the business goals. PMs need to get a strong grasp of exactly who the customer is, the persona they’re targeting, and the requirements of the business that they’re solving for. What is the customer’s number one goal? How are you going to actually help solve that? A mistake I see people make is getting too deep into the technical requirements and not really focusing on how it is actually helping the customer.
Second, and this might sound straightforward, PMs need to be very good at verbal and written communication. A PM’s role is so multifaceted — you’re working across engineering, marketing, sales, legal, finance, and with the customer. If they can’t articulate the value proposition, that information is automatically lost across the entire org. Effective communication gets the internal teams onboard and lets the customer know what your product does and why it’s important. Verbal intercommunication is crucial for long-term success.
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