20 Product Robinhood CPO on The 3 Stages of Product Management, How to Structure and Execute Great Product Reviews, The Secret to Building a WorldClass Hiring Funnel in Product Team Building with Aparna Chennapragada

In this episode of "20 Product," host Harry Stebbings is joined by Apurna Chenna Pragada, Chief Product Officer at Robinhood, who shares her journey from a non-medical family member in India to a tech enthusiast and influential product leader. Apurna recounts her time at Google, emphasizing the evolution from desktop to mobile and her belief in the intersection of finance and tech as the next big platform shift. She discusses the art and science of product management, stressing the importance of solving real problems for people at various stages of product development. Apurna also offers insights into hiring and onboarding product managers, the nuances of product reviews, and the value of resilience and adaptability in product teams. Throughout the conversation, she advocates for a customer-centric approach and the significance of understanding technology's role in driving product success.

• Host Harry Stebings introduces the podcast "20 Product" where top product leaders share insights.
• The podcast aims to uncover tips, tactics, and strategies for creating and scaling successful products and product teams.
• Aparna Chennapragada, Chief Product Officer at Robinhood, is the guest in the episode.
• Aparna's background includes 12 years at Google and roles as an angel investor and board member at Capital One.

"This is 20 product with me, Harry Stebings. Now this is the show where we're joined by the world's best product leaders."

The quote introduces the podcast and its focus on product leadership and expertise.

"Today, I'm so thrilled to be joined by Apurna Chenna Pragada, chief product officer at Robinhood."

Harry Stebings expresses excitement about having Aparna Chennapragada on the show, highlighting her current role at Robinhood.

• Airtable is promoted as a tool for keeping people, workflows, and data connected.
• Productboard is presented as a platform for product teams to understand customer needs and prioritize features effectively.
• Maze is introduced as a tool for continuous product research, offering discounts to podcast listeners.

"With airtable, your team works from a single source of truth that is always up to date."

The quote explains the benefit of using Airtable for team collaboration and data management.

"Product board can help you create a scalable, transparent and standardized process so your pms really understand what their customers need."

This quote emphasizes the value of Productboard in helping product managers prioritize features based on customer insights.

• Aparna shares her journey from India, highlighting her family's medical background and her own passion for math and computer science.
• She started her career at Akamai, a web infrastructure company, which led to her interest in product development and scaling.
• Her time at Google involved working on products like Google Search, Google Assistant, and Google Maps.

"I grew up in India. I was the black sheep of the family. I was literally the only and the non doctor in the family."

Aparna describes her unique position in a family of medical professionals, which led to her pursuing a different path in computer science.

"Of course at Google I did a bunch of that."

The quote succinctly summarizes Aparna's extensive experience in product development during her tenure at Google.

• Aparna reflects on her 12-year tenure at Google, noting the evolution of the company through different eras.
• She emphasizes the complexity of Google Search and the challenges of building products for mobile devices.
• Aparna also discusses the future of technology, particularly in finance and augmented reality.

"And I think the second Google was more around. Okay, how do you actually then start to think about the mobile era?"

This quote highlights the shift in focus at Google during Aparna's tenure, particularly towards mobile products.

• Aparna addresses the debate on whether product management is an art or a science.
• She believes it depends on the product's stage and context, with different approaches required for solving, scaling, and sustaining products.

"I think the answer really depends on, well, what products are you building and what stage and in what context."

The quote emphasizes the contextual nature of product management and the need to adapt strategies based on the product lifecycle.

• Aparna defines product management as solving problems for real people, focusing on the customer.
• She stresses the importance of not losing sight of the individual user, even in large-scale product management.

"A product manager is someone who solves problems for people."

Aparna provides a concise definition of a product manager's core responsibility, highlighting the focus on problem-solving for users.

• Aparna discusses the balance between following customer feedback and relying on gut intuition in product development.
• She shares a personal example with Google Lens, where initial U.S.-focused research led to fancy use cases, but real value was found when research expanded to India.

"To me, you see tweets, forms from people, you see kind of like books written about product management. For me it is really context and stage and person dependent."

The quote reflects Aparna's view that the decision to follow feedback or intuition is dependent on the specific context and stage of the product.

• User research is crucial in product management, especially in understanding how customers interact with products.
• Researchers must process information and ask the right questions, focusing on customers' current and past behaviors rather than hypothetical future use.
• Emphasizing the importance of not using customer dialogue as a filter for all decisions but as part of a delicate dance in product development.

"You have to listen to the customers, but where and who, but also the others part of it. And this is where user research, and I see this like front and center in Robinhood."

This quote underscores the importance of user research in product management, highlighting that listening to customers is essential but must be approached with consideration of context and the right questions.

