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Alo Mukerji: Welcome to LaunchPod, a product management podcast from LogRocket. Today, our guest is Allo Mukherjee, VP of Product at Wave HQ, which develops money management software for small business owners. Driven by a genuine love for small and mid sized businesses, Allo has worked in product leadership roles at Constant Contact, Buildium, acquired by Realpage, Toast, and Privy, acquired by Attentive.

Her specialties include creating frictionless product experiences and increasing revenue through pricing models and new product lines. On today's episode, LogRocket's VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, talks to Allo about driving innovations at a fintech company, focusing on SMBs, and the importance of rapid innovation.

So, here it is, our conversation with Allo Mukherjee.\

Jeff Wharton: Hey, Allo. So excited to have you on today. We've known each other for, I feel like quite a while, but this is the first time we actually get to really sit down and talk through products. So I'm excited to have you on.

Alo Mukerji: I'm excited to [00:01:00] be here. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah, definitely. No, this is fun. I'm really stoked for this episode. You've done, a lot of really cool stuff in the SMB world. And looking forward to dig into it, first I'd like to kind of just just Start with the obvious. PM was not something that was big, you know, product , it's not something you like you and I could have majored in college when we started.

It wasn't what it is now, 20 plus years ago when we all started. How did you end up in product? And what did that career path look like? That took you, to senior leadership and running product for some of the companies you have been at.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah I don't know if my story is unique or not, but , it certainly is somewhat interesting or an interesting path. I was a consultant when I came out of college. I worked for Accenture for a while. And I think around the time I left Accenture and I was a project manager but I think.

In the tech world, but that's when all the internet bubble happened. Maybe I'm aging myself a little bit, everything was going crazy. People were going to work for these really interesting and new companies. And that's how I ended up in product. I saw this junior [00:02:00] product management position at a tech startup.

And it was maybe the only one I was qualified for. Ended up applying there and that was a great company. And so I was very lucky to get that job. And then I ended up sharing an office with their more senior product people. And so really got a very good sense of what that role was.

Was and I love the fact that there were salespeople coming in all the time. They were on customer calls. I mean, they They were really at the center of the universe in terms of like people just coming in and the questions that were being asked in the set of activities. And so that gave me a really interesting view into what product was about.

And I was like, Yeah, that's what I want. I'm doing the legwork here. But ultimately, I had decided pretty early on that seemed like a cool job. That company was called uh, earm technology. And there was a bunch of Lotus people there. And the CEO of that company Jeffrey beer is just a great person also had a product background.

And product was at the center of that, even though it was started as an enterprise company, went into SAS. And so [00:03:00] I got a very good sense there for what it meant and really wanted to be a part of that. So I was sold pretty

Jeff Wharton: There you go.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah.

Jeff Wharton: I do feel like consulting , can be a great path into it, right? Because it's all about how do you understand an ecosystem? Maybe one that you're a little bit new to. How do you understand the levers and the pillars there and then affect change and drive that forward.

And, if you look at a company as a product, it's a similar thing. So I think that transition makes a lot of sense.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. And really just like, how do you frame a problem? How do you present a problem? And yes, it was a great introduction to what it eventually became.

Jeff Wharton: Nice. I feel like it's the same way you see a lot of history majors go into sales is they're great at , reading a lot, assimilating a lot of information and making a thesis statement. I Feel like I've seen an over abundance of sales leaders who are history majors, similar consultants have a good path into product.

Alo Mukerji: So interesting. And I've also, even in my career to kind of answer the second part of your question, I've also oscillated between having these product leadership roles and doing some consulting [00:04:00] stints in between because it's just another way to, , getting to know a customer, getting to know a space providing some solutions on the product innovation side.

So yes, there's a lot of similarities. 

Jeff Wharton: so we can fast forward, a few years and you find yourself with. So we're going, flying through career at this point, landing the last couple of years, you're at Wave, a fantastic SMB fintech company. And specifically, if we want to focus on maybe the last year, You all have just been ripping through kind of product releases.

It seems just in the past 12 months alone, what is it? A new mobile app whole new product around mobile receipts. A new nav, I think I just saw recently. And what I guess I'd love to understand, especially the most recent one. I saw a lot of the team talking about data driven design, the level of kind of research that went into doing that.

