Future of Work: Kapil Rathee of Junglee Games says product managers are responsible to create a work environment

At the third edition of YourStory’s flagship tech event Future of Work, Kapil Rathee, the Chief Product Officer and President of Junglee Games, spoke about the importance of building the right product. He said, as a product manager, it is very important to ask oneself a question – ‘Are you building the right product or building the product right’.

“Most of the time, we think about building the product right. The product needs to be scalable and seamless, it needs to have great user experience, and so on. But what we are missing fundamentally is that we are not putting the same effort which is needed to understand why build a product in the first place. And if you are building a product, are you building the right product?,” asks Kapil.

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Kapil then said, even if one builds a fantastic product, which is ahead of time, if it is not the right product, then will people actually pay for it or consume it?

Quoting Albert Einstein, he said that one should spend 95 percent of the time in identifying the problem, and only five percent should go in for solving the problem.

He added that identification of the problem and putting the problem statement out is often hard. Hence, it needs to be defined clearly.

“Today, we have enough technology to help us through that. We no longer have to depend on our guts or hypothesis. We could instead leverage the data, talk to customers, reach out to them more seamlessly, look at competitive landscape, etc., all through technology,” explains Kapil.

Kapil said, as product managers one needs to focus on what are the problems and how to solve them.

According to him, it is the responsibility of the product managers to create a very creative work environment.

“Product managers are at the centre of the business where they are talking to almost every stakeholder in the company. Hence they are at the heart of the collaboration.”

It is, however, not about creating amazing products, but it is also about creating value at the end of the day. It is important to focus on what value you are creating for yourself, for the companies, for the stakeholders, for customers, etc.

The right way of developing a product is following the steps correctly and chronologically - identify the problem, ideate, simulate, innovate and create, measure, analyse, and finally, scale or stop.

He said the things that needs to be considered are whether the product is desirable (Do people want it?), feasible (Can you build it?), viable (is LTV>CAC), scalable (How big can you grow?) and sustainable (How long can you last?).

As part of the session, Kapil also spoke about understanding business KPIs, and on driving the business in collaboration with the business functions.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

A big shout out to our Future of Work 2020 Sponsors: Alibaba Cloud, Larksuite, Vodafone Idea Limited, Gojek, Adobe, Udaan, Pocket Aces, Junglee Games, ShareChat, Open, Vestaspace Technology, Maharashtra State Innovation Society, Kristal.AI and GetToWork; and our Knowledge Partner: Ascend Harvard Business Review.