How to Build Product on a Lean Budget w/ Yasmin Desai

00:00
Yasmin Desai
That's not an MVP, though. 90% of the time I see it dung on me.

00:03
Amardeep Parmar
That's Yasmin Desai, an experienced principal, product manager and a productcoach and consultant.

00:08
Yasmin Desai
Validation doesn't never have to come, it doesn't have to be difficult.Firstly, start, you know, the very slimmest version. What can you get done in aday?

00:16
Amardeep Parmar
She's an expert at building product on a lean budget.

00:19
Yasmin Desai
I've run a company before where we didn't even have a website for nine months.We were just using existing tools, used our social media to, like, marketourselves. It should be super simple for you to go on LinkedIn, create a focusgroup, create an interest group even.

00:33
Amardeep Parmar
Take care of proactive advice to really get your product where you want it tobe.

00:37
Yasmin Desai
I teach this to students and I literally say, everyone's leaving the room now.You're going to go on the streets and you're just going to go and ask people. Ido feel like I have a very distinct way of doing product.

00:51
Amardeep Parmar
One of the things that I think I see so often in startups is where they get tooobsessed with the product without looking at the customer first. What is thatcustomer validation you need to do before really even getting into the product?

01:02
Yasmin Desai
I mean, there's never enough that you can do firstly, and I think especially ifwe're talking super early stage as well, it's very easy for you to be misguidedby what your friends are saying, what your families are saying, what you'reseeing in the market, who your competitors are. And so it's really about tryingto hone in on who would be your ideal customer profile, because it's likelythat you won't even have customers yet already. And so really hone in on whoyou think might be the right people. That would be the people that wouldessentially use your product or service and have them as more of a focus group.So a group that you keep going to as well, but you change it up because youdon't necessarily want to have bias just from that group too.

01:40
Yasmin Desai
So what I often find is, you know, companies will come to me or people that aretrying to start a company up and the company up, and they'll say, I've got thisgreat MVP and it's going to take us nine months. And I'm like, that's not anMVP, though. And they have so much conviction on what they think is right fortheir customer that I would rather them strip that all back and start the veryslimmest version whatsoever, even if it's only a two week build and then go onand take that out to customers and potential customers and see what's there. Ithink the main thing though is most people seek will you use my product, willyou use my service much? Are you going to pay for this rather than truevalidation.

02:16
Yasmin Desai
And true validation for me is when you don't even talk about your product oryour service. There's a real art to that which is, I don't know, let's justcome up with an example. Maybe I've come up with an entirely new phone and Ithink that it supersedes everything that's out there on the market because allthese specific features. Instead of talking about that, I would just talk toyou about your phone right now. I'd say how often do you use it, what do youuse it for? Why do you use it? Why? What's the core need that you're trying todo? And maybe I find out that it's connection, right. And for you it's justconnection and always having it to hand to help you be faster in life maybe.

02:51
Yasmin Desai
And I would take those things and be like, okay, cool, are those core parts ofmy new features in my service or my product? And I would take that asvalidation. There was never ever a world in which I should be asking you, willyou use my product or service? And there's also a world where you should nevereven know why I'm asking you these questions as well. And so most of the time,I mean, I would say 90% of the time, it done wrongly actually. Yeah.

03:13
Amardeep Parmar
And you mentioned there about how if you shouldn't know that, why you're askingthe questions, how do you get people's time to be able to ask them thequestions and to get that customer feedback? Because a lot of people strugglewith this where they don't know how to reach their target customer.

03:27
Yasmin Desai
I think there's a few things. One is it's okay to be transparent and say I'mpotentially working on a new product or a new service. Would you be able togive 30 minutes of your time now depending on who your customer profile is?Right. So if you are selling B2B then it would be a lot harder to get thatperson's time. And that's where things like incentives come in. Hey, I can giveyou a £20 voucher, whatever in return. So that's like how you get them firstpotentially for the first 30 minutes. Other than that, you know, I've doneworkshops where I go into universities and I teach this to Students.

03:58
Yasmin Desai
And I literally say, everyone's leaving the room now you're going to go on thestreets and you're just going to go and ask people, because nine times out of10, yes, they might not be your ideal customer profile, but they will haveelements of what might be or they'll know someone or they've used somethingsimilar. Validation doesn't never have to come, it doesn't have to bedifficult. Firstly, and you shouldn't sit around waiting for it. It should besuper simple for you to go on LinkedIn, create a focus group, create aninterest group, even for what it is that you're doing. And yeah, I would besurprised if anyone came and said that. They struggle to get people's time andinterest because people like giving their time, I find, and especially if it isin an area where they have interest in as well.