So I guess what fueled this bout of innovation and what do you, what is this kind of idea of data driven design that you guys were leveraging, what goes into that?

Alo Mukerji: Actually as a company we do service the service based SMB market. And we do offer a [00:05:00] lot of products. And so there is a lot of space for innovation, which is really nice. And what drove the first one you mentioned, the mobile app, for example, as we were trying to unify these experiences, because in FinTech, I think that's where A lot of the power is, regardless of what different products you're offering.

It's the unification that that really provides that. And that's what we're trying to do at a very high level. And then we also very recently we were just a free product for a long time. And now we announced and put out some paid tiers as well. So we're, All of this was in a way, in a preparation of some of the things we want to do in the future in terms of our paid offerings as well.

And so we do utilize research. This is a common, I think with the SMB market, and especially with B2B SaaS, which is where I've been for a long time really leaning into understanding. Value, customer value, like where do people put value and that to me is the name of the game with research, whether it's pricing or packaging or product innovation or whatever it might be.

And so I guess the types of research that we've done and that [00:06:00] the things that we've looked into particularly because I think simplicity, good design, good UI UX has always been one of our, I think differentiators again, has to be in the SMB market and the, in the B2B SaaS, self service space.

I guess traditionally these things are very hard to quantify people where, whether it's customer experience or just the results of UI and UX design. And it's been nice because with some of these projects, particularly, I think that the navigation one that you mentioned, we did have a little bit of luxury when it came to time to just be able to do some discovery work to figure out both testing some ideas.

And then ultimately when we launched it we had a before and after. Real quantification and measurement around anything really UI UX is often a luxury. And luckily nowadays there's a lot of tools out there, including your own that help people with that. So it's become easier over time, but anytime you see quantification tracking that's always a big help in terms of helping us really figure out , what kind of differences we're [00:07:00] making in terms of value with these customers.

. And I read a lot of LinkedIn over the past little bit of time. I saw one bit where one of your team actually posted a blog post about how I think it was from the design team. How they actually went through and understood what users needed and how they navigated the nav specifically, I think the new nav.

Jeff Wharton: And there's some interesting bits about, he talked through, they had people unprompted describe the different functions your product did and in their own words, group them into functionality and, you know, goal there was to make sure that how you grouped them in the nav matched with how people thought about them.

Kind of in their own unprompted world. Was there anything else like that? Or, was there more to it than that for this kind of idea of user research here?

Alo Mukerji: that's a really good example. You're doing more broader research to understand some of those things. And then when you've got some ideas, you're doing more validation pieces to it. And then ultimately, when you launch, you've actually got the real data is to compare and contrast.

That's one example. But [00:08:00] that kind of flow I just, I mentioned, we could say, we use the same one even when we were doing pricing research as an example. So we're going out there trying to figure out where people putting value at a very high level, bringing that down, having them make some decisions and some trade offs.

Ideating on that and then validating some ideas and then ultimately looking at data. And, if you need to adjust, you need to adjust after it gets into market. So I think that's a pretty good uh, sort of, you know, the way we approach that process.

Jeff Wharton: And that actually brings up, I mentioned all the kind of in, things you guys have released over the past year, but, I missed apparently new pricing that had launched recently. And you went from free to more paid. How were you monetizing before?

And what was the impetus to moving to pay? And I guess. What were the risks that you guys saw with that? Cause it's always a little bit of a risk to move to something where you're asking people for money. How are they going to, how are they gonna stick on? So

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, absolutely. So we've actually been around for a long time and we always had a free invoicing and accounting product and we monetize [00:09:00] basically on, on payments. And that's been going on for years. We were acquired by H& R block in 2019. And so one of the things, especially as the product person, one of the, yeah.

Issues with free is that it actually doesn't allow you to invest as much as you'd like in the customer problems and the customer needs. And for us, we've got a lot of folks that are coming in doing invoicing. And then, they're monetizing on the payment side. The invoicing, which is the thing that they really want to do.

We haven't been able to innovate and make enough progress on the product side as we'd like, or solve as much of the, many of the customer problems that we'd like. So interestingly, I actually think having these more paid offerings is going to allow us to address those customer needs even better than we did.

Than we did before. And of course, it helps us also set ourselves up to be a much more scalable company in the future. And so that was some of the impetus. But the interesting thing about it is we have always been a free product. We're going to continue to be a free product. We just very smart about [00:10:00] adding some paid offerings as well with again with additional with additional value.

