Intuition & product management - with Projjal Ghatak, CEO of OnLoop

Welcome again to the Product Bakery and another interview we've had today. We've talked to Pojal Ghatak, who is the CEO of Onloop, an ex-Uber employee who used to stick around in the world of strategy for a long time. So today we had the pleasure to talk about how he found a problem that needed to be fixed that affects a lot of people. And especially as a CEO, there is a different point of view on how to build up not only a product, but also a company. And we took a deep dive on how to get started with the right people on board. Interesting also to hear from the CEO directly how to choose not only the right people on board, but also how to choose the right investors who allow you to be product-centric and to not fall into the enterprise trap. So if you're interested in that topic, make sure that you listen in. Exactly. And last but not least, if you like this episode, make sure to press the follow button to stay up to date with all new upcoming episodes from the Product Bakery. And with that said, let's get started. Welcome, everyone. Today, we have a guest dialing in right from New York. Projal is an ex-management consultant. He spent more than four years working for Accenture as a strategy consultant and then also moved into Uber, where he continued his work on strategy. By now, he has his own company. He's CEO and founder of Onloop. And it all started basically from a problem that you identified. So, Projal, maybe you can start by telling us a little bit more about Onloop, what's the problem that you're solving and how you actually decided to start the company. Sure. No, thank you for that, Alex. And thank you for having me. The way I describe Onloop is it's a brand new product in a brand new category that can be best described as collaborative team development or CTD. And Onloop was born from my personal pain of running high-performing teams in places like Uber and feeling like the tools and the processes that me and my team had to go through with respect to things like performance management, to things like other tools like learning and development didn't really bring out the best in folks. And it took up a lot of time. It had a ton of bias. It sparked a lot of anxiety. And we felt that the world deserved better and deserved a fundamental rethink of how teams should be assessed and developed, especially at a time when the workplace is going through such a transformation. And obviously we all went remote in the pandemic. We will probably come out of the pandemic in some form of a hybrid setup. But a lot of the older management approaches to doing regular feedback and regular development sort of in-person in the room is going away. And we strongly believe that the tools and the processes that existed pre-pandemic are just not going to cut it in this future hybrid world. And it's our responsibility and our mission to really build that from scratch. Awesome. And I mean, maybe you can tell us also a little bit more like how from feeling actually that pain and from identifying that there is massive potential in that space, how did you approach actually starting a company and building a product? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I tell people sometimes I'm an old school founder and an old school founders like relying on their own sort of intuition or their own ability to think about a solution for a problem that hasn't been invented before. And it's sort of part art and part science in the same way that it's very hard to encapsulate experience or judgment or perceptual ability to make decisions, understand problems into a clean framework. But for me, I think when I left Uber and I thought about sort of what was really next for me and my desire to sort of focus on something that I felt very deeply about, I think as I sat down to write my thoughts around the topic or research around the topic, it kept coming back to the same pain of performance reviews, really. And that cluster of two weeks every six months where leaders like me had to write 20, 30 of these reviews, people locked themselves away for days at a time. You start from a blank sheet of paper and from scratch. And I think that anxiety and that feeling was hard to shake off. And as you think about sort of converting that pain to a product, it's really about thinking about how someone's day to day can look differently in order to alleviate that pain or provide relief to them. And for us, it sort of became a wish of, hey, when it came to reviews, what if everything that had been done over the course of those six months magically sort of came together and compounded to create sort of an output that was generated over time and culminated in sort of a review or a document versus people starting from a blank slate every six months. And as you start breaking things down, you start thinking about what that might look like in a product form. And we can go into sort of some of the early design decisions we made that were driven by us trying to imagine this future whereby these inputs were bite-sized and fit together into an overall output versus happening in six-month chunks. So you had a pain point. You had a solution that you tried to convert out of this pain point. But I was just wondering how much information did you had back in the days? And also, how much of your own, let's say, gut feeling or intuition did you use to shape that new solution for something that hasn't been invented? Yeah. I think at the end of the day, when you build a new product from scratch, you are ultimately relying on your own data-driven judgment of being in that pain. Because what we realized is when we first started talking to folks about what we were solving, the only thing they could imagine were clunky, not well-designed, not fun-to-use products they had seen before. Because unless you bring something new and you're able to set up at some level, visualize it, people can't see it. And so that initial process of starting out, be it sort of five screens on Figma or an overall UX, is very much something that you come up with on your own. And then as you share that, as you socialize that, that tends to crystallize into a product over time. And I think one thing that I learned early on in our process is that who you invite into that world of being a