Navya Rehani Gupta

In this keynote from #mtpcon San Francisco, Navya Rehani Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Peek, looks at the art of zooming in and zooming out and at finding the right focus for every perspective and every situation.

The story of New Coke

Navya starts with the story of Coca Cola’s disastrous reformulation of its recipe in the mid 1980s, in a response to losing market share to Pepsi. New Coke was a sweeter drink and its launch was a disaster. Says Navya: “The original taste was so ingrained in American society that to many people changing the closely-guarded recipe of Coca Cola felt like painting the Statue of Liberty pink.” Coca Cola brought back the original flavour two months after the launch of New Coke.

It’s a story with key leadership lessons that apply to building products.

• The leadership team failed to zoom in to customer sentiment when trying to combat declining sales.
• They failed to anticipate the intangible components that were driving Coca Cola’s success.
• They also failed to zoom out and fully appreciate the market landscape.

Customers loved Coca Cola because of its unique taste and its brand equity, but the leadership team decided to emulate Pepsi. It’s a blunder that could have been avoided if Coca Cola’s leadership team had zoomed in to the customer sentiment and zoomed out to the market landscape.

What do we expect of product people?

Navya then talks about her time working on Wall Street, for Uber – and for Peek during the pandemic – and how these experiences taught her the art of zooming in and zooming out.

She says:-

• We expect product people to be strategic but to get their execution perfect.
• We want them to be all over the detail but always keep sight of the big picture.
• We want product leaders to create empowered teams but still stand in front of investors and justify the why, what, how and sometimes when for the team.
• We expect product people to stay calm throughout this, because they’re the cheerleaders for the team.

Zoom in, zoom out tips

Navya has four tips for mastering this art of zooming in and zooming out.

#1 Make room to zoom

Navya says that not all time is created equal. Most people underestimate the cost of context switching and overestimate the amount of focus time they have.

She addresses this by dividing her time each week into four categories: planning, executing, thinking, reflection.

#2 Have a conversation about conversations

A conversation about conversations helps you to come in with the right depth, Navya says. She spends time at the end of each day looking at agendas, and pre-read material to see where her team is at –  whether they’re over-generalising, bogged down in detail, what she can do to help, and so on.

#3 Know when and how to flex

Navya believes that taking inspiration from analogous industries can lead to radical innovation. Next time you’re stuck, she suggests, you should take a step back and try to frame the situation more broadly. Look for inspiration from analogous industries.

#4 Get better every day

Focus on continuous improvement. As Navya says, product people love retrospectives, and for a long time she has conducted her own personal retro every quarter. She asks herself three questions:-

• How can I maximise my impact?
• What are the root causes of my lowlights?
• Which of my activities require an adjusted zoom setting?

This personal retrospective has helped Navya identify areas of the business that were overlooked, she says. It has also helped her zoom in on side projects to create a bigger impact and helped to create rituals for Navya and her team so that they can zoom in and out together.

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