And that's how we went to market. And that, as I mentioned before, we did a lot of prep work and a lot of testing and a lot of research around that to figure out how to do it, and then we did some, risk mitigation exercises as well to, as you always do with pricing and then yeah, we, it's been in the market a couple of months now it's been very very successful

Jeff Wharton: nice. Yeah. I I guess that's the way to, to add pricing go from free to paid is if you can, I've seen companies go, okay, now we're going to start charging for the thing that you were getting for free and there's always. User pushback, right? What there's even a, when I went to business school decades ago there was the famous, Turkey case study around Thanksgiving where you gave the Turkey away, gave the Turkey away around Thanksgiving, then people start to just expect it.

So you give it away to free for too long. It's really hard to unfree that thing. But to take that loyal audience and say, Hey, we're going to innovate on these things that you want more around, but you got to pay for it. , one of the things I love is [00:11:00] uncovering in this, Areas where it seems like doing the less customer friendly thing potentially is more customer friendly.

We were talking with guy named Cy who worked in the insurance industry, and he actually talked about all the insurance regulation and all the rules and stuff like that actually force insurance companies to be more. customer centric. And I love this kind of thing where , by charging customers and asking them for money, you're actually able to be far more customer centric and give them much more value.

So I would love those little things you find,

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. Yeah. I've been working on pricing for a long time, and it always amazes me how even with, I think, more straightforward things like price increases, for example, at the end of the day if you make it about the value that you're providing it really does benefit both parties. And even, at Wave with this change customers do recognize that.

They do actually recognize

Jeff Wharton: right? So I feel like we've talked a good bit about research specifically UX research and user research. I'd like to keep on this topic [00:12:00] but mildly pivot to something that I always love, which is a concept of basic research. And I loved when I read this from you. We had you on our spotlight series a while back and you made this statement basically about.

Investing in research is really important. And basic research is really important. And I have so many anecdotes about interesting things we've found have actually been giant scale metrics when we've done that. Or scale levers rather when we've done that. But, I'd love to hear from you.

What has that meant for you and your career? Maybe what has that led to at Wave or other companies where you've been doing this research and it's turned into something maybe you didn't expect or have, turned into high value offerings.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, maybe if I flip that around to say, use the word researcher really mean more kind of customer centric product development. That being an important part of your product development process. I think it goes back to the value like you're constantly trying to find.

Research is a mechanism for just figuring out where people put the value. [00:13:00] And I think it's been incredibly important again, in SMB, because there's so much that you can't pick up on in just asking somebody, what do they need or what do they want? I used to work at Toast, which is in the restaurant industry.

That's a really great example. Like you, you can't possibly understand what, Is happening until you're like there. You're like, not only does this have to be like easy to use, like they've got to be able to do this in the middle of five different other things going on. Or I did a lot of actually research in the FinTech area on just, how people finance their small businesses and things like that.

And there's so many things you pick up on in the entire customer journey that you Would have missed had you not looked hard enough. And so I think getting those answers and really digging in helps you come up ultimately with a better solution that fits the actual needs, which is, I think as product people, that's our job is really to understand that.

And then to translate that, understand the real meaning behind it, and then translate that into something [00:14:00] in technology. And that's really why I'm a big believer in it. Cause you can't just ask. simple questions like what do you want and necessarily pick up on all that nuance, which is where the magic kind of is.

Yeah, Pretty easy to go out to a customer or prospects and say, Hey, what do you need? What products should we build? And they'll give you an answer. I think the famous tech story is, Apple coming back and inventing the mouse and saying, the users wanted a better command line.

Jeff Wharton: And in reality with the market really wanted in the end, was it just a better interface in a way to do that? How do you go about. Actually arriving at those insights. I'm assuming you're not just going out to, when you're at toast, I assume you didn't just go into restaurants and watch them work for a day or two.

Maybe you did. I don't know. That'd be awesome actually, but.

Alo Mukerji: yeah we did that too, but I think it's more about you have to be a little bit skilled to do it, but asking the questions around the questions. And yes, you can ask what you need or what you want, but then figuring out like why that is. And then what is the whole set of tasks that are happening?