thought partner or a design partner or an advisor in that product development process is actually extremely critical if you're trying to build something that is disruptive or different. And people talk about sort of the early adopter mentality. And frankly, if you look around the world, not everybody is an early adopter. And when you show something drastically new to someone who is not an early adopter, the feedback they might provide or the lens through which they might see it may shut you down in a way that's actually not productive for what you're building. And so I think beauty is in the heart of the beholder pretty often, and that applies to products too. And therefore, I had the privilege and the benefit of really putting myself in the shoes of being an Uber GM and running a sort of fast-paced 50% org and really trying to imagine what I would want in a product in that situation that would allow me to both accurately, as well as with minimal time usage, fairly assess and develop my team over time. And there was definitely a ton of reliance on the initial perspective, but also as we started building out and raise some capital, we sort of put together a product advisory board very, very carefully as well of leaders that sort of agreed with that pain, came from some of the world's leading companies across a widely different set of functions to sort of create that committee that built together. And I mean, let's maybe quickly talk about these thought partners, right? You mentioned it's important to carefully select them. So I would be curious to also understand who have been your thought partners that you involved early and how did you select them? Yeah. So again, this is sort of part art, part science. Now, obviously I had the benefit of spending two years at Stanford Business School and was lucky to sort of put together in a group of peers that were passionate about developing teams. And a lot of Stanford's business school program spends a lot of time on how you become a leader and how you think about feedback and you think about development. So a couple of folks came out of sort of my experiences at business school and folks across management consulting and tech and consumer who sort of were passionate about this problem and were equally frustrated about tools that the organizations were using. Others came through word of mouth referrals because people spoke to their friends about it. So there's a COO of a large media agency in New York that became part of our advisory board because he heard about us and was super leaned into being part of the solution. And so it was a combination of folks that we knew, but also folks that thought about us and wanted to be part of the movement early on. And for us ensuring diversity in terms of not only gender and race, but also function and background was quite important in carefully selecting these group of people because ultimately products that only fit a very narrow set of perspectives don't end up scaling over time. And for us, we really wanted to make sure that we were building a product that was applicable and available over time to every manager in the world who was thoughtful and wanted to build their teams the right way. And so ensuring that there was diversity of perspective represented right from the get-go was an important factor for us. But there are companies that choose to verticalize in a function or an industry much earlier on, and they might construct an advisory board that only has say product managers or only has partners in management consulting firms. It really depends also on what the founder is looking to build and the sort of applicability that they want to have over time. And there's different schools of thought on how wide or how narrow people should go in the early days. You said you had like the fortune to be at Stanford and having that network as well as the word of mouth that helped your people coming to you. So let's say I am a founder who doesn't have that big of a network. How would you recommend me to approach finding the right people? Yeah, that's a really good question. And luckily we live in a world today where, you know, connecting with folks is a lot easier. I think platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn have helped a lot of founders and early stage product folks build in public and find an audience and sort of meet like-minded folks. And so I think for those that are blessed with people in the network that are sort of like-minded and aligned with what they're building, I think Twitter as a platform, especially in the US and LinkedIn as a platform internationally, I think people have found success putting up things on Product Hunt and sort of finding like-minded folks together. And so the internet's obviously leveler in many ways to help people source like-minded folks in places that they may not readily have it available. Do you think at the beginning it's already important for me to create a kind of frame of the people that I would like to hire in terms of cultural aspects, soft skills, hard skills? How would you do the prep work? I think it really depends. Are you talking about building out a team or building out an advisory board for your product? I would say both. Yeah. So I think from a team perspective, and again, this is my first venture. And so although I've spent a lot of time around founders, this is the first time I actually did it. And one thing people talk a lot about complementary skill sets and aligned values. And with aligned values comes aligned sort of ambitions and aligned pain tolerance. And sometimes I tell folks that when it comes to building a startup, people don't necessarily think about that. This is in many ways a long, painful journey as well. And if there isn't sort of strong pain tolerance, it can be hard to develop the grit to go through the journey. And in my experience, what drives grit more than anything else is mission orientation and sort of people truly being passionate about what is being solved. Because if people are obsessed with the problem, they will stay dogged about eventually finding the right solution. But if they're passionate about an idea or they're passionate flipping a business in two years and getting acquired, I think that their ability to stay the long course is much harder. But it also goes back to the founder