Feedback-Fueled Innovation: Prodhub.ai's Strategic Leap in Product Management

This episode explores how Prodhub.ai leverages customer feedback to drive strategic innovation in product management.

1. Customer feedback is crucial for refining and evolving business products and strategies.
2. Automation in product management can free up time for strategic thinking and decision making.
3. The evolution of Prodhub.ai from a task automation tool to a strategic planning aid illustrates the potential of AI in enhancing product management.
4. The integration of customer feedback into product development processes can lead to significant innovations and improvements.
5. Continuous engagement with users and adapting to their needs is key to staying relevant and effective.

1: Introduction

Ethan Cole introduces the episode and guest, Sumit Rana. Topics of discussion include the impact of customer feedback and the evolution of Prodhub.ai. Sumit Rana: "That customer feedback is gold."

2: Evolution of Prodhub.ai

Sumit discusses the new strategic features of Prodhub.ai, aiming to support product managers beyond just task automation. Sumit Rana: "We are still very much onto that mission and we are adding a lot of new capabilities."

3: Strategic Importance

The strategic shift in Prodhub.ai's functionality is detailed, emphasizing how it aids product managers in strategic decision-making. Sumit Rana: "It’s a prime example to automate it and therefore add value."

1. Leverage customer feedback: Regularly gather and analyze feedback to refine product offerings.
2. Embrace automation: Automate repetitive tasks to free up resources for strategic activities.
3. Focus on strategy: Use tools like Prodhub.ai to enhance strategic planning and decision-making.
4. Continuous learning and adaptation: Stay updated with new technologies and market demands to keep your product relevant.
5. Engage with stakeholders: Regularly communicate with all stakeholders to ensure alignment and address their needs.

We welcome back Sumeet Rana, the CEO and Founder of Prodhub.ai, in this episode of Founders In LA. Sumeet shares progress on prodhub.ai and how it has continued its mission to serve as a co-pilot for product managers, automating routine tasks to allow for the creation of superior products more efficiently.

Beyond merely speeding up product development processes, Prodhub has significantly broadened its scope to include strategic elements like product discovery and ideation tools, enabling product managers to explore new revenue opportunities and develop comprehensive business strategies.

Sumeet underscores the critical role of customer feedback in shaping the trajectory of Prodhub, detailing how insights gathered from hundreds of interviews have informed the platform’s development and helped pivot towards features that resonate deeply with users’ needs.

The discussion touches on the importance of genuine feedback over niceties, the strategic decision to offer a free plan for individuals, and the ongoing effort to demystify AI and data security concerns among their clientele.

The conversation also highlights the latest developments at Prodhub.ai, including the introduction of an Opportunity Dashboard designed to help Product Managers identify and prioritize the most valuable opportunities based on customer feedback and market data. Sumeet reveals plans for further innovation, with a focus on enterprise maturity and infrastructure improvements powered by Azure to ensure data security and build trust with large enterprise customers.

This episode not only showcases the impressive strides Prodhub has made under Sumeet Rana’s leadership but also offers valuable insights into the importance of customer feedback, the strategic application of AI in product management, and the challenges and opportunities of innovating in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

People

Sumit Rana, Ethan Cole

Companies

Prodhub AI

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Sumit Rana

Content Warnings:

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Sumit Rana

So that customer feedback is gold. It's good, bad, ugly, whatever the feedback is, that's gold.

Ethan Cole

Hey everybody, thanks for joining us and welcome to the founders in LA Podcast. I'm your host, Ethan Cole, and this is an opportunity to shine the spotlight through a product lens on some of the exceptional founders we have as part of the LA community in an unedited one. Take organic conversation with us back in the studio. Sumit Rana welcome back Sumit thank you, Ethan. Good to be back.

This is gonna be an awesome episode. An update on what he's working on. But first, a word from our sponsors, founders and LA is brought to you by Nearshare. Nearsure is a trailblazer in nearshore outsourcing and staff augmentation. With over 15 years of experience offering exceptional latin american software development, data, product and design talent for us projects, Nearshare has revolutionized the way companies scale their teams.

Ethan Cole

They stand apart with 50% female leadership, are trusted by companies large and small, and have been helping us customers grow since before nearsharing was cool. Discover how nearshore can power your tech goals and help you stay lean while scaling fast. Learn more at www.nearshare.com. We're also brought to you by Unida Club. United Club is a co working space that sets itself apart with locations in El Segundo, Manhattan beach and Hermosa.

