Saurabh Saraf is a product management executive with experience across retail, ecommerce, aviation, and insurance. As Vice President of Digital Product at Staples and previously at Liberty Mutual Insurance, he led growth strategy, corporate turnarounds, and digital innovations and operations in B2C and B2B contexts. He has lived and worked across the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
In our conversation, Saurabh talks about how many organizations overlook meaningful opportunities by focusing too strongly on shiny new initiatives over incremental improvements. He discusses how setting metrics and KPIs is important for ongoing work, but more flexibility is often needed around developing new innovations. Saurabh also shares the importance of overcoming societal conditioning that failure is a bad thing.
I’m a firm believer in maximizing impact by prioritizing the biggest bets and executing against them rapidly. But as important as that is, the entire organization shouldn’t be chasing the big new thing.
What sometimes gets lost is the opportunity to see the impact of compounding gains with rapid iteration. When organizations have this temptation to stop at the MVP and then move on to a shiny new initiative, they leave a graveyard of half-developed products that then slowly get improved opportunistically, sporadically. This is because some of the strongest product managers are interested in moving on to something new and exciting, but it’s really important to ensure continuous ownership.
We talk about product owner and product manager roles. Well, we all need to own and manage our product fully, not just when they’re at that exciting new and shiny zero-to-one phase, to get those improvement benefits throughout.
To drive this home, I’ll do things like meeting regularly with my teams to talk about everything they own. What is in maintenance mode? What are they doing about it? How are they thinking about it? What roadblocks do they have there? Yes, I’m focusing on some of the big things, but I’m also having those conversations about things that may be incorrectly considered mundane. All of that still needs attention and all of those improvements have the opportunity to add up and create an impact as well. This also shows people that everything they’re doing every day is important.
I feel like that’s the perennial trade-off. With a large or an older tech stack, there’s always going to be a whole lot of tech debt. When there’s an opportunity for a really large piece of tech debt mitigation, it comes down to thinking about the business case. What is the meaningful opportunity we can unlock by taking that piece of work on? And what is the downside? Make sure that everyone involved has a clear understanding of that.
As an example, a couple of roles ago, I went to my leadership team to say, “I want to do this thing. I want to completely overhaul this platform. And it essentially means we’re not going to deliver any new business-facing functionality for several months.” Of course, their first reaction was, “You’re crazy. We have a business to run.” But then, we looked at what the opportunity was, the payback period, and the risk of not doing it, which is often significant.
It was one of the best decisions we ever made because it was absolutely critical. It truly accelerated the speed of everything we did going forward after that — faster speed, lower cost, etc. — in-line with the benefits we would have seen from a shiny new product, just less glamorous.
I think of data like air — it’s everywhere and it’s necessary to survive. I feel like most places are still struggling with exactly how to harness all of that data and how to take advantage of its full power. I’d say there are three points related to data. One is having clear OKRs, clear metrics, clear KPIs, and using tools like A/B tests to measure progress quickly. If I’m doing something, I don’t particularly care to have that fourth decimal place of accuracy on it. I want it measured, but then let’s do an A/B test, get to a confidence level, and then move on.
The second is understanding the impact of the full company. I’ve worked mostly in large companies, and there may be times when we’ll set up something on the frontend for a customer that looks relatively automated, but there’s a whole bunch of backend support that’s happening offline. I need to factor that in when I’m making decisions on what else to do. I can’t go out and create a whole number of trap doors and then have entire large operations teams on the backend sitting and doing something furiously that looks automated to the customer. It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be built with that in mind. When we talk about data, we need to take into account all of that.
Third, it’s important to get behind the data. You should look at the numbers and probe into them, but it’s more about watching session replays, having customer conversations, and getting some of that color behind that data. If nine out of 10 customers are saying something, let’s try and understand why. Sometimes, doing those deeper dives entails a whole other insight. We might assume the data was saying X, but as we dig into it, it actually is saying Y.
Some of what I would consider timeless initiative measures, like conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, or overall customer satisfaction scores, will always be important. Specific measures may vary by time or company priorities. But as we look at metrics, it’s important to consider not just the quantitative metrics, but also the qualitative indicators such as user feedback and net promoter scores.
We have to make sure that our digital initiatives are not only driving revenue but also increasing overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. It’s important to make sure we’re looking at both of those so we’re not sacrificing the long-term retention rates just to get a short-term bump. It’s also important not to take the metrics piece too far. If we’re talking about a new idea, I will always ask, “If this idea does succeed, how good could this be?” But I also don’t want to get to a point where someone has an idea and they need to write a 17-page business plan before they’re allowed to go work on something. That’s how you kill every single innovation.
