Tarun Bansal

Hi. Uh, I'm Taruk. I'm currently working as a lead product manager in the geo platform. I am currently working in the IoT domain. Basically, we'll launch the product for our customer, which will be a b to b to c. So they will be enterprise customers, and we offer this product to the, uh, final customers of the enterprises. Uh, I'm, uh, currently working with you for around two and a half years. I worked in the IoT domain. And before that, I find out some of the products for JioHealth app, the digital health app. And using the AI, ML, and the other technologies, we launched the enterprise products and successfully onboard around 50 plus organizations. Before that, I worked in Capgemini as a senior product manager. It's where I worked in the financial services domain as well as insurance practice. I worked across various clients as a proxy product manager. So I worked in the A and G geography, then in the Indian market, then the European market, as well as the Middle East, and won the US clients. My major role was to enhance the customer experience, the involving the various new digital platforms, the customer onboard touch points, and the other, uh, various points where the how we can increase the customer awareness, the customer reach to the platform, the customer experience, the customer interaction with the platform, which could finally help them to bring the more customers as well as post, uh, purchase experience. Before that, I worked in TCS as a business analyst for 2 years, again, in the, uh, health care practice as a database analyst. So currently, uh, overall, my experience around 8 and a half in product management purely. I have total experience in 9 and a half. In terms of the product management, so my current role as per the overall domain, what I'm having is to create solving some of the very complex product problems using the newest technologies, uh, which is the very pure intersection of the strategy as well as the technology with the customer centric point of view. So my role involves to understand the customer problems, what are the who are customers, what problem they are facing, if they're facing any problem currently, or how we can help them in the current journey. So generally, designing the whole journey of the customer, then try to find out the gaps, the bottlenecks in the journey, try to solve that using the technology in the digital platform. So in the current role, using the IoT, what we have did is we have partnered up with the various Indian DISCOMS, which are the distribution companies. So if you know, the Indian government has set a agenda target to convert all the smart meter to digital meters by 2026. So what we're doing is the lot of data which is coming. And this is the customer data. The customer data should need to be secured, should need to be accessed only by the right permissions, right side of the thing, and it should be totally encrypted in the database. And when required for the particular source, it should be encrypted as per the GDPR, the other laws of the policy. And because this is the customer data, the customer should also have the access to the data to make the better understanding. So the whole idea is to use this data, just route the PI information, help them more accessible to the organization for which the customers belong to more to a customer, help them understand their pattern, the usage pattern, their problem. The DISCOM will understand that if there any theft is happening or there are any laws or any other unrelated activity might occur in the whole chain. As well as the customer point of view to understand their behavior, how they can improve it in terms of the total efficiency of the, uh, their house electricity in terms of finally converting into their rupees saving. So this is one. Before that, in terms of the health care, my whole product was to deslythehealthcaredomain in the enterprises. The companies are offering the services to the employees, but this is just ad hoc services. Our platform was giving the whole data point, giving the AI ML, tell them the whole how when these early warning signals are required for a customer based on the reports and other thing, and how they can use that for

