The Way of Product with Caden Damiano #149 How to Spot When the Data is Lying & The Most Effective Framework for Hypothesis-Driven Development w/ Kritarth Saurabh, VP of Product at Neat
What happens when your biggest customer asks for a feature that seems perfectly rational—backed by data, supported by sales, and tied to six-figure deals? Kritarth Saurabh shares how Neat avoided the build trap by pausing to validate what customers actually needed versus what they requested. This conversation explores the difference between output-driven and outcome-driven roadmaps, and why the hardest word in product management isn’t “no”—it’s “wait.”
Key Topics Discussed:
* The Mural integration trap: How responding to customer feature requests can lead to becoming an integration factory
* Output vs. outcome-driven roadmaps: Why shipping features fast matters less than scaling the right thing
* The validation framework: Moving from idea to experiment to validated roadmap before building
* Qualitative vs. quantitative data: When to trust customer anecdotes over usage metrics
* Zero-to-one product development: Building without data in early-stage companies
* Meeting equity and hybrid work: How Neat approaches designing for distributed teams
* Simplicity in hardware: The phone camera principle and why accessibility beats perfection
Key Quotes:
“You gotta have the conviction to take a step back and say, look, what is the real outcome that I’m trying to drive here?”
“If I had just spent maybe the next quarter validating this as an experiment...what they would’ve told me is they want App X, they want Figma, they want Y...This is not about just making the dollar signs with the mural. This is about the wider customer problem.”
“The hardest word in product isn’t ‘no’—it’s ‘wait.’”
“Often moving slow is a problem...but I think a bigger problem is not scaling the right thing.”
Featured Story:
The Mural Integration Decision: Kritarth details how a seemingly rational request for a Mural integration—backed by top-three usage data and tied to major deals—would have led Neat down the path of building an integration team that services infinite requests. By spending a quarter validating the underlying customer need, they discovered enterprises wanted workflow integration across their entire app ecosystem. This insight led to building an App Hub marketplace instead, creating a platform that scales exponentially rather than linearly.
Resources Mentioned:
* Book: Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
* Neat’s App Hub marketplace
* Product Kata framework
About the Guest:
Kritarth Saurabh is VP of Product Management at Neat, a video conferencing hardware company focused on simplicity and meeting equity. Before Neat, he spent years in consulting at Boston Consulting Group, Accenture, and Deloitte, working with Fortune 500 companies and startups on product development. He started his career as a software engineer and has experienced the full product lifecycle from ideation to sunsetting.
Connect with Kritarth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kritarthsaurabh/
About NeatNeat manufactures video conferencing devices designed to keep meetings simple and equitable, whether participants are in-office, remote, or hybrid. Their products include the Neat Board Pro, an all-in-one 65-inch integrated screen with camera and speaker capabilities.
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