The Kalaari Podcast: Anshuman Bapna on building great products & unlocking innovation

When it comes to startups, there is no fast track to success. Almost all startup teams go through a variety of crises and challenges Behind the Scenes. Having been a part of many startup journeys over the last decade at Kalaari, we believe that there are valuable lessons to be gained from the journeys of others.

In this episode, Anshuman Bapna, Ex-CPO of MakeMyTrip and Founder of Terra.do, shares his insights on building products and finding innovative solutions.

Some of the key topics he addressed in this podcast:

1. Finding founder-problem fit

2. Balancing intuition & data-driven decision making

3. Creating guidelines to unlock innovation within a company

4. Setting up a framework to solve problems that others deem unsolvable

Read the full transcript and watch the video below.

VANI KOLA: Hello, everyone. It’s my pleasure, to invite you to this episode of Behind the Scenes with Anshuman Bapna, founder and CEO of Terra.do. Anshuman is a seasoned and well-known product leader. And today he shares his insights and learnings with us. Welcome Anshuman, Thanks for taking the time today to share with us your experiences, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: Thank you for having me Vani. I’m looking forward to chatting about lots of things and different things.

VANI KOLA: Anshuman, you know you have been involved in building some great products and often I think in the startup journey, we don’t talk about the role of product management, product leadership, and what goes into the making of it. So, I wanted us to start with, what is one of the products that you are most proud of and what went into the making of it?

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: Yeah, so my product journey has been across large companies, small companies, my own startups, and so on. I think one of the most challenging and eventually turned out to be one of the most successful ones was when I started looking at products at GoIbibo which is this online travel company, that merged with MakeMyTrip three years back.

And I had just come over from my role at MakeMyTrip as the Chief Product Officer there and started looking at products at GoIbibo. And the challenge was very straightforward, which is until the merger happened the two companies were at loggerheads with each other. Fierce competitors and obviously their two products, therefore, resembled each other in some dramatically obvious ways.

And now that we’ve invested in the company, the idea was for the two brands and the two products to now span the entire spectrum of what the Indian user needs and wants, which is quite a bit. So, the question was, how do you differentiate? What the GoIbibo product would look like in travel? They differentiated it enough and spanned into this other segment, which was a budget category, a younger audience, but at the same time, not lose its essence. And the essence of GoIbibo always was this very hackish social kind of a culture that had birthed this community of younger people. So, there were obviously many different ideas, we potentially played around with, one thing that we ended up on was to say well if this is going to be a product that gets people to believe that you could buy travel from anywhere, but if you were to buy travel from a socially, trustable place where your friends are, who can give you advice, where there are well-wishers, knowledgeable people about travel who could help you decide what to buy, what not to buy. Then GoIbibo is that place. Now how do you do that?

And the idea we came up with was to gamify all kinds of social interactions. GoIbibo had always been very famous for giving out this thing called “Go Cash”, in which the concept was that any time you have a friend of yours who travels using GoIbibo, you would get 50 Rupees. It was a brilliant strategy. So how do you build that kind of a product and make it successful in this new world? So, we created this new paradigm all together in which the entire home screen was taken out by social actions and every social activity that you did, earned you some Rupees. Now that is the overall knowledge here and what we did, I think, they brought lots of ideas we played around with.

But I think the thing that really unlocked innovation inside the company, which I was really intending, was to just create broad guidelines so that marketing could pitch in so that somebody who was a part of the supply team could work with five-star hotels to come up with something interesting and create that. So, we built out this whole gaming black box for internal users, which is kind of a remarkable new thing about this, is that look guys, we’re going to open this up for anyone in the company to start playing around with. And it’s very simple, what, who wins and who loses which is we see what kind of what ratings we get for the kind of games that come out here. And let people unlock their imagination completely.

So that’s what really did the trick because now everyone had as a part of their 3-month plan, four-week plan, some game that they were launching on this front-end that they were really relying on some of the best, most insightful, most hackish thinking went into creating huge things that would go live there. And eventually, that became a fundamental way how the company started thinking about who the users were and the users found, for example, I mean you would reward users, for example, answering questions about the area that you lived in for another traveler. And because you would get that reward, they would start coming back to the app much more, which if you imagine when travel, which is a very episodic kind of a product right? Which is that you need to only come to it only once in three months. Suddenly people started coming much more frequently and that created this virtuous loop which I thought was probably one of the best things that have happened in my career.

VANI KOLA: A different question really, there is this endless debate of data versus intuition and there are urban legends of, or urban myths of, you know, Steve Jobs was very intuition-led and probably he was. And you know there are others who are more data-led, so which camp do you belong to? And you know, is there a product decision-making framework that works for you?

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: Yeah, I think it’s a great question again. My way of thinking in this is that you operate at both the 30,000 ft and at the 100 ft level in two different ways. One is that at the 30,000 ft level, you shouldn’t be articulating big, very audacious goals for the next X months and you could decide what your frequency of that is.