Okay. Uh, have you have you demonstrated success defining launching excellent product or customer solution? Explain detail. Yes. So success is that, um, for me, just just a perception. When you launched a product, whatever thought, the goals, objective of the product, and you try to achieve that with the customer side feedback and the customer satisfaction. So if if I say, you will launch the product and the other aim was just to, you know, onboard 100 k customers in the 1st month and then have the revenues, all those things, this is just kinda goals. First goal is if your customer has liked your product or the actual customer, if they start using their product over the over and above the other product which are already there in the market, which has start coming up, how they're liking this, what is your, you know, stickiness ratio, the repetitive customer rate. This is what is success for me. So in my previous product, we talked about the JioHealth. Uh, the retention rate was around 75 to 78%, and most of the customers, like, I will say this, uh, reputed customer most of the transaction around 86 to 88% of the transaction were the repetitive transactions. This is how we can define the success, and this can be multiple reasons. We need to understand why our customer is repetitive on our platform. So in our case, the customer is repetitive because they like the UI, they like the services, and they can correlate to that particular service in the current situation. They find that in the in terms of other platform, there are multiple things. They couldn't they could not relate to that particular, uh, platform because they feel there are multiple things which are not highlighted only for as per their persona. So in our platform, it was a persona defined platform. So we will just ask the basic details of the customers, and based on their details, we'd cater the whole options, make the dynamic UI, and then provide the, uh, services as well as the content for the customer requirement. That's how the success rate are pretty high. So that will that is the, uh, success for me in terms of launching the platform. 2nd success was internally, which is the who are the team member, the stakeholder involved. They feel good about launching this product. They feel they have achieved something in terms of defining that, in terms of designing that, in terms of delivering that, or they learn something. The whole journey of launching a new enterprise platform to the Jio side being a you being such a big and complex organization but the whole good learning as a success for us as a part of a team. So we, like, first of all, defining the whole totally new organization because with Jio as is it the old b to c company earlier, And this is something new. Creating a b to b product was very new to the whole leadership as well as the team. So to 1st, to bring everyone the same platform to make sure that to make sure that this is important or why this is important and get the agreement for everyone. Then changing the whole mindset of the organization and then start working on the particular product in the quality new domain and then launching the product and what with the launch. Get a good response from the customer, a good, uh, response from the leadership who'd like who use the product in the emergency situations. They understand and this is why it's so important, how this is good from the other platform, and get the good reviews and good notes about the platform. And then they helped us to get to more clients. Basically, it was like, hey, we launch a product, being part of a small team, we try to reach out to various clients and try to convert that. Then say a product will launch in Jio also where Jio Employer, Jio Leaders. Then they use the product, they like it, and then they become a sales representative type of a thing where they help that to put a good words to their friends, in the big organization, to their clients, and then take us take us to them in front of them to give us the presentation demo and try to help them to convert them start using this product. Because this is not for the deal. This is a product which is very important for them, which is good in the as per the market standard and how this can be helpful for in their current situations also. So this is the success for me, which we get in last product also, and which we're trying to get in the current role also, which is

Do you have experience in UI UX design? If yes, can you share how you applied these skills with that example? Okay. So yeah. So UI UX is the core of the product management. And for me, I when I started my career in product management as a product manager, apart from the other thing, which was the customer journey, everything, all the thing, the first point was how to react to the customer. And when you talk to the customer, the for a digital platform point of view, the first thing the customer interact with your interface. So that's why the UI UX is very important from the first day itself for me when I joined as a product manager 8 and 8 half years back. So the for that time onwards, UI UX is the core of of the whole of the development. So obviously, UI UX is the fun thing, then you have the back end, then you have the processes and everything. But when the customer comes to your platform, you platform, you as your first thing they interact with the launch in which get the impression, the perception, their mind, then pitch push them to move ahead and then to motivate them to make a transaction on the platform. So we have a team here. Everywhere the team was there, small person, some 2, 3 person team other team was there, but it was not entirely the team. So being part of product manager, first, I need to understand what type of the UI or what type of the experience I did I want to give to the customers. So that comes as a mobile experience I did I want to give to the customers. So that comes as a mobile application. What are things that are important? Where to deploy the burger menu? Because most of the customer now using the left right hand mobile. So how it will be useful for them is being give one hand handy in the one hand. So where to put the buttons, what type of color coding to use, what type of screen to show, what option you feel the customer should see on the first screen when they land off, how to greet that customer. All those things are part of the my journey when I started doing the UI UX with them and proper, uh, design team. So I tell them these are the type of the very basic. So we do the very basic type of, uh, designing, very just a line line type of a line diagram. Tell them this is how the screen want. This is how the message should come. This is how the pop up will come. This is the color should be, and that's how the where do we put the burgers and all those things, burger menu and other options should be. 2nd part is once we do this, we create a very basic design, you will say, the UX from the, uh, design team. Then we test that with the proper set of customers. Either we do the a b testing depending upon the number of the customer, number of the user group, or we do the one to one testing, try to see if how they perceive this particular UI. Generally, we do the a b type of testing where we show them the 2 to different type of UI to make sure which one is they really like and why they really like. And then maybe we try to improve further and more CTS and other thing so that we can get a final design. Based on that approval from the user group itself, then we try to move that design to further stage. And this is a country's journey. When I would try to improve it, we see the CTS, these things are going. This is how the user is spending more time with this particular page and all those