or the founders or the kind of company they're looking to build. I'm looking to build a company that I work at for the rest of my life and sort of build tribe members who come alongside that and be building with me for a very long time. But I know there are founders who don't feel that way and they chase an opportunity and they will go raise venture capital from a set of funds that want them to chase an opportunity as quickly as possible. And if they don't succeed, that's fine. You sort of move on to the next thing. And I think it's very much dependent on the ethos of the founder as well as an extension of that, the ethos of the early investors in the company and what they support in terms of culture and longevity and general ethos of the organization. Nice. Awesome. I mean, I think you mentioned some really good points here, right? In terms of getting the right feedback, getting the right people in the importance of diversity. And I think that's something that we can highlight again. I think especially if we look at an area like Silicon Valley, you oftentimes find startups that are founded, run, advised by a very specific group of people that's very similar. They're all similar to themselves. And I think that automatically brings in some biases into the product. And I think one thing that I would also talk a little bit more about is feedback at the beginning that might also be counterproductive, right? If you ask people about a product or you just have an idea and you get their feedback. I mean, it's a little bit like Henry Ford, right? The very famous quote of like, if you ask people what they want, they would have said faster horses. Nobody would ask. Nobody would tell you build a car if they've never seen one, right? You're always catching me with that story, Alex. Yeah. I mean, it's a classic. I almost feel bad about sharing it because everyone has probably heard it 1000 times, but I think it's very true. It's especially like spending a lot of time working also on research itself, right? It really also comes down to the questions that you ask people and asking someone for feedback on a product is usually not as helpful as asking them more around the situation they're in, the problems that they're having, right? Because you're trying to find solutions to solve a specific problem. So how did you make sure that the problem you had was actually a problem worth solving or finding a solution to would be viable to a lot of people? Great question. And I think there are a few different dimensions to it. So we should parse it out. You know, I think a lot of people talk about two types of companies, companies that are product led and companies that are sales led. And what tends to happen in sales led organizations is that they end up building what a customer thinks that they want or say that they want. And most enterprise products in the workplace have tended to over time be sales led whereby it sort of becomes a cacophony of features that don't really play well together. And that is in many ways, the bane of enterprise software, because it's been built to check boxes, not to really make users fall in love. Whereas consumer products on the other side are much more dependent on people falling in love because they're not nicely paying for it and tend to be sort of more product led organizations. Obviously in the last decade, we've seen Slack, Notion, Asana, others really flip that around. And we're very much in the infancy of that movement overall. And I think what is most important in that endeavor is to be super aligned with who you're investing and the expectations they have from founders of the organization in both sort of what type of traction they really care about. And again, that can be number of signups, it can be revenue, or it can be engagement and usage. And each of them also have from a traction perspective, have a different approach to what you focus on. And we were very lucky both in terms of angels we brought on board as well as institutional investors that they were very aligned with the size of the problem. And the fact that performance management and L&D as products or categories, arguably is probably one of the most universally hated categories in the workplace globally. And there's about $380 billion of spend that companies undertake to make people better or developed. And we are lucky that we've never ever met someone who said this is not a problem. And that's a huge privilege to have as a founder because it actually makes hiring easier. It makes a lot of other things easier because people resonate much more with what you're looking to solve. Now, obviously, when large problems are unsolved, there's a reason for it. And I think it's very important as a founder to also have hypotheses as to why the problem is unsolved. And I think this goes back to, has someone really gone and tried to doggedly solve this problem for the end user versus trying to make an enterprise sale. And rightly or wrongly, a lot of our competitors and adjacent product companies are really focused on driving a sale. And that's based on going to the website and seeing if it says request a demo or it says try for free or free for life. And it'll tell you exactly how a company operates. And the only way to really build an amazing product in any category is to be product and let your product really drive usage versus the sale of it. But you also got to time that right. And so I don't know if it really answered the question, but for me, the approach that the company takes and the tribe that they put together, both in terms of, not only in terms of customers and team, but also investors in many ways dictates whether you talk to a client that are trying to build a faster horse or you're trying to build a car. It also takes longer to build a product that you have deep conviction around. And so, Notion, which a lot of people now know, a lot of people don't know that Notion is not a new company. It's been around for close to a decade and their founders built the product for a very long time and built a product that was fairly complex before they were to figure out how to educate folks and really drive stickiness with it. And so product companies can take longer as well and nothing's an overnight success and that takes more patience as a founding team or an early stage company. So would