What we really preferred was a 6-month cycle where someone would go out and say you know what, we can come back to work every day, make it slightly better but what if, over six months we could double business? Right? Wouldn’t that be amazing? Wouldn’t that be something exciting you would come to work for? I have to see; I have a much more structured debate around that to see if we have the right goal or not.

But then, once that big, very audacious goal has been articulated, I think there has to be a lot of independence at every level. Now you take the tactical goals, you need to be able to achieve that and the way you do that, is by saying look guys, there is no cost to doing things that are reversible. If it is reversible, and good learning involved. Don’t overthink it, just do it. And that’s how you make sure that for example, the kind of things that you can do is that you can take all this special in the consumer internet space right you can take a cohort of users, which is small, and which has a characteristic that you can represent the entire user-base and do all kinds of interesting experiments with them, which will allow you to learn but you don’t burn your bridges in that case, you can always — you don’t do things which are against your big very audacious goals or against your values. But within those confines, let junior most product manager, let a designer, let a marketing person come in and decide what that experiment is.

And in fact, one part of the company should be focused on tooling that allows these people to independently ship out the stuff without having to take permission from anyone. So, for example, one of my pet projects was — at MakeMyTrip was that how do you the designs of all these crazy ideas? And they always have to go to a product manager and engineering team for that to be even tested out.

Could you build some kind of lab experience inside the MakeMyTrip app where the designer could ship just a prototype that has all kinds of analytics tracking behind it? So that the conversation the designer has with the product manager, it’s not that oh my god, look at my cute little idea of would you be willing to spend some time and resources in building it. The conversation should be “I’ve already done it, 10,000 people have already seen it and by the way this is the heat map of what we did. Now, let’s go and build it.” That’s how you unlock a lot of innovations at the company.

VANI KOLA: You know in most companies I find that hiring the product leadership and hiring great product managers is really actually very hard. So, I want to understand from you, what makes those top 10% of product managers really be successful and advise for founders on how they should build the product leadership and organization?

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: And I’m going through that completely right now all over again, so this is going fresh in my thinking as well. I think product managers are on this planet who ship. Everything else is stuff that either aids that or stuff that you’d build on top of your amazing capability to ship. So if you’re not shipping, everything that I’m going to say after this is completely moot.

So the first muscle that everyone has to build inside an organization if you’re thinking about the product, is how do I ship fast and consistently. Even if it is not the right product, even if it is not the perfect product, the fact that you ship again and again, and overall again consistently is the one thing that differentiates great product managers from everyone else out there in my opinion, so that’s one. Now when you unpack that, which is then what is it that allows product managers to continue shipping. Now at a junior level, that might simply mean that you have fantastic chemistry with the developers that you work with, so they respect you. You pitch in, as in when needed, you take the blame away from them, you bring credit back to them, all those nice little things that happen in a good, hot team together. But when you grow, when you

scale up a little bit in your product management career, then your ability to ship comes from aligning other people who are not in your direct reporting relationship at all, they are part of your peer team. So, the sales team that goes out to sell this product, which you are building, or the marketing team actually got you the customers in the first place. How do you make sure that they are just as clicked about what you’re building? And you are also listening to them, it’s not about just being super persuasive and bamboozling your way into convincing them every single time.

It’s about being very responsive to how they’re thinking while innovatively. And the best product managers begin to require that skill of what is called, badly, in my opinion, stakeholder management, sounds almost like riot control, riot management. And the thing, which is how do you quell this set. That’s not the idea, the idea is to listen very actively and then make that into how you do things. And then as you go, further in your product career. It’s about judgment calls, which is how comfortable are you in making small and large judgment calls on people, on strategy, on the product, on when to kill a product, and when to give it one more shot. Those kinds of decisions and how comfortable are you with not getting it right or wrong, but the fact that it’s unknown how many times you’ll get it right or wrong and it’s not a career killer for you. The fact that you’re learning every single time is the end goal.

So, the best product managers that I have seen at a higher level are just very comfortable with their judgment and ability. And then, of course, I mean, as you get a scale of even more in your organization, that judgment translates into what you read at the market is what you read in the internal stakeholders is as well, what is it what your CEO might be most obsessed about or would be worrying about what will happen. That’s the kind of stuff you get better and better at because they are not coming back to the good old — what word did I use — alignment, which is that if you figure out the alignment as a product manager, then you’re sorted. And that’s kind of almost the most important thing that distinguishes great product managers.

VANI KOLA: Talking about you personally a little bit, Anshuman, you have gone from being an entrepreneur to a corporate executive and then back to being an entrepreneur — geographies, crossing geographies and crossing sectors right from internet entrepreneur to now you’re doing with your new startup Terra.do — climate change and one, how do you, you know, manage all these different roles, transitions, how do you wear so many different hats? What makes that possible for you and why climate change?