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Learn more at www. Dot Unida Dot Club that's www. Dot Unita Dot Club. Our guest today is Sumit Rana. Sumit is the CEO and founder of Prodhub AI.

Now Sumit, can you please remind our listeners you know about Prod Hub? I believe the last time you were here you referred to it as copilot for product managers. That's right. So we are still very much on the mission to be the co pilot for product.

Sumit Rana

Our value proposition stays largely the same. If I have to explain what product does, it basically automates the product management function, identifies new revenue opportunities so that product managers can build better products faster. We are still very much onto that mission and we are adding lot of new capabilities that are adding value through not only the execution side of things, but also on the strategic side of things as well. That's great. I think the last time you spoke to us it was more from the lens of, hey, I've created this tool that will allow product managers to do their jobs and execute quicker.

It will help them create prds very quickly, it'll help use generative AI to write user stories. And sounds like now you've kind of expanded beyond those activities, not mindless activities, but the daily minutiae activities of writing a user story. And from my own product background, what I do like about Prod Hub is I can't tell you how many times I've written a story for a login. And I was joking with a buddy of mine, Travis Corrigan, who's also friend of the show, was on it previously, and we were joked about it back in the day, like, hey, we really need a solution because we can't just keep writing our same user stories. I wrote that maybe seven times, he wrote it maybe seven times or more.

And it's just so efficient to have to like go back to try to rebuild, reinvent the wheel, like every single time and like just you scale it out. How many product managers have written that same story for a login? Right. Just like so necessary in order to have the requirements there so that the, so that you know what the look and feel is from a design perspective and the engineers know exactly what the experience is. But oh, man, not having to write that over again.

So that was the prod hub that we spoke about six months ago. And now, curious to hear more about the strategic angle, though, the strategic piece that you're adding. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, it's a great job. I think you summarized it really well on where we were. And I think at the end of it, our core hypothesis remains the same, which is look at any automation use case out there, look at GitHub, or look at any other automation company.

Sumit Rana

It is built on adding value. By automating the stuff that is repeatable, you're spending human effort, human hours on doing the same stuff over and over again. And therefore, it is a prime example to automate it and therefore add value. So, largely, as I mentioned in our mission statement, we want to automate those use cases and free up that time for product managers or product management related fields. Could be business analysts, could be a product owner, could be anyone who's thinking about what to do and more importantly, why to do.

When we started, we were very focused on the what effectively we were focused on, when you say user stories, it's very tactical, which means that by that time you already know what problem you're solving and now you're going and creating that solution, you're creating that user story, you're creating those use cases. Right? So we started there because it was an easy thing to do. It was the low hanging fruit, and it also is probably where most of the pain is. And so we started with that.

Over the last six months, what has happened is as we're doing more and more interviews and we're speaking to more and more customers, we are getting feedback from product managers, especially, who are more on the senior side or the product leadership side. And they started talking to us about, well, I don't spend that much time on writing user stories. My product owner does it. So we got it covered on the product owner side. But then when you're talking to product manager, they're saying, well, I'm spending more time thinking about what problem am I solving?

And is that big enough? Am I going after the right audience? They're thinking about all those questions that you normally want to think. If you're writing a PRFAQ or you're writing a PRD, that is where you're spending significant time, because that's where most of the thinking part comes in, that's where most of the value comes in. So we said, no problem, we'll automate that.

So we kind of automated the prds. But then again, when you write a PRD at that time, you already thought about what problem you're trying to solve. So now we've actually expanded that spectrum. So we started doing that where we said, okay, we've automated the PRD, and that's a good first draft, but you don't write a PRD in five minutes. You can never do that if you're solving a big problem.

It needs deep thought, it needs collaboration, it needs stakeholder management, it needs a lot of those aspects where the PRD takes a shape of the initial idea to building it over a period of time into a solid, solid business case. So how can we enable product managers in building that solid business case? So what we did was we added product strategy, sorry, product discovery and ideation tool in there. So now when you get that PRD, you could actually probe further and you can say, okay, give me competitor data, give me the market size. And so we've actually enabled AI prompts within our tool where you can just click off a button and it expands on the original PRD idea and then gives you like say, 20 ideas on what else you could do.