you say that it's the key to not falling into the enterprise trap where you're building a product for your customers is finding the right investors? Because I mean, bottom line, you're also building a product for bigger corporations. If I'm an end consumer or a freelancer or the manager of or the founder of a two people team, then I probably wouldn't use a product like Undo, right? So is it the investor or what else is needed to actually don't fall into that trap of like, because you might lose people, I assume, to like, there's always the risk to lose someone to a competitor who's willing to build exactly that feature that me as a big company wants. Yes. But again, keep in mind when you say as a big company that also has different constituencies within that organization. So you might have what an IT team needs versus an HR team needs versus what a leader of a 10 person org needs versus what an IC needs. And all of these people work in this bigger company. And in fact, when we worked with folks on our product advisory board, we had companies like Snap and BCG and H&M and GitHub and large enterprises represented. But in every case, we tried to make sure we picked a leader of the team and sort of made that person the star or the hero, the heroine of the show in really dictating what would move the needle in driving impact for the organization versus a functional stakeholder who's also deeply important, but their needs are much more around the implementation and the integrations and the packaging around it versus the core day to day. And so even the personas that you focus on within an organization or within a customer segment can lead you to focusing very scarce early engineering and product resources to different things. And a good example is, do you focus on driving engagement in the product or do you integrate with say an HR information system? And for us, it was super important that even today, we are much more focused on what will drive engagement in the product versus necessarily what will integrate into existing systems. Obviously over time, we will build more and more integrations, but that is a secondary focus versus really nailing an experience that teams fall in love with. I have a question. I mean, whether you have good investors, bad investors, a good board or good customers, bad customers, I think every company, especially in your area, faces at some point the challenge where you have to decide to rather go product focused or sales focused, right? Because I mean, you have to make money, you have to stay in business, you have to make your stakeholders happy. And I don't want to ask where you draw the line, but I would like to ask how and when you draw the line. Great question. I think the reality is that you do both in the long run. You have to sacrifice, right? Yeah, but I think the sequencing plays a big role. So if you look at a company like Notion today, and it's a great example, today their non-product organization is actually much bigger than their product organization. And that's because in how they go to market and the time they spend on educating customers about the product and that GTM engine, which you might call quote unquote sales focused, is now a bigger sort of focus of the organization to ensure that customers can really drive success with this amazing product that they've built over time. But you could argue that if they did not spend a lot of the earlier staying doggedly focused on the right product experience, they would have also not built a breakthrough product that could have competed so effectively with sort of other wiki or document management platforms. And that really goes back to, in many ways, the conviction of the founder or the CEO in terms of what the right strategy is, but also something that you can change over time. So to give you an example, us as a company today, once we've launched the product, is really focused on paying customers. Because we think that who has willingness to pay will also help us accelerate to find the right pockets of pain that would then allow us to maybe through product led motions to a trial or a freemium really expand into a target segment. So I almost feel like a company every three or six months also has the ability on whether they focus on user growth or revenue growth or engagement. And you sort of have to be agile or fluid about how you dictate that based on where you are as a company, what you're looking out to prove, what are some of your key risks, and how do you sort of mitigate those risks as you grow the business? And I think here comes the job of the CEO in place, right? To make sure that you hit the right strategy at the right time. And I think Airbnb is also a very good example. They spent a lot of time at the beginning in building the product. It took a very long time until they really went out of it for scale and also eventually changed their focus on rather onboarding new customers instead of continue working on the product, because they reached at some point the state where they were able to say, okay, now we use what we have to scale upwards. But from a strategic point of view, I mean, there are obviously these phases going on where you have to decide, but I know many companies and CEOs who get under so much pressure that they usually tend to rather focusing on sales because this is what is in quotes the easiest solution, even though it isn't. But the long-term pay you have to make is obviously very high. Totally. And also the solution where you have most transparency on if things work or not, right? Sales numbers are usually easy to read, or it's a very clear KPI while actually looking at the value that you create for the users that can take a longer time, right? Because you still need to establish the product. You need to land on the market. It's easier to close an enterprise deal promising a solution. Totally. And again, I think that it's obviously much harder to define a category or build a new category versus build a copycat competitor. And the reality is if you look at the bulk majority of venture capital dollars, they tend to chase sort of the second, third, fourth competitor of a category that's already been created versus sort of chase a category created. And that's because it's much easier to actually build a grocery business in Indonesia focused on the success