Metrics. You track on success in the role product manager. So in terms of metrics, there are different metrics we track. So as a particular platform product manager, one of the few few metrics are the my platform uptime, number of customers which are acquired through the platform, how the customers are spending the time, basically, the customer the landing, uh, their drop rate in terms of the success of the the customer acquisition date, the depth of the probably the depth of the customer time in the particular page, number of the clicks on a particular CTS, uh, then obviously the final converter number of the converter customers. So the whole customer funnel, number of the customer landed on the platform, the different they went through the different transition of the pages and then how much are converted, the whole percentage part, whether drop rate are high, whether drop rate are low. This is very important from my point of view. So my KPIs are generally the platform success in terms of the customer likeness, uh, the API success rate, as well as the customer depth, how much time they're spending on a particular platform, the final conversion of the rate, the stickiness ratio, the repetitive transaction on the platform. The total revenue is a scheduled thing because as of now, because some of the services are free for the customer because we are built to a community for customer. Then the referrals, how many customers are referring as being how many being they are being the odd marketing person and referring the product to the to their colleagues and other friends. Uh, then the, uh, CSAT and the, obviously, CSAT score, obviously. Then the, uh, Delhi, uh, Delhi's DAU and the MAU for a platform. These are some of the success metrics from a platform. Apart from that, the as I mentioned, the API success rate, the platform uptime, the CPU utilization, all these are very important because if your platform is down or something has happened during the journey, then this is a very bad experience for your customers. So we have a team, whether the infra team, they keep on tracking all these, uh, the CPU utilization, the storage utilization, the data pipeline size, and other things, upgrade and success rate and the API ratio API failure rate to keep on tracking all these things daily basis. I try to improve that experience for the customer point of view. One important thing in terms of KPIs is whenever the funnel happens, where is the highest drop rate and how I can improve that further so that my customer from this stage to another stage will be a higher number so that the final help to convert the final success rate on the platform. So once we design that, this is something very important for us to understand and to improve further. This is a daily activity. We keep on tracking a funnel and try to see where the white drop rates are pretty high and why. If, like, if the white drop rates on last page on the payment platform, if this can be used in 2 2 d platform is not working, the transaction not happening, the rates update, some hidden charges are being added or the customer are not sure about the charges in the initial phase or the customer still make up their mind. They need some coupons, some other thing. So this is how one particular drop rate or one particular gap in the funnel will help

So, uh, my particular day at the PM is, uh, start with first launch my own platform, my application. Just when I open my eyes and get up from my bed, get to refresh after a walk and everything, I try to open my application, try to see every this thing is working fine. Is there any gap or is there any break during the journey of sorry. For a particular customer, if everything going fine, that's good. If something that I feel, then I open my teams. There's a group, particularly the production, um, the particularly the production bugs. So I try to put up there. This is the issue happening. I asked my QA team to check that and reproduce that is happening. Just log try to log a bug and ask the dev team to resolve it as soon as some customers escalate that to a particular customer support team. Then after moving going to the office, I tried to get through the particular news up article and tried to see some of my competitor website and their what they are doing, what they have launched, or what they're doing, how they're doing. After reaching the office to understand the current, uh, situation of the development product, some of the PMs, how what they're doing in their particular product, how the whole product coming up, are they currently online in terms of timelines or not? What are things happening? What are the problems they have? Somebody in my team has faced in the past. It might lead to technical product, help to help them. Then, obviously, don't give giving a glimpse of my whole dashboard, to my Google dashboard as well as my funneling dashboard, where you see how how the numbers are coming up, what are numbers high and low as compared to yesterday, why the number are high, is it due to a campaign, what are success? Think of factors for that. If the number are low, what are the failure factors for that? Then having a meeting, particular report for my stakeholder highest stakeholder, how we're doing currently in terms of the report, overall monthly and weekly reports, as well as some updates, and then connecting with my technical team, try to understand the progress from their side, and give it then the last part was, obviously, the whole job is to having a brainstorming on the new things or the but when

