Leader Spotlight: Increasing your product’s value proposition, with Deepa Muralikrishnan

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Deepa Muralikrishnan is Vice President of Product Management at VTS, a commercial real estate (CRE) technology platform. She began her career as a computer engineer, led the digital web platform team at Audible, and played a key role in launching Audible in European markets. Before joining VTS, Deepa held several leadership roles in product at Emergent Payments (formerly Live Gamer) and ADP.

In our conversation, Deepa discusses how she continuously evolves products and their value propositions to meet changing consumer behavior, technology trends, industry standards, and more. She talks about her globalization strategy and how she led efforts to expand to new markets during her roles at Audible and ADP. Deepa also shares her philosophy of “leading from the front” when managing and mentoring high-performing product teams.

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Keeping up with post-pandemic real estate

Could you start by introducing VTS and the products the company builds to merge tech and real estate?

VTS is one of the industry’s leading technology platforms, providing real-time market data and workflow tools to help owners, operators, brokers, and their customers manage their commercial and residential properties.

The VTS Platform consists of VTS Lease, VTS Market, VTS Data, and VTS Activate. I manage the market, lease, and data product lines. Clients use our platform to market their space and manage their end-to-end deal pipeline. Investment and leasing teams rely on our predictive data for their investment, portfolio, and asset strategy.

With VTS Activate, we help the property management teams offer a great tenant experience. For example, tenants can use our app to access their buildings anywhere without needing a physical card. Activate also provides visitor management, amenity booking, work orders management, etc.

Since the pandemic, commercial-related markets have been evolving and changing rapidly. More and more companies are embracing the digital world, for example, the percentage of tenants who look for a space online before they physically tour the space has increased by 210 percent compared to pre-pandemic. There is an increased need for tech platforms to be open and integrated with the CRE ecosystem, such as budgeting, accounting, access management systems, etc. A lot of innovation is happening in our space, but that also comes with a few challenges. VTS is at the forefront of leveraging technology to address some of the rapidly changing client needs.

Leading from the front

Managing product teams requires a mix of strategic vision and operational excellence. What leadership principles have guided you in building and managing your teams?

I believe in three key principles to build and maintain powerful, high-performing product teams:

1. Leverage each member’s strengths — Product management brings a lot of people with different backgrounds and strengths together. This unique mix of people often leads to diverse thinking and an unusual set of strengths. As leaders, we need to be able to identify and leverage each member’s unique strengths
2. Empower the team — To scale an organization, we want to cultivate a culture of creativity and innovation. So, teams have to be empowered and know that they have the freedom to be nimble and think outside the box. It’s important to allow teams to make some of the critical decisions within product development
3. Lead from the front — The leadership philosophy requires providing a strategic vision and being able to roll up our sleeves and show the way if needed. It is also critical to know when to step back and empower the teams. From my experience, this leadership approach has helped me gain the trust of my team and genuinely understand and support them in their success. I subscribe to this style of leadership rather than managing in a prescriptive, top-down style

Since you prioritize leading from the front, what’s your approach to helping your team understand the alignment of the work that they’re doing and how that ties up to company goals?

I overuse the word “alignment” within my teams so much that they feel like I end every sentence with it. In product roles, we are the voice of our customers and the voice of the business, but we still have the critical job of aligning the organization from within. Product will not be successful without support from other functions, such as marketing, customer success, sales, and field enablement.

Whether we work in organizations where investment decisions are made based on ROI or in companies where investments and priorities are decided by top management, unless everyone is aligned and operating with a common mission, we cannot deliver the customer and business outcomes we want. So, when we perform annual, quarterly, or monthly reviews and present the product strategy and roadmap to the stakeholders within the organization, one of the key focuses is to show how we are aligning on the company’s goals, objectives, leading indicators, and key metrics.

It’s also important to emphasize how all the cross-functional team initiatives and activities are aligned to move the same needle — whether it is driving incremental revenue, customer adoption, or operational efficiency.

VTS is a smaller company than some of your previous ones. Did you have to modify that methodology at all when you were transitioning to the new position?

While VTS has been in business since 2012, we are at the critical stage of our scale-up phase. The CRE industry is evolving rapidly and each market (e.g., New York City, San Francisco, London) is unique and reacts very differently to macro and micro economic factors. We don’t have the luxury of having a six-month planning cycle with a 3-5 year vision — we have to be nimble and react fast to our client needs, especially in this current environment. Of course, we still do multi-year planning, but the stakeholders are very different and more operationally involved compared to large companies.

The methodology and the approach we use varies greatly in that we don’t have a lot of room to experiment and fail. We must be able to pivot our strategies and quickly change our priorities.

Evolving products to meet constant changes

Could you share some strategies that you’ve found to be most effective in enhancing the product’s value proposition?