04:39
Yasmin Desai
So, you know, a lot of people ask me, you know, I'm trying to build a new. Thenew thing at the moment is what product roadmap can you build with AI? And I'mjust generally interested in seeing what they're, you know, potentiallybuilding. So I'm very happy to participate in those.

04:53
Amardeep Parmar
So one thing I've seen recently, I've been involved in a lot of hackathons andseeing, especially with students. Right?

04:58
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

04:59
Amardeep Parmar
So if a student at a University can get 100 responses to a survey in two days,then for founders who are saying they're going to dedicate their lives to aproblem.

05:07
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

05:07
Amardeep Parmar
If they can't get their feedback, that's showing that they're not going outthere enough sometimes as well. Yeah. And I think sometimes seeing that andknowing that their student, even when we had work experience a couple weeks agoand we gave them a problem and said, okay, go and get customer feedback of whatthe biggest problems are.

05:22
Yasmin Desai
Okay.

05:23
Amardeep Parmar
And then like build a pitch deck around that.

05:25
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

05:25
Amardeep Parmar
And they got over 100 responses in two days.

05:27
Yasmin Desai
That's amazing.

05:27
Amardeep Parmar
So 16 year olds can do that then. If you're listening, as a founder, I thinkyou've got to really go out there and not make excuses. Right. It'spossible to do it .

05:35
Yasmin Desai
And I think, I mean, there's slight differences. Right. And I think when it's astudent survey and you know that it's for their dissertation, you kind of wantto help them. It's slightly different. Right. Because you have that feeling ofI want to help them get a good grade and whatnot. But the same principlesapply. Right. It's putting yourself out there and how do you get an audience.If you can't even get an audience to get some feedback, I would judge you onhow you're going to go and get an audience that are your actual customers. Likehow are you going to acquire them if you can't even do that?

06:02
Yasmin Desai
Because likelihood is that maybe 10, 20, 50% even of the people that you'reinterviewing might eventually could be your ideal customer profile and thenhenceforth would be your customers at the end of the day. So yeah, if you can'tdo your own demand generation, essentially I would be very concerned.

06:18
Amardeep Parmar
I look at this founder product fit as well, right? Is it if you don't, if youcan't reach your target customer and also if you don't enjoy talking to yourtargeted customers because sometimes people try to just do as minimuminterviews as they can to get into the building. But if you don't like talkingto your customers, then how are you going to build something around?

06:34
Yasmin Desai
Oh yeah, absolutely. And that's why you see like most of the advice, right,especially for early stage companies is they don't even hire product managers,right? It's usually the CEO's job or the CTO's job for a very long time untilthey've gotten to a point where it's like, okay, cool, this is, we've gotsomething here, there is validation and then you go and hire a product manager.Usually when you've got a bit more of a roadmap or you're at that crux ofthere's too much work here and we actually need to build out the engineeringteam or whatever it is that there might be. It's very rare that a productmanager is actually your first hire.

07:06
Yasmin Desai
So people like me actually don't come in at that stage a little bit laterunless if you've taken a different role instead, which is what I've done andthen shifted internally. But yeah, I don't know any founder that has neverfound it interesting to talk to people or at least when they know that they'vegotten a team of people who are doing it for them, wanting to be in everysingle one and or at least watch the playback and watch the recording.

07:32
Amardeep Parmar
And you mentioned a lot about an MVP earlier on and one of the challenges now,I think people, is like you said before about don't do something for ninemonths, do it in two weeks instead. And now with AI and how things arechanging, the idea of what an MVP even is anymore is quite changing andvariable. Right. How do you think about MVP today and what counts as an MVP toStart getting feedback?

07:53
Yasmin Desai
That's a really good question. I would say I have a personal view that an MVP,I probably take the really slimmest version. So I don't know. Let's just takethe phone example again. Right. I might. I probably wouldn't even go anywherenear to building a prototype with that. I mean, digital products are verydifferent to physical product. But if it was a digital product, and let's justsay, you know, I was trying to get some validation, there's no reason why.Let's say I was doing a, you know, a new meal subscription. Right. Why would Inot be in my capacity in literally one day to be able to hack up a website,create a Facebook group, or infiltrate an existing Facebook group and be like,I'm hosting a supper club, come to my house and we're all going to cooktogether.