Yes. So in my current role, this team my role is currently a mix of both business product manager, technical product manager. So I currently work with my product manager as a technical team. The team in, uh, inclusive of the, basically, the UI, UA guide and some developer back and front end developers, then obviously the QA team, then the infra team, then the, uh, deployment team, which is the production environment team, and then obviously launching the product with the help of GTM team. Apart from that, I'm also in the customer facing being a senior, I've also faced some of the customer because our customers are mostly b to b customer. So connecting with the customer over a video call or each going to their practical premises, understanding the problem from their side. And if we already have converted the customer, they're obviously being a good relation. The customer try to understand from their side. They like the product, what is feedback for us from the particular product. This is what my current role is. In terms of the customers, customers are always difficult and easy to handle. That depends from situation to situation and person to person. I'm not saying, like, one customer is very difficult, one customer is very easy. So in the initial phase, the whole important thing in the whole journey what I understand is because customer is paying you something to deliver some value. So they have some perception in their mind that this is what if you're paying something to get this particular product, this is the value I'm getting. When they see something different, they sometimes become narrow sighted and then try to see why I'm I'm not getting this particular point which I already mentioned. So the whole idea is always try to be formal and informal. The both same time with the customer, try to understand from their side, build a trust relation with them so that they can blindfold and say, if Tarun has come or Tarun has taken it's he has said that he will deliver this particular product, then I can be pretty sure can this product the product get delivered. And this product will this particular product will get totally uh, fine as per this specification and will work in this particular condition. And if because we can't control the whole product, everything, some always something can happen which can break the whole product and journey. Then because Tarun is there, we if we escalate this particular thing to Tarun, then Tarun will help us to resolve it as soon as possible. This is type of relation I try to build with my particular customer. So there is one particular customer who has, like, for for part of the product, they have had a different vendor. So a particular complete package, there are 5 different vendors. And out of the 5 vendors, 3 vendors, they already worked in with a particular customer in the past for around 4, 5 years. It's a very good relation. So when I started working for the customer, they are start every time they start giving the example, like, they did that in the past 2 days, they did that in the past 3 days while taking time and all those things. So I go very frank with the customer saying, sir, because this is what we have mentioned to you, because we're giving some good value and could give us whatever product. So, uh, please let us give us our way so that we will give you the promise thing. And I'm always there for you whatever things you mentioned. We as a part of a team. I'm not a different team. We

QA or software engineers. How has this experience help you understand the SLA so I can contribute to development team? So, uh, before MB, I was a software developer as well as the front end developer. Yeah. And as well as the, uh, I did my as a database analyst. So this experience helped me to understand the different aspects of a software development life cycle. 1st is timelines. How time how much time the lead can take for designing a particular front end, back end, or particularly API, and all those things through the effort estimation. So that when I connect with the particular team, I can tell them this is the front end of all, this is the back end of this is how we can do. So they can relate well, like, Tarun knows everything about this. So at least they'd show a trust factor in me. Second thing, how this is important is when we go to any particular team, then we talk to developers and other things. They try to connect you within technical language because that's their behavior. So if you understand what is API, how the API works, what is the behavior of the front end, and what are the behavior back end, how the back end work, how the front end work, where you can reuse the back end technology thing. So that is gonna be important part first. So that is very much important for being a product manager. I understand if you have a software background, Explore understand the software so you can work very well with all your technical teams and as well as your client. 2nd part in terms of being experienced of software manager was because whenever you do, you go for any particular product, you have to and you're just brainstorming, just understanding what the product can be, what a product thing, just thinking about that, you understand the problems and complexity related to designing and developing the particular product also to some extent. So this generally, in the case, when if you think something out of the box and you feel this product can be designed very easily and all those things, and we can go to the developer team and say, this is a total disconnect, this product. There's a narrow can be designed, but this can be a difficult thing. A lot of work will be required. Take a lot of time as for the current scenarios cannot be possible to design with the skills and all those thing. So this gap should not come if you have the prior experience. If you have prior experience to actually understand from a software developer or software team point of view and understand how this product can be complex, how this small thing or small change can be complex. So before designing, before thinking, before, like, during the ideation, you can take care of this point. Also, when you go to a current meeting, trying to ask you some ask you some changes on customization configuration. Then you, at the point, same point of time, you need to take the decision and tell to the client he can done it. Okay. If you can done it, how much time you done it? Because client tried to push you to get everything in 1 or 2 days. If you have prior experience, you have to understand it. You can say this is small configuration. Okay. We can take 1 or 2 days, 3 days launch. This is the whole product life cycle. This is the customization for you. This might take too few time, few sec few days. We'll take with one team based on the availability of this. It's just a small change. That's all. You can talk to a client that will