And where can you find the nuggets of information in [00:15:00] that? So I think back to what we were talking about, maybe in the beginning, like going a little bit broad, understanding a little bit more and then, digging in deeper where you need to, where you need to dig in deeper.

I know I think I talked in that spotlight too about like doing a little bit of qualitative work and then figuring out where you want to go deeper and then get getting in there with the data or validating with the data, et cetera. Yeah, I think it's just about going broader than you might think and having the skills to ask the right questions in those areas.

Jeff Wharton: I was definitely picturing you and your team at toast, like scurrying around a coffee shop or something. 

Alo Mukerji: We did do that, too.

Did do that, too. That's a great story, actually. One of the things, I think COVID helped with this a lot, but one of the things that you wouldn't have picked up on is, how hard it was for these people just to get their internet working at the time.

At that time, you didn't, not everybody had that out their seating. And something like that you're like, Oh, that's actually their biggest problem. Like I got to think, I got to, that makes me rethink the whole thing. And that's just a really good example.

Jeff Wharton: yeah, . It's always, ask the right questions and you can never beat at some level of spending some time with a [00:16:00] customer, just watching this, watching them operate, watching them work. I think I can't remember who I was talking to. It was a colleague of mine from years ago they launched a new app to, to basically run payroll. And what they found is people were using about half of it and getting to a certain point and then coming back in later and trying to figure out what was going on.

And so finally, he just went out to a few customers and sat with them and realized that they were literally stopping partway through opening a spreadsheet, doing all these calculations by hand and then coming back in and manually entering this. This, these numbers that the application did, and they thought they had made it very clear that it could do that.

But in the end they realized they had not, translated or communicated that value well enough. And so they found that all these people were just having this terrible experience. It was just a matter of exposing that product capability better. So I think you always learn the interesting little nits when you do

Alo Mukerji: Yes, back to what you asked me in the beginning, I think it's all about just being curious around those problems. That's really what we're trying to do.

Jeff Wharton: And to that curiosity, I always love a good rule. Anyone [00:17:00] who has a framework or a rule, I eat that stuff up. I love it. I've heard you talk about this rule of five for user feedback. And it made sense to me, but can you maybe explain a little bit and how that works?

It works out

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. We've talked about this process, but that idea of going broad, like to me. Five is like a good manageable number. Particularly I would say five in each segment of , whatever your audience segments might be, but just talking to five people to just get a sense of like, where do I want to go with this?

Like, where are the areas that I want to go deeper? Do I need more qualitative? Do I need more quantitative? Is there a way for me to get this data? I think, you get so much. 80 to 90 percent of what you need to get just talking to those five people and then the again, like the magic comes when you're looking in between and figuring out where do you dive deeper?

And how do you even design the right study that you want to design around the research? So I've just found five to be a pretty good number where you get all the information that you need in order to , dive [00:18:00] deeper.

Jeff Wharton: It's good to have an idea around that. Cause it's very easy to either say, Hey, we talked to a couple of people. We got the info or, at what point do you stop? You could go on forever talking to customers. And the second you get one different answer, you go, Oh, maybe we're thinking about this all wrong.

So it's good to have that kind of. rough idea of at what point, we're big here on how do you test a core hypothesis? How do gather the data you need to get to the point of conviction and move to the next thing. And you iterative testing through, an entire process to complete a project or come to a final thesis. And one thing we've always gone back and forth on is how many people, what's proof, what is convictable proof versus just anecdotal. So that's I always love to hear how other people look at that and where they set the bar.

Cause I think it can inform a lot of what we do here. And hopefully people listening, it can also help there.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, and maybe I would just to summarize it, I would just say to your point, the five gets me to the themes that I need to get to. And then I can decide what I want to do from there.

Jeff Wharton: That's fair. So we talked very briefly about pricing and packaging a few seconds ago. [00:19:00] But I told you before we started recording it's, I think one of my nerdy passions is pricing and packaging because it's maybe an underloved lever. In my mind of, you can have the best product, you can have the best messaging.

But if your pricing is off your packaging, it doesn't make sense. You'll probably do okay. But you are, I would wager you are leaving huge amounts of value on the table. And it seems like you've gone through a lot of that recently. So I'd love to pick your brain a little bit about it to be honest.

And, first of all, I'm gonna put you on the spot on this, but you talked briefly about at a prior point in your career, there was one time where you only talk to customers and not to, people outside the org, but you were looking to grow the new customer number and use that data to set some pricing and packaging policy.