08:39
Yasmin Desai
And you're going to use essentially what would have been my recipe box that I.Is the product that I'm trying to sell. Right. So I know that some people wouldcome to me and be like, I need the app. And I'm like, you could probablyactually get that all up and running with AI in two weeks. But now I think theboundary is even less of what can you get done in a day? And so I think allthese tools are great 100%. But I really question when people say, I can't goto market without an app or I can't go to market without a website. I mean,I've run a company before where we didn't even have a website for nine months.We were just using existing tools that were out there and used our social mediato, like, market ourselves.

09:15
Amardeep Parmar
I think one thing that holds people up too, is that they get obsessed with theidea of how they're solving the problem rather than the customer just goes backsolving the problem.

09:22
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

09:22
Amardeep Parmar
So there's somebody I know, for example, where they had something where yousign up online and you're into details and people might think it's AI doing theback end, but they just have somebody who's literally sitting there matchingit.

09:33
Yasmin Desai
Right? Yeah.

09:33
Amardeep Parmar
And as long as you get a good result as a customer, you're happy.

09:36
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

09:37
Amardeep Parmar
And how do you think about that too, in terms of it's the iterations, Right. Isthat what you. What the end goal is? It's necessarily how you do at thebeginning.

09:45
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

09:46
Amardeep Parmar
And how is there different ways you can do things at the start to really getover that hump?

09:51
Yasmin Desai
Yeah. I think that this is where people have, you know, and it's so normal, asa founder, you've got the ideal flow in your head of how everything should workand when everything is optimal and when that might be the right time for you tothen do the big bang launch. Right? But if you take the example of somethinglike Zappos, right, where they were like, we think that we can digitise how wesell shoes usually, I mean, I say usually many years ago when you had to go toa shoe store, right? And they were like, no, we think we can do this better.And what they did was they literally just walked into all the nearest shoestores, took pictures of everything, uploaded that to a website, waited for theorder.

10:25
Yasmin Desai
And that's the key part of they didn't go into that problem space of we need tohold stock. Right? They waited for the order would come, they'd walk to theshop, buy the shoes, go to the post office, put their label on it, send it tothe customer, and that was their validation. Even though, yes, they had to payfor the postage themselves. Right. And even though the shoe wasn't actuallyeven their own shoe make, but it was validation that, okay, yes, people wouldbuy shoes online and then everything after that is like, you know, okay, fine,we need to figure out returns, I need to figure out issues with the shoes andwarranties and blah, blah, but let it happen first.

11:05
Yasmin Desai
People, I think, get scared because they think they're going to lose thatcustomer if the issues, if you don't have this insanely good process. But ifyou look at any company now, which company has the most fine, detailed processthat never goes wrong? I'm sorry, no one, Right. You're always fine tuning atsome point. So it's more about letting that fine tuning come way earlier andnot thinking that you have to have everything perfect.

11:30
Amardeep Parmar
From day one and on that fine tuning point as well. So you made your own MVP,and the hard thing is you're probably going to get loads of bad feedback andthere's all these different mistakes. How do you collect that feedback and thenalso act in it as well?

11:42
Yasmin Desai
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the company, the tools that you have. Let'ssay you literally are doing bootstrapping, right? So you don't even have moneyfor a tool. I would expect that you're putting all that feedback into a GoogleDoc, an Ocean Doc, a Confluence, whatever it is. Even if it is just like thenotes on your MacBook or your Evernote, whatever tool that it is that you use.Right. There are so many great tools that allow you to aggregate the insightsand then it will pull out. Oh, we think that this is the new feature that youshould build by AI and whatever. But I think that in the early stages, you wantto be making those decisions yourselves and not letting it be driven bywhatever this AI is telling you to do.

12:18
Yasmin Desai
So it's totally possible if you've got Roadmap tools. I'm personally, I mean,there's not one tool. Again, there's no one tool that's perfect. I think Jirais doing a really good job of doing product roadmaps now. I think Productboardwas good at doing it. I think that they now have too many features,interestingly. But what I did always like about Product board was you could putan insight is essentially a copy paste of a snippet of what your customer saidand then you can attach it directly to two, three features that you think youmight want to consider.