• Founders should not rush to hire a product manager; it's a high-risk move that can negatively impact the company if the wrong person is hired.
• Early-stage product managers should be deeply invested in the problem space and act as a bridge between customer research and the minimum viable product.
• Hiring should focus on candidates with a high tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to hustle, rather than generalists or those with only domain experience.

"So if you outsource that job, that's a big risk for you. Right. You need to live and breathe that problem enough that at some point, if it becomes obvious that there's another person or there's a coprocessor, that will help, and, like, there's arms and legs that are needed here."

The quote advises founders to deeply understand and engage with the problems their company aims to solve before considering hiring a product manager, emphasizing the risk of outsourcing this critical role too early.

• The hiring process must be tailored to the stage of the company, with early-stage startups needing candidates who are driven and comfortable with uncertainty.
• Interviews should focus on past actions rather than just words, and back-channel references can be insightful.
• Case studies and simulations during the hiring process can help assess a candidate's product thinking and problem-solving abilities.

"The most important factor I would look for is just like the hustle and drive at that stage, at a later stage and for a different product, the domain experience may matter a lot more."

This quote emphasizes the need to prioritize hustle and drive over domain experience when hiring a product manager for an early-stage startup, as the company's needs will differ from those at a later stage.

• Common hiring mistakes include hiring too soon, confusing noise for influence, and prioritizing personality over the ability to collaborate and influence.
• Product leaders must identify key influencers within the team to help bring others along with the product vision.
• Onboarding should include a balance of listening and action, with clear identification of the first wins for new hires.

"But mistaking noise for influence and cloud, I think that's one of the things you see that don't mistake drama and activity for progress that people have made."

This quote highlights a common mistake in hiring, where apparent busyness or strong personalities are mistaken for effective influence or progress, emphasizing the need for discernment in evaluating candidates.

• Onboarding is often overlooked, especially for senior team members, but is crucial for integrating new hires into the product team.
• New hires should go through a learning phase, followed by a doing phase, with management identifying and setting up the first wins for success.
• The onboarding process should include deep product knowledge acquisition, immersion in customer data and research, and understanding of the underlying technology.

"And he talks about how it's onboarding you think about as two steps, actually. One is this first phase of come in, listen... And then there's a doing phase."

This quote from Aparna Chennapragada outlines a two-step onboarding process that begins with listening and learning, followed by action, to effectively integrate new product team members.

• The importance of a product manager understanding the technical aspects of the product they manage.
• The credibility loss that occurs when a product manager suggests simple changes that are technically complex and time-consuming.
• The value in finding quicker solutions that offer partial but significant improvements.

"Unless you understand the innards of it, you don't know what change takes two weeks versus what change takes two years."

This quote emphasizes the need for product managers to have a deep understanding of the technology behind their products to make informed decisions and maintain credibility with their engineering teams.

• The costly mistake of trying to make a non-thriving PM work for too long.
• The two patterns indicating a PM may not work out: lack of contextual competence and poor culture fit.
• The need for PMs to integrate into the existing team and acknowledge the current product ecosystem.

"The two patterns I've seen there that bite people, one is just like competence... The second kind of not thriving is less fixable. Loosely bucketed as culture fit..."

This quote highlights the two main reasons why new PMs might struggle: not having the necessary skills or knowledge for the specific context, and not fitting in with the company culture.

• The significance of product reviews and the disdain for unnecessary processes.
• The distinction between product reviews at different stages: solve, scale, and sustain.
• The necessity of having the right people, including problem solvers and cross-functional team members, present at product reviews.

"I'm a huge fan of product reviews... But there are different kinds of reviews this goes back to what we were talking about earlier on the stages of the products, the solve scale and sustain..."

This quote describes the speaker's approach to product reviews, highlighting the importance of tailoring the review process to the product's stage of development.

• The challenge of giving feedback that is seen as suggestions rather than directives.
• The importance of prefacing comments to clarify when they are directives and when they are suggestions for consideration.

"As a leader, you have to have to separate that out. And that's probably one of the biggest mistakes me, other product leaders, senior execs make at any company."

The quote stresses the importance of clear communication from leaders to ensure their feedback is interpreted correctly and not mistaken for orders.

• The importance of taking good meeting notes and assigning clear action items with responsible parties.
• The need for product area leads to prioritize action items and communicate these priorities back to the team.

"Not all action items are made equal... Some are considerations, some are like high priority things."

This quote underlines the need to differentiate between various levels of priority among action items resulting from product reviews.

• The error of not conducting stage-appropriate reviews.
• The problem of unclear ownership and agenda during reviews, leading to ineffective meetings.

"One is certainly this stage appropriate review, as I call it... The other extreme is the cacophony of a review."