And it didn't work, but that's where the story ended. Can we know the story?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, that was, yeah, that was that's going back. But yes, that was the first time I did. I did, I would say both new product and pricing and packaging work. So luckily, I haven't [00:20:00] repeated those mistakes again. Yes, that's exactly what happened. We only researched with our own customer base partly because that's easier to do.

You have access to them. And that was one of our goals, but I, now I always look at those two are definite segments. You look at your new customers versus like your current customers and try to figure something out that works for both of them. But in that case, I hadn't done that.

And so when we launched it It wasn't doing so well with just bringing people into the product suite, which was one of our was one of our goals. And so we actually pretty quickly than gathered that data and then had to make some changes to how we did that. How we did the pricing and luckily it wasn't it wasn't so far off.

There were some tweaks that we had to do, but we were able to make those adjustments and it worked out, a lot better. It just wasn't being priced on something that that those folks understood, whereas it worked a little bit better with our current customer base, but [00:21:00] yeah, we ultimately came up with something that accommodated both.

Jeff Wharton: And how did you discover the right pricing level there? 

Alo Mukerji: Yeah.

Jeff Wharton: it just talking to those cost of those prospects or, how'd you get there?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. I think in that case because our conversion numbers weren't what we wanted them to be. We just went out and talked to some of the folks and then we did some of the other things I taught. We were just watching people and we're asking them like what are your questions?

You're looking at this pricing page. What are your questions? And so we were able to actually pretty quickly, even within five, right? Figure out yeah. Something's going on here where this is not making sense to them. And that actually made sense because it was what we had what our current customers were pricing off.

So obviously they understood it and these guys did. And it was really important for them to have predictability and pricing as it is for most customers, but certainly for SMBs, they wanted to be able to predict what their monthly costs would be. We went back and figured out how to work that in a way that would make sense for everybody.

Jeff Wharton: Nice. I love these slipped at the rule of five reference in there

Alo Mukerji: Yeah.

Jeff Wharton: But it's true, right? If you get five people in a row who all say the same thing, and it's, person one, two, three, four, and five all have basically the same [00:22:00] point, you're probably onto something. We had a similar.

Problem, I think early on when we launched our, we have a big blog for product managers. And when we launched that we, some metrics are going right. And some things were not hitting what we wanted from a result standpoint. And, I think one thing people underestimate is how willing people are to just answer questions.

If you're just coming at them from an honest point of view, Hey, we would just want to see this work. I'm not going to sell it to you. I just want to ask you some questions about this. And we were able to get. A lot of people to respond to us and chat with us. And the first five all said the exact same thing.

To a point where it was almost, I was working with one other member of my team and we were laughing like almost did these people coordinate because it's just so identical and that's when, I think we're onto something

here and we were able to 

pivot and that's actually what led to this podcast that we're doing right now.

So

Alo Mukerji: I love your blog, so it's working, whatever it was.

Jeff Wharton: Oh, good. But that's, that's be right, five people and we kept going, but we should have been smart. We should have stopped after five because we talked to a ton more people, but it just was the same thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna definitely use that in the future.

Now maybe same topic, but [00:23:00] a more positive one, buildium you You went through a similar exercise rather than, how can a problem have to go back and retool and refix it worked really well. And you guys came up with a lot of success. So can you maybe go through what were you building?

And what'd you do differently there that allowed you to hit it out of the park on the first run?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. Yeah. That was a very interesting situation where we again, focused on the SMB side of the market. Really small property managers were talking like 10 units or less. And there was a real desire to go slightly up market to monetize those customers better. And whether it was myself or there's a lot of people at the company that are very passionate about the small business market, and they tend to not like these, Bundled solutions.

I tend to not want to pay for things that they don't have to pay for. And trying to hold fast to a pricing model that worked both for them and the up market was a challenge. And I think we have to be pretty innovative about what we came up with, which [00:24:00] was to give them some a la carte options, but then also to price these bundles really well, where, they had the opportunity to upgrade.

And that ultimately was very successful because it was also a great multiproduct strategy and also helped us with retention and various things. But a couple of the things that we did right there. I felt like one kind of internal and one external is it. We actually looked at every single customer, like we really looked at it on a spreadsheet and tried to predict how they would behave.