12:49
Yasmin Desai
And so when you do have that larger team and you've got, let's say 10 newproduct managers when they join and they can see, okay, well, I've seen thesefour insights and I know that, you know, this is the feature and there's myvalidation, basically, rather than having to start it all from scratch. Sothere's so much that can be done. A repository is always a good idea. Youshould never lose these. Always record them. Always, always record them. Or atleast, at the very least, make sure that you've got all the detailed notes,transcripts of what you've talked about.

13:18
Amardeep Parmar
So one of the little diary secrets I keep. So I used to be a tech consultant,And it was in Oracle, Siebel, a very enterprise product. They said, we're usingJira, we use all these different things. And at that stage it's a little bitmore predictable. When you're working with like Vodafone, Heineken, Panasonic,those are the kind of clients and the challenge I think for many people atstartup stage is that there's no predictability. So sometimes people make andyou see all the time when people's pitch decks, they have, this is a productroadmap. I don't think anybody's ever stuck to that, ever.

13:46
Yasmin Desai
No, not at all.

13:47
Amardeep Parmar
And when you know that, I think it's sometimes even for ourselves, it'sdifficult when you think, should we make a roadmap when we know that we're notactually going to stick to it? And how do you think about that? Of like, is itstill useful exercise to plan out in advance what you're going to do whenthings can change softly.

14:01
Yasmin Desai
Are going to change all the time. Yes and no. So I think the way that I wouldlook at it right is in the early stages of a startup you're probably onlylooking six months ahead and I think it's okay for you to look six months aheadunless if you are going out for external investment, it's a large amount ofmoney. And yes, of course the investors are going to look and ask for a one tothree year roadmap usually. And also what's your five, 10 year goal of when yousell out or whatever. Right. But I think you can afford to at least these daysput in a lot less effort into making it exactly right. The one thing you shouldbe doing is you should at least know what you're doing for the next quarter andthen the one after it.

14:38
Yasmin Desai
But yeah, you're right. Especially in the early stage. It is so common that,you know, you get an enterprise client or something similar, a big opportunityand you just go after it. Everything gets scrapped. We had it in a previouscompany, you know, Topshop came on board and were like this is literally 100xthen all our efforts and everything else and so we literally just tore it allapart. But you do need something there anyways just so that everyone has astability of okay, here's what we're building day to day because you don't knowwhen that opportunity is going to come in. You don't know, you can't predictwhen they're going to sign, if they're going to sign, how much they're going tosign for. So you do need to have it there in the background.

15:16
Yasmin Desai
But the main thing is, you know, people will ask, oh, do I leave 20% capacityfor these new opportunities? No, you don't. You completely move and shiftthings or just totally deprioritize them for the new thing that's coming thatyou have got stronger validation for than the rest.

15:33
Amardeep Parmar
Hello. Hello. Quick interruption to let you know a bit more about BAE HQ. We'rethe community for high growth Asian heritage entrepreneurs, operators andinvestors in the UK. You can join us totally free@thebaehq.com/join. There,you'll get our CEO structure in your inbox every week which is content, eventsand opportunities. You can also get access to our free startup fundamentalscourse by joining. Let's get back to the show. And do you plan for differentscenarios at all? Let's say. Okay, let's say for example you have a bigcustomer coming like Topshop and recently Becker been in the news about acompany where they had a three month retention. Well, three month break clause,right?

16:17
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

16:17
Amardeep Parmar
So let's say you get a massive customer come in, but they break it three monthspotentially. And you've shifted all your product strategy based on that.

16:24
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

16:25
Amardeep Parmar
Should you still try to plan for, okay, if this doesn't work out, what do wethen do? Or do you just kind of go in and see what happens?

16:31
Yasmin Desai
You should, but generally I would say I'd be very surprised if anyone does itbecause you just, you don't have the affordability to, you don't have the timeto do all these backup plans. And I think more than that, you know, you mightget that enterprise client. And yes, you're right that in three months theymight churn, but you don't really want to be that person in the room that says,hey, hang on a minute, they might churn. And so should we not have a backupplan? Like, it just kills the mood, all the excitement as well that goestowards, oh, we've got this amazing client that's come in. So not really. Iwouldn't expect it. Or I at least expect that you just revert to the oldroadmap that you had anyway. Right. I wouldn't expect that.

17:07
Yasmin Desai
Then that becomes a third iteration or fourth iteration.