So metrics are important for a lot of the ongoing things, but I think for some of the new ideas and innovations, it’s important to have a little bit more flexibility to allow them to happen without every metric and every KPI being buttoned down.
What makes that hard to answer is that how to manage B2B and B2C depends on a lot of things, such as the tech stack, broader organizational priorities, and the broader organizational structure. What I can say is that there is a difference between B2C and B2B, which requires an advanced approach. For B2C, the focus is often on user experience, accessibility, and marketing. Consumers aren’t patient and they shouldn’t have to be. Everything needs to be intuitive. It needs to be fast. Things like site speed make a measurable difference in terms of how many people will actually complete their checkout.
In B2B, it’s about addressing very specific business needs and providing solutions that meet the unique needs of those businesses. These needs vary by industry and company size, but often, you’ve got users who are a little more invested. They’re not switching around and going from one solution to another as frequently. It’s a harder win to get those businesses in, but once you get them in, you can customize the approach for them a little more.
What’s also really important is understanding those customers in the middle between B2B and B2C. Small businesses, for example, might behave like consumers in some ways, but they might still need a path toward the B2B offerings as they grow. And you have to be able to then think about how to juggle those two. How do you provide them with some of that intuitiveness and ease of use of the B2C, with some of the customized functionality of the B2B? As they grow and as they move up, how do you transition them into that B2B segment?
Regulation is so interesting because it can be a huge barrier. For incumbents or for those who are willing to brave it and break in, it becomes a moat. If you are a company that’s protected by that moat, you can continue to grow and adapt, especially because sometimes, rules can change overnight and the moat’s at risk. At that point, you need to be able to adapt. If you’re sitting there using the protection of that moat as a reason to not really move forward, that can really hurt.
When I was in the UK, a client I was working with was the industry leader in recruiting for a specialized industry. There was a regulatory change coming that would have significantly diminished their market position. They were the market leader by a wide margin, but this would’ve changed that. We needed to completely transform our roadmap overnight. And that’s not normally the speed at which anyone works. We did a comprehensive market study, competitor benchmarking, and an acquisition screening. Ultimately, we added three critical changes to the roadmap that would increase our value proposition to customers.
The first change was crowdsourcing to differentiate and leverage our existing user base. The second was repositioning the site for everyday relevance. That was a big expansion, but it proved to be useful. Last, we built more deeply connected offerings by creating offers with offline products, making the pricing work differently, and creating a brand-new unique positioning. That differentiation succeeded. For some parts that didn’t exist, we had user adoption grow from zero to 3 million to 100 hundred million.
Three things come to mind for me on this. One is continuous iteration — that’s innovation in a smaller form because you’re talking about smaller incremental changes rather than big transformational changes. They matter because you need to make those as well. If everything is shooting for the moon, then you’re going to miss all of those opportunities.
Second, I always challenge my teams to aim for three big bets every quarter. When I say a big bet, think of a goal with a 50 percent chance of success — not something that’s super easy and that you know you’re going to get. You just need to execute and get it done, but you also don’t want it to be so hard that it’s not going to happen. It does take a significant amount of time, but I can’t have everyone trying wild ideas unless we’ve got the capacity for that, so I keep it to three.
The third piece is about celebrating failures. A 50 percent chance of success means a 50 percent chance of failure, and you have to be okay with that. People are so conditioned to see the things that don’t work as a personal failure. You’ve got to work really hard to get people to accept the fact that within this space, failure is okay. The world at large may think that if you fail at something, it’s a bad thing, but here we see that controlled, acceptable failure as a good thing.
It’s about being authentic and showing people that we welcome everyone to be themselves. If you’re not doing it yourself, it doesn’t matter what else you’re saying and doing. I make it a point to always mention my husband every time I’m having a first conversation with someone and putting that out there. I was doing that well before I became the executive sponsor of the LGBTQ+ group at Staples — making sure that it’s out there so that someone hears it and notes that they heard an exec mention being gay. It does make a difference. And people have come up to me and said that.
More tangibly, it’s important to build a diverse pipeline of candidates when you’re looking at roles, whether you’re looking at hiring or internal promotions. It’s way too easy to just jump into the process without taking the time to ensure that you’ve got that truly diverse slate. When we’re talking about specific individuals and developing them once they are in the role, it comes down to getting to know them and focusing on their individual needs.
When we were talking about successes and failures, some people like public recognition, but others like more private recognition. You don’t want to be sitting there and asking someone, “Congratulations! Do you want me to do this in front of the group?” You should know what will feel comfortable to them and what will be an actual motivator. All of that support, in addition to some of the more obvious things like providing people with stretch roles and all of that, starts with being true to yourself, understanding each person for who they are, and supporting them in an individual way.
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