So that's, that's a lot of like quant work that you do, but ultimately, that paid off. Like we, we had a very good sense of what we thought. Thought was going to happen when we launched. And then the other thing I would say, I read about these like pricing councils and different things, but in my experience, and this goes back to, when I worked at constant contact or building them, you really pricing, it's just, it's never going to be consensus driven and you have to be very clear about who has the accountability and who's making the decisions.

And one of the really nice things that buildium was, it was myself [00:25:00] and our CEO and our CFO at the time. And just having the leadership, like really having your back and releasing, this is what we're doing. Like we, we got all the data, but this is actually what we're doing. And having conviction around that.

I think that's really, it's really important to just know who's accountable and what messaging you're putting out there, because there's so much variability. And I also always say that with pricing, you never really know what's going to happen until you launch it. You do all the research, you never really know.

The market could have shifted in that time. There's many things that can happen in between now and then. And so I think it's really important to have that conviction and kind of the, the risk mitigation stuff ready to go. Should things not go the way that you had planned.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah, and those are the problems I love the most. I think that those are the problems where and the decisions where you can really set a company apart. There are certain things that are maybe not totally binary, but there's a really clear, like a right answer and a wrong answer. Those are, those are good to work through, but they're not that fun.

At least I know maybe that's just me, but they're less fun because at some point you just know I'm [00:26:00] right. And there's very little opinion involved. I love, and I've said this before, I love an opinionated company or an opinionated decision. At some point there's a set of problems.

I feel like the company's hit where there's no, there's no wrong. There's definitely more, right. Ones where you have to put yourself out there or decisions or projects where you have to hold a stance or you have to say, we're going to, the right answer is counter to.

So much of past things that people have done. That's the opportunity to really just leap, bounds ahead of competition or to really progress a market. And I love those kinds of things. So it's great to hear pricing, I think is one of those, right? Pricing and packaging, there's a lot of safe things to do, but you can also do some really neat things that can really set you apart and really set you up for success.

If you just do what you said, like align leadership work to, have a small, gather the necessary data, but then also push of this is what we're doing. And we're going to, now that we've got that information, we're going to make it the decision we're gonna push this forward. But like you said, still have the mitigation efforts because sometimes opinions are wrong.

So it's good to have the bailout door.

Alo Mukerji: I think that's a lot of product [00:27:00] to as well. You're trying like trying to make these decisions. You're trying to make these on a day to day basis and all research and data and all these other things help you do is just get the probabilities up, right? Is there, that's, it's just a matter of getting the probabilities up.

But ultimately we have to make calls as product people, whether it's pricing or whether it's, what am I going to launch this or how you prioritize things or whatever it might be?

Jeff Wharton: Maybe just the market or maybe I love the big leaps forward. So I love the giant statement movements that disrupt a market. I think interestingly, we were able to just cover, place that went really well, a place that maybe didn't go as well. And it's interesting.

I was listening to 20 minute VC. Just this morning walking to work I listen to far too many podcasts. But I walk to work, I walk home from work, I listen to them in the gym. So I listened to a lot of these and it was interesting. He had Sam Altman and some of the team from OpenAI on, and one thing that they talked about was actually their feel was you learn more from big successes than anything else.

Everyone says you learn from failure, but they didn't agree with that. And I'm curious to get your take on, especially having gone through just a, [00:28:00] maybe not a failure, but something that didn't go. As well as we, you would have hoped and then, a big success. Where do you think you learn more?

Where have you learned more?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, I think I've been so lucky in my career that I've worked for some incredible companies and some incredible leaders along the way. And pretty early on, like those companies were very successful. And and I was lucky enough to be there during the ride. I would agree that there, there was a ton to learn from the model of what works and what, good leadership looks like.

And how do you get successful in SAS, for example, I'm going to work for constant contact. They wrote the book on that. And I feel like I definitely learned a lot from the role modeling and just seeing what was going on in some of those, in some of those places.

And of course, like the, the failures you've learned a ton from that too. It's just different. Like I think from the successes, you're learning what you want to do and repeat. And the failures are just trying to figure out, what could I have done better? How can I learn more about [00:29:00] this area, et cetera.

So I think they're both important. I think they're both important.