17:11
Amardeep Parmar
And I guess looking at too, what we're now doing is when people come on, we getthem on 200 say and then see how their differences change. But what would yousay from two years ago? What's really changed in the way you think aboutproduct? And is there anything that maybe you've changed your opinion on?

17:26
Yasmin Desai
I think there's two things. So one is, I mean, I personally have slightly movedout of startups, I'm not in that world anymore. But what I have seen change inthe last couple of years and this is because of multiple things. Covid, thefinance landscape, the investment landscape is I actually see the definition ofthe MVP changing and it's getting harder and harder. So back in the day, right,MVP would have been okay, do you have validation that people would use it andthat was it. You didn't actually have to tick the box of they are using it, youjust had to say they were using it. Then it became okay, would they use it? Andif you took that away from them, would 40% of people be disgruntled?

18:04
Yasmin Desai
Or roughly around that number, right. Now it's gone even further than that,which is, are they using it? Would they be disgruntled if you take it away fromthem? And are they paying you and are they paying you consistently? So it's notjust a one off payment too? Yeah. So the bar just keeps going higher. And Ithink that's because, you know, we've seen so many startups that had all thismoney that did nothing with it and then fail. Right. And so the investors arequite upset. And that actually there's just so much more competition too.There's so much competition. And that's why the bar just keeps getting raisedfor what actually does mean you can qualify as an MVP. But also to what yousaid, it's a lot easier to create one now.

18:40
Yasmin Desai
You've got all these tools, which means that, you know, individuals now havebecome creators. They literally can go from, you know, I had this skill to I'mselling this skill or I'm selling this startup or these services and products.And that's incredible. But that does raise the bar in terms of expectations ofhow quickly you need to be selling, how quickly you need to get to MVP. And soif, you know, you've probably brought someone on two years ago, 200 episodesago, I would expect them to be getting a lot in revenue right now and way pastthe point of an MVP. It's no longer okay for you to say, my MVP will be out insix months. And then, you know, we expect that by the end of the year we getour first few customers.

19:20
Yasmin Desai
It should be, no, I mean, what have you done in the last quarter and what'syour if not that, you know, some companies even go to six weeks. What have youdone in the last six weeks? What have you done in the next six weeks? Andwhat's your progress from there?

19:33
Amardeep Parmar
You mentioned earlier as well, but right at the very early stages, it should bethe CEO or the CTO or something like that doing lots of product work. Whenshould they start thinking about, now is the time to get somebody who'sdedicated to product or somebody with that product mindset into the company?

19:47
Yasmin Desai
I'm a fan of the CEO taking it as far as they can. I'm not a fan on theopposite side because I want them to hire me, but I think they're cool. But ifI was an investor, then I want them to be taking it as long as they can beforethey reach that crunch point of, okay, we need to hire someone now. It's neverreally like a Bing, this is, you know, the date or this has happened. Thatmeans that usually it's where you've just got too much work and you don't haveenough PMs to dish out the work. And that's where you are as a CEO, being thePM. And it's also just where, you know, you probably then are getting involvedin a lot of other things, strategy, partnerships, sales, blah, blah.

20:28
Yasmin Desai
And therefore at some point you can't afford to have a trusted product personthat can take that reins from you. It can be a combination of, you know, yeah,you've got your first few set of good customers and that you are comfortablethat they will constantly be there and so that you need to start branching outand doing that more demand generation. And then that's why when you might hirea product person in, or it can just be a case of actually, you know, andsometimes this does genuinely happen. You've got way more demand that you couldhave ever predicted and then you need to do the job of hiring the team to goand build it and that becomes more of your priority than it would be ofdirecting the product roadmap.

21:05
Amardeep Parmar
And is there anything that you think that founders often get wrong when they'rehiring that product person or they're looking for somebody in that space?

21:11
Yasmin Desai
Yeah. So I think this isn't product specific. This is specific to startups ingeneral. You hire great people in the beginning. Right. And usually it's, Imean, I think, I mean, I'm always in two minds about this. Sometimes it isactually really easy to work in a startup and sometimes it's a completeopposite in that you have to have so many skills and be doing so many differentthings and there's no room for error because it costs a lot more at that pointas well. But I've seen where you hire them in and you're usually doing it at amid level position. Right. You don't have the affordability to go in and belike your CPO or you're the chief sales officer.