So that's where this strategic part comes into play, where you build on the initial idea, going back to the similar framework of divergence and convergence. So first you explore all the ideas and out of those ideas you can bring them back into what are the most impactful that are relevant to you today. What we're doing is we're pushing it even further. Very soon, it's not live yet. Very soon we will have an opportunity dashboard.

The opportunity dashboard is actually going to go to even further back. Before you think about writing a PRD, you have to first think about the problem that you're trying to solve. You have to think about what are the possible solutions. And it's a fun kind of a thing that I used to hear at Disney and maybe some other organizations too. When you're a large organization and you're doing good, the favorite line that I used to hear is we are drowning in opportunities.

Now that's a problem, but it's a happy problem because you have a lot of options on how to make money, you have a lot of options on which path to take, but it always comes down to which one is the best bang for the buck. It always comes down to how do you prioritize that once you've decided that, then you go write your PRD, then you go write your user stories after the PRD. So we are tackling that initial thought, the initial from a strategy perspective, what is the opportunity in front of me? And out of all the opportunities that are available, which one is the one that I should go after? So our new capabilities, the opportunity dashboard, is going to expose not just your thought, like this is a problem trying to solve.

You could actually plug in your customer feedback in there. You can upload unstructured data and say, this is what my customers are saying, and we will actually make sense of it. And we'll tell you that as per your customers, here are the top three features that you should have, and that is an immediate revenue impact to you. Then you go invest in that product, then you go invest in that pod and you go into that user story. So we have actually expanded the spectrum by adding more strategic frameworks and strategic capabilities on product AI.

So not only you are now operating at a tactical level where you're writing user stories, you're actually going way above and you're thinking about the strategic pieces too. And therefore the entire product lifecycle will now be automated. Wow. So I think that's an excellent use of the technologies that are out there today in terms of AI and the ability to expand and double click into something. So not to it was the MVP is what you started with, but it did seem like it does sound like now.

Before when you started, it made sense like, oh, wow, this is really good because it's going to cut down the time for product managers. I think it sounds like it's a strong move to be able to expand it out to like, hey, these strategic things, have you considered these other options of going to even before, other solutions for the same problem set? And then to your point, if you're able to incorporate the customer data and let that feed into an opportunities engine, and then you can kind of work through that to the story level, it's a much more powerful tool than when you first started. How did you get to this point? What caused the pivot?

Because I know the last time we spoke you said you have a product background and you did classic product development. I think you spoke to 300 different people before you started building. How have you been informed? What informed this change and expansion the. Feature set.

From an early stage startup perspective too. We have a lot of people who listen, who are also building. What led you to expand in this direction and what surprised you between the 300 interviews you did before to where you are now? What's that gap? What was the injection of something else that told you to go to this direction?

Sumit Rana

Yeah. No. So I think the number one thing that any entrepreneur must look for is customer feedback. So that initial 300, now I think there's another additional 300 interviews. I spend 50%.

I try to spend 50% of my time on pure feedback. There's no sales pitch. There is no selling involved. It is literally going and reaching out to people and say, hey, I have something and I would love to take your feedback. You have been a product expert in this space and I would love to hear what you think.

Does this resonate with you? Does this problem resonate with you? The way we are solving it, does it resonate with you?

Just again, from an entrepreneurship standpoint, it's not like we made it big right now, but still, I think my learnings have been, you can never go build a product just based on your experience only and just based on your past learnings. The world is changing at a rapid, rapid phase. Right? So the last thing you can do is that you build assumption based on just your experience. Right?

So what I like to do is I like to talk to as many people as I could and get experience firsthand. Like, even if there are some people who are using the product and are not deciding not to continue because of whatever reason their organizational budget doesn't support it or the organization is going through a churn. And I'm hearing that a lot, by the way, a lot of organization going through some churn and reorganizing and all that stuff. I absolutely make sure that please spend five minutes with me and talk to me about that. You use the product, what worked and what did not work.

So that customer feedback is gold. It's good, bad, ugly, whatever the feedback is, that's gold. So we take that feedback and then we start thinking about how we incorporate that into the product. And lo and behold, that was naturally the first item that we should build in our system. If you are thinking about building the next opportunity in your product, you absolutely must have a way to listen to customers and then start making sense of it, what the feedback is.

And that is your biggest revenue opportunity there. So that is what the opportunity dashboard will look like. And so naturally, and I say this to my customers, too, when we speak to them, and I tell them like, look, my roadmap is not my roadmap anymore. It's your roadmap. You're my customer.