Jeff Wharton: I'm going to, I'm going to play politician on this one. And I think I was thinking a lot about that this morning. So if that, hence me bringing it up but I I had an opinion already going into this question with you, but. I'm going to play politician and I think the places I've honestly learned the most are where we've initially made mistakes and where something has not gone right and we've been able to turn it around.

Cause sometimes the things that go right. Just cause maybe you have just such overwhelming, massive product market fit that, that you could do almost anything and you're going to, and you're going to win. You can get a lot of false positives. Similarly, in a bad situation. Market or, wrong product market fit.

Maybe you're doing the right stuff and just your product. Isn't that great? Or it's great, but just not for the market. But it's the places where you realize you were doing something wrong in a world you could have succeeded. And you found out what that was. What's that lever. What's that one, cause oftentimes like.

The difference between something that's going quite wrong and going insanely well. Often you're not off by, exponential amounts. You're off by just a [00:30:00] little bit of the most important lever, and you tweak that until you find yourself up and to the right versus flat. I think those are places I've loved and feel like I've learned the most because then you see Oh, this is how that works.

This is the why or this is the what that I missed. I can apply that later and later. Potentially.

Alo Mukerji: right, yeah, I guess I would say to play politician on my end a little bit actually, going back to the research a little bit to me, what's the most fun is just trying to figure out those problems what is it? And then how do I actually get into, like, how do I solve it?

And doing that with a great team of people, which is, what some of these good company, great companies, successful companies are that's just that's To me, that's the most fun process regardless of whether actually succeeded or failed. It's the kind of the process of figuring it out.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah. Let's I was gonna say totally leave this subject now and completely move on. I think the problem with that is, is What we're going to jump into is is tied. So let's minorly move on. And you've talked a lot about, especially in SMB, that velocity velocity and product is really important.

And this is why I [00:31:00] realized like we're only moving on because success and failure is such an important thing here, in reality, it's probably a matter of, you get more successes if you. If you just move faster, you can get more success under your wing and maybe just, you can hopefully have one that massively outperforms and erases all your losses.

You can mitigate your losses and really invest in your wins. But I guess what's so important about velocity in product on the S& P side, especially what drives you to push so hard to move quickly here?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. I think it's a lot of it is just software in general. The market moves so fast and let's be honest and software. Anyone can copy anything, right? It's just a matter of building stuff. And so I think it's really critical to be able to get out in the market to get to a market an audience quickly learn something and try to test and iterate.

On top of that, and then with SMBs and consumers too, because I think they behave very similarly it's always really important to try to be the first usually the, these people don't want to be out there looking for software. Think of that [00:32:00] restaurant person I just talked about, right?

There's no way. And I think, the faster you can get to them in their journey, they're probably going to stay embedded with you, as long as you're not doing anything too wrong. And I think being the first the first in their tech stack or whatever part of their tech stack they're trying to figure out is super, super important.

For those reasons, I think velocity is important. And then as a product person, you just want to learn. So the faster you get out there, the more data you have, the more, again, back to what we were talking about before, like you never really know what's going to happen. So might as well get out there fast, learn from that, and then, adjust adjust accordingly.

So I think particularly in software and B2B SaaS. Where you can make adjustments and you can make changes time to market is just critical. I think it's just critical.

Jeff Wharton: Yeah. And I guess that brings up a question though, like you said, you get one chance to be the first one to the market, but also, I think you get one chance in a lot of these markets to, for these people to be introduced to you. And if you, they will stay with you if you [00:33:00] present the right solution and something that works well, but the contrary to that, or the contrary to that is if they're underwhelmed by what you deliver, they might never come back.

So how do you balance this speed and velocity with delivering a complete product? solution that's at least complete enough for what they need, right? Like we, I talked last week, we went over this idea of the concept of the MVP is dying because it's just, it's not great for anybody.

But how do you deliver this like minimum complete product but still maintain velocity?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, so I would go back to the word value, right? You're really trying to figure out how much value can you deliver in order to get some learnings or, whatever your objectives might be. And that is where the data and the research comes in handy. And I I really have an issue when people think that takes a long time.

Because. Today, with all the tools that we have in place, the ways, the different ways you can do the research, you actually can get through it pretty fast if you want to. If you really put the time and effort [00:34:00] into it, you can do it pretty fast to at least where you have some confidence in what you're putting out there.