21:51
Yasmin Desai
If it was a salesperson, that person stays with the company, they're doing welland then at some point you have that round of okay, well, we actually need tohire more. But you think that it's probably easier for you to make them thesenior hire, but then what you do is if they're actually not qualified and atthat point and ready from a market stance rather than your company stance, isyou end up being in this awful position two, three years down the line wherethey're actually just not qualified and you have other people that you've hiredin who are often better than them and then you've got this disgruntlement andfrustration of you as a CEO being like, I'm not, this company isn't moving fastenough or I'm not getting the product that we need or the quality and blah.

22:30
Yasmin Desai
Some people really thrive and they can grow with that curve. There's a lot ofpeople that fall off of that curve and most people don't realise that they'reeven on the curve or have the chance to be on the curve as well. So I thinkagain, this is where at least as an investor, if I was to start my own company,when you get to that cusp of okay, we have to expand now, I personally probablywouldn't make the internal junior mid hires suddenly go to chief or director.And you know, you do get, there are so many startups and we're still onlyreally seeing the effects of it now. Even though we've had all theseredundancies where you've got directors, VPs, blah, and what, they're fiveyears in the game, that's it from out of uni.

23:11
Yasmin Desai
And I think it's great for them, it honestly is. But it's not, it's absolutelynot equivalent to being a VP in a different type of company. Right. And so thetitles and the inflation of titles and you know, I'm sure you hire as well andyou do see that. You see people coming out of uni in 2 years asking for 100ksalary and you know, these insane titles when actually you know, you haven'tgot the qualifications.

23:35
Amardeep Parmar
I think VP FM the funniest title because it means totally different things, adifferent guy, and I think it's Goldman Sachs if you're watching this. Sorrybut like, I think like half the company is VPs because that's, they know theycan pay them and like with certain tax benefit, whatever it is. Okay, so justgive everybody a VP title.

23:52
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

23:52
Amardeep Parmar
But they don't want to take them above that because there's not enough spaceabove that. So you just have like 50% of VC VPs. Sorry. So it's alwaysinteresting to see what a VP means at one company could mean. And it's also VPcan mean venture partner.

24:05
Yasmin Desai
Yes.

24:05
Amardeep Parmar
So that when you've got gp, which is general partner and general practitionerand it's always confusing the different titles and how they work.

24:11
Yasmin Desai
Yeah.

24:12
Amardeep Parmar
And before we go to the quick fire questions you mentioned about trying to getthe CEO or the C suite or founders to be product people as long as you can, isthere any way that they can tell if they're doing a good job or not?

24:23
Yasmin Desai
So I think founders tend to fall into two buckets. One is you're a productperson and you're not so good at sales, or you're the salesperson, you're notso good at products. And so if you're not the product person, you need dealingwith the counter. And I would argue both ways anyway, in terms of being able totell whether you're doing a good job of it, I think honestly, it would belooking at how much of what you've built on the roadmap and actually deliveredmattered. So when you're in that early stage, right, it's quite normal that youship something, it doesn't work. You ship something, it doesn't work, you mightretract it, you might kill it, you might iterate on it. But I think a reallygood testament is actually how many quarters or how many sprints did you ship.

25:03
Yasmin Desai
something with zero value because there's some affordability. Right. I wouldexpect that even in the companies I'm in, you know, they're big companies nowthat I work for, it's still okay for you to ship like 20, 40% of stuff where,oh, damn it. Like this didn't get used. If that is, you know, consistentquarters where you're not doing that, then that's a concern. And so theopposite is true. Right. If you've got multiple quarters with paying customerswith features are actively being used. And that's where I really hone in on,okay, if you're releasing a feature, well, what's your success metric there? Sowhat are you. Why are you releasing it? What do you expect to come back fromit?

25:40
Yasmin Desai
Is it 80% of your current customer base engages with it, and they engage withit by, I don't know, spending at least five minutes, whatever it is. Right. Itdepends on the feature and whatnot. But, yeah, that's how I would qualify it asto how much. How agile were you able to be? So how often could you break theroadmap if you really needed to? Depending on the customer needs and thevalidation that you sought. But then also, how much did you ship that wasactually worthwhile, that provided value that you could, you know, everycompany should. And I really argue against when companies say, oh, we can'tmake a clear direction as to the revenue. No, you can't.

