Lazy, Vain, Selfish Users and the Rule of Three: An Indian Product Leader's Playbook

Rathi, who started in product management at Flipkart in 2010, says that before roughly 2010 India built plenty of technology but mostly as back office work for American and European customers. When startups began building for Indian consumers there was no ready talent, no college courses and no playbooks. People watched YouTube and read SVPG, but what they learned could not be applied directly to Indian startups.

He adds that the surrounding leadership had a different mental model. Many business leaders came from FMCG or manufacturing, where inputs produce fairly predictable outputs, and they carried that machinery thinking over to software. Over several waves of experience, he says, leaders learned that software is not machinery and consumers are not that predictable, and product management is now coming of age.

On what makes India distinctive, he points to the shift to smartphones and the Reliance Jio revolution that brought a huge population online. He also cites government-enabled digital infrastructure such as UPI and the India Stack. He stresses the country's linguistic and cultural diversity and the low per-capita income, roughly two to two and a half thousand dollars. In his view that makes finding the right paying customer a premium craft.

Rathi argues that product managers sit so close to their product that they assume everyone thinks about it all day. In reality most people in the target market do not care, and word of mouth is weaker than teams believe. He recalls Scott Belsky's framing of modern consumers as lazy, vain and selfish: they want to be wowed quickly, they resist changing habits, and they want to know what is in it for them.

Seen through that lens, onboarding copy and the first welcome can matter more than core features built for loyal users. At Swiggy his team reframed the product from "we are a food delivery app" toward what the user wants and how the app helps them. They connected marketing messages directly to onboarding, asking what trigger and promotion brought someone to download, and continuing that journey in the language they understand. He says it started showing results quickly.

At Jupiter, a neobank with accounts, credit cards, mutual funds and gold investments, the same thinking applies to users who come for one service and leave. Rathi says product managers should understand people who are not yet buying as well as marketers do. They should pick a single positioning that earns a first try and decide when to introduce other products, rather than greedily showing everything at once.

He also frames product managers as being "in the business of influence", persuading engineers, leadership and users alike. In his words, a PM is a full-stack influencer who must think more like sales, marketing and influencers.

Rathi credits Amazon with the press-release approach but argues that its power goes beyond checking whether customers will love something. You work backwards from a launch date and from the entire machinery that has to exist by then. The one-pager of a PR can be used to negotiate with the VP of Engineering about whether the date is realistic, and its quotes can test alliances with marketing, pricing and business owners.

If someone disagrees, he says, you adjust the date and the goals together, because everything changes at once. The real value is finding everything that has to come together for the release to go live.

He then believes in "the power of three" and asks his teams to write three alternative, divergent PR FAQs. An example is a membership program with two tiers versus three, or a points-based tiered pricing program. They must be fully thought through so leadership can choose, and contributors can see their input was considered even if it was rejected. He says this is also a powerful tool when a CXO says "let's build this".

The FAQ section also encodes company-specific checks. At Jupiter, a financial services app, every FAQ must address compliance and sign-offs. At Swiggy's three-way marketplace, it asks what a change means for restaurant partners and for delivery partners, which pulls product managers on different sides to consult each other.

Rathi says product managers must own outcomes, not just features or one part of the problem. Success means changing user behavior in a way that delivers a business outcome, which requires thinking about users, competition, engineering and marketing. You need not be an authority in every area, but you must either be very good or have run your ideas through partners. He cites the book *Range*, with its Roger Federer example, to argue that breadth lets you connect more dots, and Lenny adds a similar story about Wayne Gretzky.

"Show don't tell" extends working backwards from a written document to a visual one. The PM and marketers recreate an exact situation for one specific person, not a vague persona, such as a 30-year-old with a defined relationship to food delivery. They ask what happened at 11:00 to make him open the app, then design each pixel and word to serve that moment. Rathi says about half of his product reviews are spent on this.

In a real-time marketplace the team also plots the roughly 30 minutes after an order, including scenarios like a delayed restaurant or a punctured bike tire. The result is a wall that gets stakeholders together for detailed discussion instead of an elevator pitch, and PMs can compare the current version against a new one.

The leader's version is a strategy on a page, similar to growth loops, covering market, user acquisition, activation budgets, cross-pollination and membership, ideally in three alternatives. Rathi says the biggest payoff is alignment across the company, since people see which part of the picture they own. It also helps choose directions by weighing whole stories, not isolated points.