that's happened already in the US or Europe versus sort of build something globally from scratch. But I think this goes back to, again, the conviction and sort of desire of the founding team and why they sort of got there and what is their stated purpose of being. And are they there to fundamentally solve a problem that's unsolved and reinvent something from scratch? Or are they looking to sort of build a business? And one of the things that people sometimes don't differentiate between is a startup and a small and medium enterprise or a small and medium business. And a startup is fundamentally about building something brand new and disrupting something that hasn't been fixed yet versus a lot of SMEs is about following what's already tried and tested. But the way I look at it is that the amount of effort and time and sweat, blood and tears it takes to build a company for me is not really worth it unless I'm really doing something that feels transformational at a global scale. Well, maybe as one closing point, you mentioned the product advisors at the beginning of the people that you brought in for the right feedback early in the process. So I think this is actually a format that we've never really discussed in detail in this podcast, because I think often we focused on actual user feedback in terms of like pain point analysis, running them through some prototypes to not necessarily ask for their product feedback, but to more look at like how they're using it. So I would actually love to further discuss how you work with advisors and how you actually manage to not have any biased opinions in the room of like people who are not the actual users, because they might not be the final engineer or IT person who's being evaluated like through the product. And I may want to throw in, since we haven't discussed the advisory board at all, maybe you can quickly share with us what is the role of it? Mm-hmm. So, great questions. And I think one thing to make clear that each of these advisory board members are leaders of teams in their day-to-day whereby they are running their own organizations. And the reason how they came on board is really to fix the problem for themselves in their respective companies and their respective roles, but from a lens of an engineering leader or a product leader or a management consulting partner or a sort of head of operations or a head of BD. And typically what we do is we sort of have a quarterly meeting whereby we sort of come together to walk through big evolutions of the product and where we are focused on and get feedback on specific features of product roadmap directions. But then also having either a biweekly or a monthly check-in with them individually in terms of their own experience in using the product, thinking of implementing it within their team, responses from more junior members of their team. And so, this is very much a sort of working group of folks that are intimately familiar with the product and are thinking about the product from the lens of their own organizations too. And in many cases, they might be running a 100% org or a 10% org or a 50% org. So, there's diversity there, but in all cases, they are leaders. One of the things that we actually figured out as a blind spot in this process is that we were quite focused on the leaders and not enough focused on ICs or individual contributors in a team. And for a product that is focused on collaborative team development, it's important that we add significant value to both leaders and ICs. And actually, we augmented the board over time with individuals who were in IC roles so that we had that perspective. And actually, one of our blind sides was that we were more focused on the leader or the manager because that's also the lens that I knew better from more recently in my career. And we've been able to sort of make adjustments along the way that we're ensuring that we're holistically getting all perspectives into perspective as we build a product. Amazing. Hujar, I think looking at that way, founding a startup and also in the way you set it up, I think we haven't heard that and it was really inspiring to me. I mean, from my side, there are many, many founders out there right now in maybe a similar situation you have been before. And I was just wondering, what's the number one learning that you've made that you would like to share with those people who eventually listening to this episode? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's hard to crystallize into one learning. But I think one of the things I focus the most on as a founder today is sort of managing my own self-energy and my own conviction about the day to day. Because one of the things that is not often spoken about is founder mental health and self-doubt and the sort of impact of building a company has on people because you constantly have to be out there being strong to your team and to your customers and to your investors. And if you want to sort of really make it in the long run, really focusing on your own psyche and your own energy and your own mental health is one of the most important things every founder can do. That's so amazing. And actually, before we close, there is a story that I have to share because I had today a one-on-one coaching with a CEO. And I can't share too much information, but this person was very overwhelmed by too many to-dos that this person shouldn't do as a CEO, like setting up accounts for employees or doing administrative stuff that can be handed over to other people. And I just want to share everybody, whether you are a product manager, product designer, CEO, VP of something, always ask yourself if you have to do those things and what it will cost you if you do things that are unnecessary. Couldn't agree more. Absolutely. Well, with that said, I think it's a good closing and I wish you all the best. We will make sure to also link you. And if people want to connect with you and learn more from your experience, I think they will be able to find you on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Twitter, projollylongloop.com. It's easy to reach me. Amazing. Awesome. Prajal, it was great to have you in our session. Have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you for having me. This was fun. All right. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.