Again, you don't know everything, but you can be pretty sure that you aren't delivering what you want to deliver. What, whatever type of value you want to be delivering. How is that going to resonate? So I use the research and the data piece of it to get some confidence in on that spectrum, what it is that I'm putting out there.

And is it actually achieving whatever the goal might be with that particular product,

Jeff Wharton: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's been important. So here, obviously I don't work in product here, but I'm, we sell a lot and I talk to customers all the time and I have the benefit of being at least, talk to our customers. Head of product and our head of engineering quite a lot.

And I, I have an opinion whether they like it or not. But one thing that's been important, we've been working over the past year to launch and really increase the productivity of this tool we call Galileo AI. It basically a way to understand severity of, user issues and take this world of analytics where it's very retrospective.

It's very, you react to things going on. How do we make that proactive? And part of that is how do we [00:35:00] surface. The things you need to look at as fast as possible, not after it's hurt your KPIs or after users complain, when it's just happened to a few people, how do we surface it to you right away?

So you're not looking for the next thing you need to understand. And the big thing we keyed in on here, I think this is. The important thing to velocity raise is understand what's the couple vital things that are just, you cannot miss on and make sure you deliver those and that gets you a long way.

So here it was, do not want to have false positives. The second you have even a couple of false positives, people start to look at it and go, ah this AI thing is just like everything else. It's garbage. So we worked really hard to make sure that. That level of false positive was near zero. And the rest you can get a, we can iterate on and continue to improve, but that's the part we had to lock in.

I think that's worked really well for us. To put my two cents on this topic was velocity can be driven really quickly, but you have to understand what are the no mistake areas or, in hiking or skiing, you call them the no fall zones.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I love that example because I think the going after the [00:36:00] data that you do have is often one of the faster paths to understanding, whatever it is that you're trying to understand. So it's a very good example of why there's so much stuff there to look at from a speed perspective before you have to go out into a market or whatever research you want to do.

Yeah.

Jeff Wharton: Now last topic, I want to make sure we cover it. Cause it I think it's super interesting and I love seeing, you've been really involved here, but there's this group FinTech is Femme. I've seen you talk about doing speaking with them and participating in events. And you come up on my LinkedIn a lot.

I'm gonna be honest. Which I think I learned a lot. Actually, I'll be honest. It's been really helpful. I feel like I see a lot and learn a lot here. You got a lot of good wisdom, but I've seen this a lot. And I'm curious, what's your level of involvement here? What is the group? I can guess from the name, maybe a little bit more detail would be awesome.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah, I actually they we just did. I think they had their inaugural event in New York where I was on this panel. And I will say that was a truly transformational experience. And I don't know that I was necessarily expecting that. And Nicole [00:37:00] Casperson, she put that on truly inspirational leader in terms of just recognizing.

I think what I felt in the room, which is that there are these, traditional fintech businesses, insurance bank, these long time businesses and just having the space to hear the female voices in the room. And recognize that you're experiencing the same things. That was really quite powerful, actually.

I don't know if I knew that going into it, I'm always like skeptical of the values of a lot of these conferences. But boy, that was a really great. event. Even a I, we were talking about a I and instead of being, usually this huge to what our jobs are taking away and whatever.

We really got down to the tactics of what can we do in our day to day with a I and product, particularly in product inclusion. So I'm a huge fan. I'm newer to it, but I hope to do more. I think Nicole's done an amazing job

Jeff Wharton: Awesome. They're on LinkedIn. It looks like a whole bunch of other places. Definitely worth checking out. And then, as you think on a I think [00:38:00] that's you and I will have to reconnect. I'd love to hear tactically. I think that's the big struggle is everyone has these big, grandiose ideas.

But tactics are what are you doing today with it is I think something often missing. So Maybe we'll have to do an episode two a while out, push some product out and see what works. But as a last thought, if people want to follow up, if people want to ask you questions or, get in touch with it, is there a way people should look for you?

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. LinkedIn is always a good one. And then I'm, I'm sure there'll be links to, to this and I did the spotlights here with you guys, but yes, LinkedIn is always a really good place, a really good place to start. And I do check it. So we'd love to hear from anyone that cares about these topics.

Jeff Wharton: Awesome. Aloe, thank you so much for joining us. As always, a pleasure to chat. And we'll have to do this again sometime.

Alo Mukerji: Yeah. It's great to see you. Thanks so much.