Rathi observes that startups face competing asks: engineers want tech debt and platform work, product managers want enhancements and bug fixes, and leadership wants large cross-team bets or a pivot of identity. Eventually product managers must prioritize among four buckets. He insists this is not a tactical PM call but a strategy call between the head of product and the CEO about how to split a hundred focus points.

The four buckets are Brilliant Basics, Bread and Butter, Big Bets and Breaking Bad. Brilliant Basics replaces the dismissive label "tech debt" because the company is built on them. Bread and Butter is the regular backlog a PM would work on alone, and Big Bets are larger ideas that need everyone signed up through working backwards. Breaking Bad is redefining the company, as when Swiggy moved from food delivery toward grocery and convenience.

The value is making trade-offs explicit. If leadership shifts weight to Breaking Bad, nobody should later complain about more downtime. Rathi suggests presenting three alternative allocations and asking which future sounds better, such as more bugs but a shot at changing the game versus stability with no differentiator. Lenny adds that PMs should recommend one of the three, and Rathi agrees 100%, tying it to Amazon's disagree and commit.

Asked for contrarian views, Rathi says that when forced to choose between shipping faster and shipping better, he prefers to think more and ship better. In his view most experiments should be thought experiments, because smart people can tell that many will fail, and trying them wastes company time. He calls it a preference, not a rule, and says speed and excellence are separate axes.

His second contrarian view is that many people in product management should not be there, because others have entered without realizing what it takes and can be made miserable by it. He names three qualities: raw sharpness, including problem identification and higher-order thinking, drive or grit, and influence.

Rathi says the first can be developed to a very effective level, since domain knowledge helps. Drive is the hardest to coach, and he has not seen low-drive people become high-drive, though they can be inspired. On influence he sees no negotiation, and says the need to be influential should excite you and not scare you away.

Rathi offers another three-part framework for leaders: when something doesn't happen, a person either can't do it, which is a capability issue, won't do it, which is a motivation or alignment issue, or wasn't set up to do it, which is the leader's problem. For capability he suggests coaching, mentoring or moving someone. For "won't", ask whether they disagree with the vision or lack time.

He says that at least in his experience 70% to 80% of problems are setup issues, such as OKRs or org design that were not thought through. He recommends the book *Team Topologies*, which starts from Conway's law, and says you can often infer a company's org design from its product.

On AI, Rathi cautions that many teams get excited and force-fit it, as a solution looking for a problem. He cites a term coined by Swiggy CEO Sriharsha, "HI": artificial intelligence is only as useful as the human intelligence of the company using it. For consumer products, he says, technology needs balancing with good UX and behavioral science.

Rathi says a three-way marketplace such as Swiggy multiplies complexity, and usual management tools start failing. OKRs assume you can divide and conquer for one kind of user. With consumers, restaurants and delivery partners, goals conflict: higher delivery fees, higher commissions and lower delivery partner pay each pull the other sides in different directions. He has seen OKRs fail repeatedly and says big bets that treat the levers together work better.

Another challenge is managing multiple empathies at once, so the delivery-executive PM must also champion the consumer, and vice versa. He adds that A/B experiments don't behave as expected with network effects, for instance between drivers in different test groups. Deciding where to put limited incentive money, such as on riders or drivers, requires thinking about liquidity in a different way.

On which side to prioritize, he says all sides must first be stable enough that they won't leave. After that the choice should derive from the company's vision. Amazon is clearly customer-centric, while he says Alibaba's Taobao aims to create life-changing experiences for Chinese sellers. At Swiggy, "customer comes first" was confusing because restaurants are also customers, so the value became that the end consumer comes first and partners and Swiggy together serve them.

Asked for a closing thought, Rathi says to creatively imagine an amazing future, work backwards from it to what will make it succeed, and be paranoid that everything could go wrong so you ensure it all comes together.

In the lightning round he recommends *Working Backwards*, Byron Sharp's *How Brands Grow*, and *The Luxury Strategy*, recently suggested to him by Cred founder Kunal Shah. His favorite interview question is which products call for speed and which call for excellence. He wants candidates to show they have assessed risk, the market and competition, and notes that a purely "ship and find out" answer shows they may not grasp that the V in MVP must still be viable.

His life motto is "stop externalizing": when a meeting or product goes badly, ask what you could have done better. As a poker player he acknowledges that luck is involved, but says repeated failure means you should look at your skill. He also mentions The Secret Soiree, a not-for-profit gathering he co-started for people to discuss entrepreneurship, startups and product.