Describe the most complex product. You may manage explain why it was challenging. Sorry. Excuse me. So one of the most challenging product which I designed so I was talking about earlier, I talked about the you helped have you ever designed the enterprise product for companies to offer to the employees? So after COVID, you've seen most of the companies start giving the enterprise product, basically, the health care services benefits to the employee, which includes the health checkup, some of the medical these are doctor consultation, medicines, gym membership, all those things. But now but we understand there's a gap. Now companies are spending some money on the giving these services and the complement service to the employees, but they are the employees consuming that? If they're consuming, what are the benefit they're getting out of that? Are they consuming it properly or not? There's no obviously reverse end of the process. Your company is offering services to the employees, but how they're getting benefit out of that is not coming up. So we designed the whole product where the services part will be there. But how that can relate it to the benefit the employees are getting to convert that into monetary value, to the dashboard, all those things were there. So these were the most challenging product because first, we are dealing with the health care data, and not every health care data can be reused easily without any permission. Second, important thing, if you're using health care data and creating some of the analytics and insight out of that, that should be right in some extent. You cannot just create any guesses guess work out of that. 3rd thing is while using AI ML, which is very critical, you need to, uh, train the model pretty well so that you get at least 85 to 90% of the accuracy. Below 85, 80 will not work in the particular industry, especially for the company. So this was the product. Uh, in terms of the designing, what we did is so, basically, understand the whole pro promise, uh, and problem, and then we'll try to generate. So, basically, when you get the health report, doctor consultation, everything, we'll try to convert that in terms of a health score. And then we show the health score of employer we have employee health score to the organization without the employee name and the PI details. This is your overall health score. Now we tell them based on the reports and other things, which are the major problematic area. Like, it's a 35%, 40% of the employees are diabetic or the obese or there's some other particular disease. So it shows on the chart, these are the major disease or major problem your employees are facing. So that based on that, you can create your particular, uh, programs to overcome those problem instead of giving some random programs to mental wellness or diabetic care and other. Even if you employ only 2 3% of the whole employees are diabetic, still you're having that demand in the program, other things. So based on the employer profile and based on the overall requirement of the organization, you will cater to the particular program, a particular disease or the problem. Uh, taking the dashboard and all those things, getting the report back, then it there will be OCR mechanism between

Uh, so one of the product currently, this is the, uh, IoT based application, which will, uh, show the life electricity usage of various devices using device disaggregation of your particular house households or particular office area to your mobile so that they can see how much one device is getting to. Accordingly, you can, uh, reutilize your electricity budget for the various purposes. Similarly, there's one more platform, the enterprise platform, which will show the whole, uh, analytical based diagram of their electrical usage for a particular area or the region or circle. Then we tell them the theft and the theft detection as well as the loss prediction as well as the forecasting for the previous for the upcoming gate time as well as this forecasting for both demand as well as supply side because right now, AV sorry. The solar and the other green energy initiatives are coming in the picture. 3rd, we designed the, uh, b to b to c health care app. So, basically, there was one application for the employees. We can use the, uh, to connect with the doctor to avail the services to get the one stop solution for all data to health care services and reports, data, health pat 3. And, similarly, one platform for the enterprises to manage their customers to, you know, see the benefit they're getting to value out of that. After this is a second product. 3rd product for banking is the customer onboarding, the digital customer on onboarding platform for design for the customer during the COVID time. The customer can be, uh, uh, you know, onboarded e k y c k y c should be done properly and how we can manage the customer records. Then the one of the platform I designed for the, uh, the health care loyalty. So in the health care, the insurances, it's very difficult. It's a very cutthroat market where you must sell with policy to a customer and then to try to retain the same customer. So I designed the whole, uh, you know, reward loyalty platform for the health care company and where they can give some of the benefit to customer to bring that loyalty in their cuss in their customers. Another platform which I build was the a customer based customer run platform for the customer discussion stakeholder customer discussions for other thing. Basically, it was the cost generally, you see Facebook and other groups where this was generally managed by admin. So if we create a financial platform by the customer, then the customer can discuss one another. They can talk about the problem. So customer will be your, uh, customer representative. They will which will help them to solve the the customer problem. They will be help you to bring some of the feedback to your platform, all those things was there. Uh, another platform which we created was the for one of, uh, b to b client for their, uh, employee management. So if you see it in the in terms of employee, the various factors are there, which we call the ESS. So all the employee services, which one we created for one of our employ uh, for one of our client. So bring all the platform a single thing and then giving the whole platform to them. And based on that platform utilization and other things, we can offer the other services to a customer. Then other product was was for the designing the new, uh, customer journey. This is basically from the paper based customer processes or the saving count, the, uh, the credit card, and other things, moving that to digital platform using the pay card and other technologies, design the whole journeys, and can move in the, uh, based on the government regulations and other things for the another part. Then the another part was launching the robust based financial platform. So robot advisory, basically, where one of the robust, uh, will give you the some of the tips based on your profile. So based on your profile, based on your persona, I will give you the personalized tips not related to the shared market or not related to the security market, all of the market so that it will help you to cater based on your requirements only, not on the very generic tips. These are