Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

Tune in to learn how to differentiate your product even if you offer something similar to your competitors, why you should integrate user feedback at the very beginning of the development process, and learn about specific situations where seeking customer feedback would do more harm than good.About AvadhootAvadhoot Bhambare is a product executive. In 2020, he left his role as Lead Product Manager at PayPal to join Womply as the Director of Product Management. Being resourceful when things hit a tough spot, he tackles problems at their root - or how he puts it “I always look at any problem by solving it structurally”. Sometimes, he bites off more than he can chew by being scrappy and being quick to say that he can do it - but, with a long career working with Olympus, Citi, Cisco, Paypal, and Womply it seems to have worked out quite well for him.  SHOW NOTES:0:00 | Introduction to Avadhoot Bhambare00:52  | Nickel and dime pricing quarrels: pricing a harddrive 03:14 | Creating synergy between UX designers and product managers05:38 | Aligning teams and skillsets at Womply08:36 | Differentiating your product offering in the b2b market10:22 | 3 things you can do when you don’t have enough capital to create your own infrastructure13:50 | Acquiring the skill of thinking from the customer’s perspective OR What product managers usually forget17:53 | Bringing user feedback into the development process immediately19:37 | How to get user feedback before investing money in production21:20 | Difficulties with Olympus: a funny story on language barriers in Tokyo24:35 | What should project managers start doing tomorrow? 25:08 | Aspects of product development that money cannot fix25:48 | Should you ask your users what they want you to build? OR Special use cases where user feedback is NOT useful.27:04 | When should you fix a product problem with money? 27:41 | Believing that you can do it, against all odds29:09 | Why you should focus on building relationships in your companyQUOTES:“There will always be your competition who will be giving a similar offering and all. I think what differentiates you is how you treat your customers.” [09:33]“Understand more about their users. Involve all the stakeholders like specifically the designers who people bring in along with your core engineers. And always think about what can go wrong.”   [24:44] “Ownership or the loyalty between the team is something you cannot get on any budget.” [25:22] “Particularly in a corporate career, you have to work with a lot of people. The more friends, the more acquaintances you have in different parts of the ecosystem, it helps you to accelerate your work. I would focus on that.” [29:47]  Connect with Our GuestFollow Avadhoot Bhambare:LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/avadhootbhambare/ Womply: https://www.womply.com/ 

Conversation highlights: - Removing biases in AI decision making and product management (data privacy, AI ethics)- Product Council at EdCast: teams, processes, and the CEO veto- Business epics vs. architectural epics: importance of planning processes - Bhaskar’s top 10 go-to metrics About Bhaskar Bhaskar is the Global Head of Product Management & AI at EdCast, a global e-commerce platform. In the past, he led product management, data science, and engineering teams in companies like Oracle and Informatica. His product management experience includes leading product strategy, defining go-to-market strategies for products in multiple business domains.

Highlights: - Six Seals of product development: from defining product vision to launch and optimization (key responsibilities of a PM)- Product-Market Fit survey: measuring value to customers - How Ale manages product teams at Payfit - Most reliable frameworks in the product development process at Payfit About AleAle is focused on enabling cross-functional teams to deliver user-centric experiences on eCommerce and SaaS products. He is the Global Director of Product Management at PayFit, a payroll software for companies. At Payfit, Ale leads a cross-functional team of Product Managers, Designers and Engineers to scale the adoption of existing products and find product-market fit for new ones.