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: Yeah, so I think that for me it’s actually very consistent, everything that I’ve been doing is extremely consistent from college days all the way until now. And the common thread is not entrepreneurship, but the common thread is solving problems that others thought were unsolvable in unique, different ways. Sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully.

So, the climate change thing is, was the, something that I’m very passionate about and so it’s been this background anxiety that all of us have had for some time. But as you have kids, then it starts surfacing again and again and I think my moment of crisis or epiphany if you will, was 2016 when suddenly I realized that Trump had happened, Brexit had happened, we were at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. My older daughter could snorkel and see the beautiful

reef and she was singing while she was in the water, and my son could not because he was too young and that year was the year when the first year of massive coral bleaching of which one-third of the coral reefs died. And that is all because of global warming and just this realization, the shock that I had well lived my life with this assumption that obviously, my kids will inherit a better world.

And suddenly I realized that could not be the case, it’s entirely possible that it’s actually a poorer, more fraught world. So that kind of one starting point. I think the other was also this mid-life crisis that I keep saying, never waste a crisis. So, I had the most beautiful mid-life crisis that I could ask for and I had enough time to think about it, enough time to talk to people, read books, and so on.

And one of the ways it ended up was that one question that was kind of in my mind, that I thought was the most helpful question, as we often think of our lives in terms of 5-year, 15 years, and 50-year projects. All my life I had realized, I had done 5-year projects. My startups, MakeMyTrip, this that, etc, etc. The 15-year projects were maybe my kids and that too also subconsciously. But 50-year projects, I haven’t even thought about that. 50-year projects, in fact, the kind of brainwave was that well if you don’t start a 50-year project at 40 then will you even start a 50-year project? And so then when you start making a list of 50-year projects, it was very obvious that climate change is right up there.

So, I started investing in that a lot more and frankly was just blown away I mean I, personally I feel this is like a — I’m a very — just like there’s a product market for dozens of founder problems I think there’s a great founder problem for it because I’m a very breadth kind of a guy. Even when I was at Stanford, at business school, I took double the number of units, so I did an entire year of medical school, almost a year of law school, international diplomacy, Mandarin, sailing, etc., etc. because I go very wide but that is what climate change is. It is agriculture, energy, transportation, deeptech in the future and whatnot. So that’s one thing.

I think the second thing, which I also a kind of very strong fit for me is that as entrepreneurs, we are very schizophrenic. We can wake up one day depending on which side of the bed we wake upon, the world is going to collapse, the company is going to die today. But if it’s the other side of the bed, we’re going to take over the world, the world is so completely changed today. And that’s what climate change is that it’s such a depressing area to be in and at one level because you can almost see this existential level crisis that the entire planet faces and they put it in deeply depressing, but then on the other side, you can take that reality and compartmentalize it and be schizophrenic.

Let’s say you know what, now that it’s so hard you know, it’s impossible to solve, the only thing you can do is to try to solve it. So, therefore, go out and start working on it so that’s how I have been — to me it feels like I mean this is one of those challenges that all of us should be working to be honest.

And my 11-year-old daughter, two years ago, when I started talking to her about this, she had the best reaction to it. I said look I’m going to start another company and she said, “well yeah, I mean because we heard that you were working for someone else for all these years.” Because she has always seen me running my own company so for her that was something completely natural. And then when I said, and it’s going to be climate change, her reaction was “well what else would you work on. What else is worth working on?”. So, I think there is that sense of obligation, that sense of gratitude. What we have inherited that hopefully, we can do some part in passing onto our children.

VANI KOLA: Any parting advice for Indian founders? This is largely episodic for inspiring founders to do more and be more successful. So, love to hear from you.

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: I mean, one of the best pieces of advice that I got from someone was to think of your — as an entrepreneur — think of your life as almost as a 10-year lifecycle. Imagine that if there was a problem that you felt very passionately about, imagine having in 10 years, three shots at that goal. So, the moment you start thinking of it as between those three shots and you get one of them right. I

f you start out thinking like that, then the burden of expectation on your very first thing that you grow out and start building up, reduces dramatically. Because you become a little bit more you abstract yourself a little bit away from the solution itself. You stay at the problem level and you also become a little bit mercenary in a good way. Which is that look, this is my best take at that goal right now. But maybe 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, maybe 18 months, I would realize, I may or may not realize that this is not my best shot at the goal. I’ll go back and take my second shot at the goal. So, if you think in that kind of an area, three shots at the goal kind of horizon, I think you’ll do yourself a service and have the right kind of mindset to play this long-term.

VANI KOLA: Thank you so much, Anshuman, for joining us today.

ANSHUMAN BAPNA: Thank you for having me, Vani.

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