What is it that you care about? What is the pain point that you are dealing with will absolutely make it happen. As part of our roadmap, we built the mvp, we built the first version of it, and we are moving organically towards what makes sense. But the biggest weight in that backlog is what our customers want. So we are always open to it.

We are a startup. We are very nimble. I mean, I joked about it yesterday at USC. I was at a class there and I was presenting Prodhub that as somebody asked me, well, do you have onboarding in your tool? And I'm like, every time I build an onboarding tutorial, our tool has changed three times already.

We are moving so fast and we are making so many changes that the onboarding becomes outdated. So we are really struggling with that because as a small team, we are very quick to make changes and very quick to see how the response is. I apologize firsthand. I said, sorry. We are working on the onboarding and all that stuff, but we are moving so fast.

So please reach out if you have. We personally hand hold a lot of our customers through their experiences and that's what we're doing right now. But I think customer feedback is probably the number one reason why we are changing on shifting things, because we want to build what solves the biggest problem for our customers. Did you find, have you noticed anything between the 300 that you did to start before you really put code down and then the 300 cents? So what would you say is the biggest change?

Because from the founders I've spoke to, I think you are one of the higher number of customer interviews before you built. I think it's a great use case or a great case study. Like, okay, so you did the 300. Looking back now, would you have done it the same or was there a smaller number? You think you would have, would you have stopped at 30 and then built and now start to stock to talk to customers or where do you land on that?

Sumit Rana

No, I think, well, one, it comes as part of the discipline as you are building a product and you read all these books and you go through this experience, then number one thing that people tell you is that you have to listen to the market and understand what the market wants and then go ahead and build a solution, right? Like you don't want to invest a million dollars in a product and you've spoken to nobody and hope that it suddenly works. Right. And I think there was some other book I was reading. It says like 99% of the products that are successful today are not the original product that we started with.

Right. And there's a reason for that because you learn as part of the journey. I would learn before I start rather than, you know, hoping that it'll certainly be what I want. However, I have a pet peeve there. I don't know if I can see say that out as a message through the podcast.

I think the initial 300 people that I spoke to, and naturally, when you start, who do you start with? You start with their coworkers, you start with your friends, you start with, you've spoken to. And usually these are the people who know you and who trust you. And they're nice. So when they're nice, they will give you nice feedback.

And as an entrepreneur, you appreciate that, that I like the nice feedback, but it actually does a disservice to the entrepreneur in many ways. Right. Because what the entrepreneur wants to hear is the truth. He wants to understand that I'm spending my time, energy and money into building something awesome, and I'm requesting your time for it. I would love to hear the uglies rather than the goods, because the uglies is where the actual gold mine is, where I actually get the feedback, right.

So I kind of realized, and I have learned that in my interviews these days. I start with that. I said, look, I'm a big boy and I can handle it so you don't have to worry about it and just make sure that you do address what you did not like. That is absolutely important to me. And in the initial phase, it was more about, hey, based on my experience, I feel like that's the problem.

Do you agree? And 99% said, absolutely. I love it. I agree. All right, will you sign the check?

Well, let's not go that fast. So, you know, so I think I probably will drive a mission here, that when you're going to people for feedback, absolutely. Make sure that you give as objective a feedback and as true a feedback on exactly how you feel about it. If you don't like the idea, tell them. They don't like the idea.

You don't, you hate the product, tell them, like, I don't think this holds a problem. And then, of course, there may be other things that the entrepreneur is looking for and saying, okay, what is the problem you're trying to solve? That's a meaningful conversation to have. And it could be also the way maybe these were early stages. So there's a science behind, and there's a lot of science behind.

When you write surveys on what type of questions to ask, sometimes it's not a direct question that you ask, but you get the exact answer that you need. So there's a framing part of it, too. I don't think I was as sophisticated in framing my questions initially, and I think entrepreneurs should spend time thinking about the right questions to ask because there's a little bit of a wishful thinking in those questions. When you're an entrepreneur, you are hoping that you hear from the other side that it's a brilliant idea. Go build it.

And I think there comes a bias along with that. So I think during my initial interviews, there was lot of visual thinking as part of those questions on my part, and I think there was a lot of niceties from the other side as they were giving feedback. So I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, and that's what I tried to get to as I speak to people. And we have an exit survey now, which actually talks about, okay, let's talk about what worked, what didn't work. Please elaborate on that.