Highlights:- Why onboarding is a critical part of your customer experience- The significance of establishing a cross-functional onboarding team- What is the EUREKA framework - How to transition from free to paid and offering more ‘free’ in your product.About Ramli: Ramli John is well known in the Toronto ecosystem as a demand gen marketer. A product growth marketer with over 10 years of experience, he runs a successful podcast as the founder and host of the Growth Marketing Today and Managing Director at Product Led Institute. Before this, Ramli started as a full stack developer and a data analyst and now he helps product-led companies convert more free trial users into lifelong customers. He also just launched his new book about user onboarding and customer activation – EUREKA, be sure to check that out. You can get the first chapter for free @ https://productled.com/eureka

Highlights: - How the AI Product Management at Veriff builds identity verification system - Concept behind Probabilistic Vs. Deterministic world: from an AI Product Managers’ viewpoint- How to make a machine do what humans can do using Artificial Intelligence - Liisi’s take on fully autonomous vehicles by 2025 About LiisiLiisi's career focus has been on automating processes using machine learning technologies. She’s a  Product Manager for Verification Engine at Veriff, a global tech company building a visionary AI driven verification platform. She is passionate about machine learning and how to create products that make our lives easier. Liisi has also been the Chief financial officer at NPO Geeks on Wheels for 7+ years.Links to AI courseshttps://www.deeplearning.ai/https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone

Follow Aram Melkoumov on Linkedin for highlight clips.Highlights:- Decision-making process for building features in a three-sided marketplace at Shipt- Battling confirmation bias and setting OKRs that match company’s goals- Secret sauce of managing people: PMs must be outcome-oriented, not output-orientedAbout Vishal Vishal is a Product Leader with a passion for building, launching, and scaling next-generation consumer products spanning marketplaces, transportation, advertising, search, messaging, gaming, and retail industries. He has been responsible for $Billions in revenue, opex, and P&L, and is passionate about solving audacious problems through a principled, outcome-oriented, and collaborative approach.

Follow Aram Melkoumov on Linkedin for highlight clips. Highlights: - CTO vs CPO: How Jean managed both roles at Brigad - Why it is important for PMs to build roadmaps around initiatives before introducing features - How and why a complicated product feature led to customer churn at Brigad - Importance of stakeholder of feedback and transparent processesAbout JeanJean Lebrument is the Co-Founder, CPO and past CTO at Brigad. He’s an absolute technical expert, and a former EPITECH graduate. Previously Jean worked at companies like Printic, Sounds, and Jamjitsu in France and abroad.

Feel free to DM our CEO Aram directly with product questions: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melkoumov/Specifically, in this event you’ll discover:- The right way to plan, strategize, design, and develop your MVP- The secret hacks we use to improve efficiency and output- A step-by-step breakdown of a real-world MVP we built for one of our clients’This is what our awesome panel looks like: Aram Melkoumov (Founder and CEO of Crowdlinker), Fiona Haller (Director of Product at Crowdlinker), Turgut Jabbarli (Senior Product Delivery Manager at Crowdlinker), and our host Sergey Ross.A word on who we are:Crowdlinker is an end-to-end digital product studio working with clients like Shopify, NBC Universal, MLSE, and over 50 others. Over the years, we’ve worked with Start-up Founders and Product Leaders across North America to bring their MVP to life by leveraging our design, development, and product talent.

Conversation highlights: - Future of AI in the next 10 years (multilingual voice recognition systems)- How deep learning works at companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple - How Miguel builds product roadmaps from talking to internal customers at Rev- Buying AI data to build products from companies like Appen and Define.AI About Miguel Miguel is the Head of AI R&D at Rev.com, an online marketplace that provides transcription engines to companies. Recently, Miguel’s teams’ paper titled, “Curriculum Optimization for Low-Resource Speech Recognition”  got accepted to ICASSP 2022. He is also the Co-Founder, Head of Speech Recognition and Machine Learning at Temi.com.

Conversation highlights: - “The Golden Cage” of Google employment - Product Marketing VS. Product Management from customer’s perspective- Why Product Marketers NEED to be a part of the early-stage product development- What PMs often forget to do after product launchConnect with Vaishnavihttps://www.linkedin.com/in/vaishnaviravi/About VaishnaviVaishnavi is the director of product marketing at Poka inc, a Web and mobile app that is the leading connected worker platform for driving manufacturing excellence. She is an Ex-Googler, who worked as a digital Marketing Consultant for large UK & US clients.