26:18
Yasmin Desai
Every feature, everything that you're shipping should have some sort of zigzagway to be able to say this was the additional revenue or this was theadditional engagement, or this is why a customer retained us or were able toretain that customer.

26:30
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah. I think it's something we definitely learned as well is that we did a lotof experiments but not really knowing why. And it's like, it sounds like a coolidea but then we didn't really know if it's successful or not. And then there'slike a lot of debris on our website that I need to go and clear out at somepoint of something we launched is going to be actually looking at his page andif they are looking at that page, does it actually match our overall intentionor is it just a distraction as well? Yeah, and I think that's one of ourproblems sometimes is that we have a lot of things that maybe don't connect toeach other very well or it's not obvious how they connect with each other.

27:00
Amardeep Parmar
To work a lot on ours, I was at the moment as well. So now it's time for thequick fire questions. So, first one is, who are free Asians in Britain youthink are doing incredible work and you have to shout them out?

27:12
Yasmin Desai
Yeah. So the first one would be Harveen Chugh. I met her, Gosh, I think it wasmaybe like 10, 12 years ago now. She was in and still is in the sort ofentrepreneurial space as a lecturer, but she has always done work additionallyoutside of that. So she's firstly just an amazing, great lecturer. She hostsloads of workshops and she's always been at the top of her game and just reallydiligent. She's in so many papers referenced and stuff like that. I haven'tspoken to her in a while, so. Hi, Harveen. The second. And again, she. Sheprobably doesn't know or remember me, but would be Deepali Nangia. I spoke toher very early on in my career and it was quite a fundamental conversation forme to. For me to figure out what I should be doing with my career.

27:57
Yasmin Desai
So I really appreciated that. And I think, again, she's just someone who, youknow, everyone knows her, I feel. Or at least if you're a woman that's Asian inthe sort of startup investment space and then you know her. Right. The thirdwould be a bit slightly different. You know, I love food and eating and beingin spaces where people create nice spaces. And I think I'm really on to thesupper club trend that I think is. Is happening this year. There was a greatsupper club that I went to a while ago. It was a lady who does these with hermum and her husband called Vegetarian Brown Girls. So that's Priya Bowry. Andshe's also from that created her own. Like she goes to festivals, fairs, sellsher food. But then also she's created this. I think she's about to launch it.

28:45
Yasmin Desai
So shout out. Basically a snack, like crisp, but better. So you build your ownsort of like crisp snack and she delivers it to you in the post. I just thinkit's cool. It's so innovative what everyone is doing with food at the momentand where you can create a really nice space. And she hosts it in her home andI think it was just so lovely. But she's all over you. She's very good atmarketing herself, very good at marketing the food. So I'm really excited tosee where she goes.

29:04
Amardeep Parmar
Awesome. And if people want to find out more about you and what you're up to,where should they go to?

29:09
Yasmin Desai
Good question. I mean, depends how much you want to know about product.

29:14
Amardeep Parmar
I made it this far.

29:15
Yasmin Desai
Yeah. And if you just want to see what brunch I'm eating every weekend, but ifso, then my Instagram is where I post most stuff. I do have a website. That'swhere you can see my coaching, my workshops that I run, if that's of interest.I tend to post a little bit here and there or LinkedIn. But, yeah, I'm not themost out there on my social media.

29:33
Amardeep Parmar
And any way that the audience could help you?

29:37
Yasmin Desai
Yeah, I mean, I hope that people can see that I have fairly good principleswhen it comes to product. Some not so conventional as well. I have. I do feellike I have a very distinct way of doing product. If you know everyone. Sofirstly, everyone. Everyone knows someone who wants to be a product manager andif so, tell them to come to my workshops. They're brilliant. They're so muchfun. We go through case studies of how to do an interview, how to do thetechnical case study. When you're in an interview, it is, you know, I thinkthere's such a gap in the market right now for people that want to be productmanagers. But, you know, they usually can get the first interview, the first,second round and then they drop. They can't get that final offer.

30:18
Yasmin Desai
And so that's where I come in and that's where my workshops try to help withthat. So, yeah, if you know anyone, I would love it if you could share myworkshop.

30:26
Amardeep Parmar
Awesome. So thanks so much for coming in today. Any final words?

30:30
Yasmin Desai
No. Keep doing the great work and yeah, really excited to see what you do inthis space.

30:36
Amardeep Parmar
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe, see you next time.

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