Our product is most successful when we’re able to create stickiness and drive adoption, which means our end consumers continue to see value and we are empowering them. We also need to be able to scale the product, and to do that, we have to stay ahead of our competitors, understand technology and industry trends, and comprehend their impact on our business. We need to have a constant pulse on these trends and continue evolving our product as these developments change consumer and buyer behavior.

Do you have an example you could share of how you’ve successfully enhanced a product based on external changes?

I can share a couple of my experiences. When I was the CPO at ADP Retirement Services, a legislative change was coming into effect mandating small businesses to enroll their employees in a company 401K. This legislative change would drive the adoption of 401K plans by small businesses. To capitalize on this opportunity and meet the demand for 401K plans, we tested and successfully rolled out a low-price, high-value 401K plan for the micro-market (companies with fewer than five employees and those with 5-20 employees).

Another example is our current challenge with the changing dynamic of office demand in commercial real estate.. As we all know, office demand is down in many markets post-pandemic. As a result, the buying personas and the factors people consider have changed drastically.

Similarly, there’s also a shift in tenant behavior. We’ve had to shift our business model to help our clients improve their digital presence to market their space online, understand which tenants are actively looking for space, engage with their building websites and online media, and help them qualify prospects and move them through the deal process efficiently. To cater to this change, we recently launched VTS 4 to help our clients predict tenant demand and increase occupancy in their buildings.

Globalization and understanding each market’s context

When you have a product that’s successfully adapted to new changes and is going strong in a market, the next challenge is often globalization. Do you have any general strategies for undertaking a global initiative?

To take a product internationally, we need to be deeply familiar with differences in the local market. Localization is more than language and currency — it’s the culture, local regulations, and consumer behavior in that market.

This requires product managers to truly understand the markets and gain empathy for the consumers in order for businesses to win in those markets. When we expand into international markets, we often see local providers who are great at what they do and own a lot of the market share. That’s because this is the sole experience they’re focused on. We’re constantly competing with the “best-in-breed” players within local markets. So, as a competitor coming in from the outside, we need to be able to either compete against those local companies or partner with them.

That’s why global expansion is a whole different strategy. We can’t just say, “This was successful in the US market, so let’s just roll it out in several international markets.” It doesn’t work that way.

Can you share any specific examples of globalization efforts that highlighted those consumer and purchase behavior differences?

I had a very valuable experience early in my tenure at Audible.com. I was leading the rollout of Audible.com in international markets, and at one point early on, we launched in Germany. Unfortunately, the whole idea of a subscription model was not successful there. We learned that people in Germany are generally averse to a paywall experience. We had to quickly pivot to open up the Audible store, providing people in that market with a complete experience of what we offer, and completely re-launch.

I had a similar experience when we rolled out a new payroll solution globally at ADP. It was very successful in the US, but when we started expanding to other countries, we quickly realized we needed to better understand those local markets. There weren’t only differences in consumer behavior, but also in things like data residency. There were a ton of compliance and legislative requirements that we needed to consider, and many of those pieces were constantly changing.

Following the Audible experience, when you’ve rolled out a product in a new geographic market, how have you gone about getting market-specific insights?

There are two main components to this. The first is having people on the ground. This means our product teams, designers, business people, and various cross-functional teams actually go to these places and try to understand the markets. The best approach is to have people understand the landscape, meet with people, customize the product and experience, and then roll it out.

Second, we need to ensure we actually have a local presence in those key markets, like SMEs who know the context well. It’s not necessary to have a presence in every single country, for example, but having boots on the ground in that general region is extremely helpful.

Creating the space for innovation and failure

Product teams sometimes mention that they are so focused on the day-to-day that, in some cases, they don’t have that space for innovation. How do you solve that?

If we want to have an innovative culture, we need to create space for teams to think outside the box, test new ideas, and create innovative solutions to solve business needs. If we, as a company, are forcing employees to have an ROI for everything we do and the need to always show positive results, we will miss creating the space to test and fail. But we also cannot allow for big failures. It’s a balance. We often use the phrase “fail fast, fail quick, fail cheap.”

We may not need an ROI for everything, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot do small POCs to help conceptualize the solution and test the hypothesis. After that, to further productize, we will need ROI.

To wrap up, as a product leader, how do you promote a culture of innovation with your team?

It’s all about having product teams understand the customer problem, business strategy, what’s happening in the market, and trends — both in terms of technology and industry, as well as how technology can help solve new challenges that emerge. Give product teams the space to understand the problem, articulate the challenges and desired outcomes, and give them time to create innovative solutions to the problems.

The biggest mistake I have seen some companies make is when the management team is very prescriptive in their problem-solving and solution-finding, which kills the team’s creativity and innovation.