The quote identifies two frequent mistakes in product reviews: not matching the review process to the product's development stage and having disorganized meetings without clear leadership.

• The experimentation with different formats for remote product reviews, including having active participants and observers.
• The benefits of allowing junior team members to observe reviews to learn the process.

"We tried a couple of experiments here... It's actually been good to kind of expose a few folks for who are junior, who are kind of like learning the ropes."

This quote discusses the adaptations made to product review processes to accommodate remote participants and provide learning opportunities for less experienced team members.

• Aparna Chennapragada discusses the initial hypothesis that personalization in search would greatly impact user satisfaction.
• Personalization was thought to be a key factor due to the individual nature of mobile devices.
• The hypothesis did not hold true for search, as the most important signal was the specific query input by the user.
• Location was noted as an exception where personalization did matter in search results.

"The phone should do a lot more for me. Damn it. But where I started though is that actually I revved up excitement around personalization as an effort in search. And so you type in something, depending on who you are, maybe you need different results and different content, et cetera. Long story short, that hypothesis didn't pan out."

This quote explains Aparna's initial belief in the importance of personalization in search functions and the subsequent realization that it was not as impactful as expected.

• Aparna learned the importance of testing hypotheses on a limited scale, especially in a startup environment.
• Despite the failure of the initial personalization hypothesis, Aparna did not abandon the concept and later applied it to Google Now, which successfully utilized push notifications for personalized content.
• This experience taught her that sometimes only a small adjustment is needed to find the right idea.

"The one big thing I got out of it was to actually have a limited test of the hypothesis... But I think the second one is this, that same idea, I never let go of it... And that was really helpful for customers."

Aparna emphasizes the value of controlled experimentation and persistence in refining a product idea, as demonstrated by her experience transitioning from personalized search to Google Now.

• Aparna believes in supporting team members, especially when they take risks based on their hypotheses.
• She criticizes performance evaluation systems that only reward metrics movement, as they can create a risk-averse culture.
• Encouraging risk-taking and hypothesis testing is crucial for a company's growth and innovation.

"I think part of it is you as a manager and a leader having their back... Because if you have a company where you say, hey, what metrics did you move? And that's the only way you can actually get recognized and promoted or evaluated, then what you end up having is a bunch of risk averse folks who'll just all gravitate towards the sure bet, right."

The quote reflects Aparna's stance on the importance of leadership support in fostering a culture that values innovation and risk-taking over playing it safe.

• Aparna finds that angel investing has provided her with a dual perspective that benefits both her investment and product roles.
• She stresses the importance of focusing on frontline problems and solutions rather than getting caught up in buzzwords.
• Her investment experience also allows her to predict potential outcomes for product issues based on past experiences.

"You're caught up in this buzword. Bingo... When you talk to builders, you kind of get down to the frontline obsession... I think the other direction is, I think, like some of the problems that the founders describe. I have seen this movie before, and there are two possible endings."

Aparna discusses how her angel investing experience has honed her ability to cut through industry jargon and focus on real problems, as well as anticipate challenges in product development.

• Aparna suggests that new product leaders should start by being helpful to their team, focus on solving specific problems, and be patient.
• She addresses the challenge of balancing company building with product building in a dynamic environment like Robinhood.

"Step one, make coffee for the team... Step two, solve a problem for focus on specific problems that the team has. Step three, be patient. Don't rush in."

This advice encapsulates the initial steps Aparna recommends for product leaders to integrate into a new role effectively and build trust with their team.

• Aparna wants to dispel the myth that successful product people fit a specific stereotype.
• She advocates for recognizing the diversity in the product industry and the importance of practitioners sharing their experiences.

"Awesome. Product people come in all colors, all shapes, all forms, all ages."

The quote challenges the stereotype of the typical "tech bro" in the product industry, highlighting the variety of individuals who contribute to the field.

• Aparna believes that the unsung heroes in product are those who have persevered through a company's ups and downs.
• She suggests that these individuals provide valuable insights and deserve recognition for their steadfast leadership during challenging times.

"The unsung heroes are the ones that actually stuck with kind of the ups and downs and actually make the company emerge."

Aparna's quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the contributions of those who have helped navigate a company through its most difficult periods.

• Aparna is impressed by individuals who, despite controversies, work authentically on their craft and make a comeback.
• She uses Aziz Ansari's approach to his career as a metaphor for product strategy, valuing authenticity and dedication.

"I really liked the fact that there's no short of controversy and had kind of like this big rise, this turbulence, and the way he consistently kind of came back and quietly started to work on the craft in an authentic way."

The quote illustrates Aparna's admiration for resilience and authenticity, drawing parallels between personal growth and product strategy development.