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Karan Peri is a product leader and builder who has led groundbreaking products across Nansen, Coinbase, Flipkart, Amazon Prime Video and Microsoft, known for pioneering progressive web apps and reimagining digital experiences at scale.
Here’s some of my takeaways from this week’s episode…
1/ 🎯 Prototype > PowerPoint: When pitching revolutionary ideas, show don't tell. Flipkart's PWA got approved only after building a working prototype—all previous written proposals failed. Live demos help stakeholders visualize the impossible and overcome status quo bias.
2/ 🏃♂️ Move at the Speed of Trust: The best product teams work in "unsanctioned" ways to prove concepts quickly. At both Microsoft and Flipkart, breakthrough innovations came from small teams working after hours to build prototypes before getting official approval.
3/ 🔍 Tech First Can Lead to Customer First: While "start with the customer" is good advice, sometimes understanding new technical capabilities (like service workers or ML) reveals previously impossible solutions to customer problems. Stay on top of emerging tech.
4/ 🤝 Early Marketing Integration = Better Products: Include marketing teams in PRD reviews and early planning. The best marketing partners come armed with data about channel performance, conversion rates, and customer behavior—treat them as strategic partners.
5/ 📊 Outcomes > Outputs: Don't celebrate shipping features or running experiments. Focus relentlessly on actual business impact. Create space in roadmaps for pivots when better paths to outcomes emerge.
6/ 🎭 Test Feature Request Sincerity: When stakeholders request features, ask them to write a simple two-pager explaining the "why." This filters out ~70% of non-critical requests and ensures requesters have skin in the game.
7/ 🔄 Pre-mortems Prevent Post-mortems: Before building, use AI to identify potential failure modes. Then deliberately choose which risks to mitigate now versus later. This prevents surprises while maintaining speed.
8/ 📱 Challenge Industry "Ceilings": When Flipkart's mobile web conversions hit 0.8%, everyone said that was the ceiling. But by questioning assumptions and rebuilding from first principles, they achieved dramatically better results. Don't accept artificial limits.
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Where to find Karan Peri:
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In this episode, we cover:
00:00 Introduction and Background
01:20 Journey from Engineering to Product Management
08:08 Pioneering Progressive Web Apps at Flipkart
13:19 Understanding Customer Problems and Building Solutions
31:34 Working with Marketing Teams
39:14 Product Management Time Management
53:53 Balance of Maker vs Manager Schedule
58:51 Leveraging AI in Product Management
1:04:39 Pre-mortems and Risk Assessment
1:06:10 Lightning Round Q&A
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Obligatory disclaimer: I've worked at YouTube and Google for about a decade in various marketing teams. Nothing I say in my personal spaces is necessarily endorsed by them.
