Aswath Krishnan

Let me be blunt, There is none Trust no one who Says they know one No one knows  Why we are  Or where  We go next But since we are  And since we feel I say it’s better  To feel peace, joy  and love  Than sorrow  Or hate  How you do that Is up to you Here’s a clue -  It’s all in you. Spread it around With the golden rule Aswath

I wrote this a week before starting a new job as a Product Manager at Lyft. Every new job is an opportunity to do things better. This is a reminder to myself on what it means to be a good product manager. It boils down to three main things: 1. Product Strategy: Bring clarity to what your team is working towards, how and why As a PM, your key responsibility is to layout and communicate the game your team is playing, how we should keep score, and the strategy and path to winning. What success looks like : All members of your team and the exec team can articulate, defend and feel confident and excited about what your team is doing and why. Key deliverables : Team mission and vision, key metrics, goals and OKRs over different timeframes, roadmap over different timeframes, current metric values and dashboards, user feedback/insights/journey, project or feature specs.

In 2018, I started and led the growth function at Quizlet, the most popular study app in the US. We managed to hit a new milestone of 50M monthly users (up 66% from 30M in 2017)! This was my first experience in growth (I have been a product and a platform PM in the past) and I’m very glad I did it as it helped me understand a key aspect of scaling a business. This post is a summary of what I have learned. What is growth? Imagine you have a shop selling products. The product teams help improve the products or create new products. The growth team has a different role. They get more potential customers into the store, match them with the right products and help them understand the benefits, get more visitors to purchase the products and come back for more. Growth is a scaling function — you should invest in growth only after you have evidence of a product-market fit i.e. your product solves a need for a target user base. The tactics that you use for getting to product-market fit or t...

I was recently advising a couple of friends who were considering leaving larger companies to join startups. Sharing the main points of our discussion here.  Before diving in, I'll lay out some definitions. Pre-Series A startups are typically those that are still figuring out product-market fit. A Series A startup is one that has found product-market fit and is starting to scale growth and develop a business model. A Series B startup has a working business model and is starting to scale revenue. A Series C startup starts to resemble a regular, mid-size company - it's scaling growth, revenue, and maybe investing in some new product lines. When I say startups in this post, I refer to Series A or B startups. 4 questions to consider before joining a Series A or B startup.   1. Are you interested in the startup's space and mission (not just your functional role)?  You can succeed in larger companies by focusing just on your function. In startups, you succeed by mak...

1. Invest in developing a strong foundation -  long-term vision, frameworks, principles, etc. Often times, a strong foundation can make decisions easier. 2. Learn to discern which decisions are consequential (range of possible outcome) and irreversible, and which aren't. Be more deliberate making the former and quick to make the latter. Use a maximizer approach for the former and a satisficer approach for the latter.  3. Bring clarity to decision making by identifying key decision factors , laying out distinct options and how they perform against those factors. Learn to create new options that make things better. 4. Understand the first, second, third-order consequences ; and how this will play out in different time horizons - short, medium and long term.

A friend and I were sharing experiences on how we both had trouble sustaining new habits. I recounted how long breaks punctuated my "daily" exercise and meditation practice and she shared how she has to repeat courses to get back to good time management practices. Unless you are superhuman, change is hard. Developing new skills and habits is hard. Consistent focus and practice are hard. These are hard because you are trying to change your default nature and programming. So assume you are not superhuman. Assume you won't have focus and energy to do all you want, you will not follow through on some days, you will make mistakes, sometimes you will give up for months or altogether. This will help you avoid feeling guilty or bad when the inevitable happens, and instead adopt strategies that can work for our non-superhuman selves - like focusing on fewer things at a time, planning for how you will restart when you give up, for how you correct and grow when you make mistake...

Peace or equanimity is the acceptance of your current reality. Joy is the appreciation and celebration of your current reality.  By these definitions, peace and joy are entirely in your mind's control. Peace and joy are better to experience and share than disturbance or sorrow. But we often let outside factors determine our peace and joy, and make it conditional. "I'll be happy if I get that promotion", "if people are nice to me", "if I have enough money", "if my health is good" etc. Why hold our own peace and joy hostage? We think outside factors - people, environment, or events - disturb our peace or joy. When someone yells at us or cheats us, when there's an accident, when something doesn't go as planned, when losing something you like etc. In reality, our emotional response to these factors - anger, frustration, sadness, jealousy, fear - disturbs our peace and joy. Our emotional responses originate from our expectations...