And we get some really good answers on that. And that's what we're taking as customer feedback and building the next version of product. Oh, man. And I could just, you know, in, my ears are just ringing all those founders who've sat in that chair, just, like, cheering you on, saying, yes, please just give us the honest feedback. You know, they're all big boys and girls and the worst thing that someone can do is you know if there's a product idea and they're actually putting their, dedicating their lives and money into it you know don't be nice if it's just come pie in the sky and idea and you know they're never actually doing maybe be nice doing but if they're like putting their time and effort and real money if it becomes a real project or a real profession like yeah, yeah don't, don't be nice.

Like just tell us the real because otherwise you're wasting time, wasting their time and money and sending them in the wrong direction. I'd love to double click into I think you tapped into like an exit survey which would be really helpful. So for, for people who are building what are the, what's the biggest challenge or biggest difference between the questions you asked then and the questions you asked now? So you mentioned two things I think stick out. Is there any others?

Like the one is the exit survey and the first one is you preface it saying hey give me the ugly. So what else changed in the questions you're asking these customer interviews? Yeah so I think initially there was a friction point too. Like when we launched product at that time you have to sign up for a beta trial and use it. One of the strategic pivots that we have done is I think late November or December we actually open it up with a free plan.

Sumit Rana

So we announced that the individual plan is free. What that does is that basically removes all friction for you to try things and for you to test things and all. So now what happens is that you don't have the, we don't ask for a credit card so you can just create a free account right. And then you use the product. So when we are asking those questions we actually go into the account and actually look at some of the stories you've written, some of the prds you've written.

Like one of the things enhancement that we are doing on the PRD is and we got a feedback as part of a similar conversation that oh this is great but our prds are slightly different. I'm like no problem, we can make it configurable and we are going to launch that feature soon where you decide what you want in your PRD. You say ok, I want the vision, I want the mission, I want functional requirements, I want security requirements and I want competitor data. No problem. So we will absolutely make it a completely configurable PRD.

You decide what you want and your organization could dictate that I want these two elements. I don't want those two elements. And that's how you can actually, that becomes your custom priority template for you, right? Or fully automated, by the way. So that came as part of those conversations.

Initially it was sort of like a took time, effort and energy to first get them to sign for the beta. And it was in the back of the mind like, oh, I got to pay for it, what's the pricing and all that stuff? And now we're not caring. We're like, no, no, no, individual plan free, just sign up, use it as much as you want, and when you love it, then let's have the conversation. And I think that is working.

Over the last six months we've seen almost 1000% growth in users, we've seen 100% growth in engagement. A lot of people are engaging with the product, they're creating new events, we're tracking the events, we're tracking the usage. So our engagement has gone up significantly, mostly from the individual users perspective. And our hope is that the individual usage continues to grow, that we ultimately convert those into organizational benefit. And that's the big difference.

That's where we want to go, actually. That leads us really nicely into the next place I'd like to take. This is what is next. So you've done the MVP, you're out there right now, you're much more strategic in the questions and you're getting better responses and more customer feedback. You're implementing some powerful new features.

So what's next? Yeah, so I think both from a strategy perspective and from infrastructure perspective, we're making a very big shift. And that shift is towards enterprise maturity. And how we can accomplish that is we are going to our entire back end. Infrastructure is going to be powered by Azure.

Sumit Rana

And as we all know, the three big ones are azure, AWs and GCP. And it comes with the standard responsible scalability, reliability, all those benefits that enterprise customers ask for. And I think again, learning from the lessons in the past, there were two reasons why we were getting some resistance. One of course was that they were infrastructure questions people were worried about. And we speak to large enterprises, we speak to medium enterprises too.

The number one fear today, or maybe the number two, I think they're both fighting for the title is how secure is my data? That's a number one fear that enterprises have. I think we are tackling that we already have the azure infrastructure up and running and our focus is going to be where it wouldn't matter that you're using foundational models like OpenAI and others, we ultimately will have customized models running off of your data, customer data, and it will be as conversational as what we are using today. You'll get the same output that you have today with Prod Hub, but in the backend, it's not powered by foundational model, it's powered by your data. Right.

It's a pretty tough task, pretty complicated task, but it actually alleviates the primary concern that the customers have, which is my data needs to be secure and I don't want my data to go anywhere. So we're solving that one. The second part is the fear of AI. We hear that a lot, and it's genuine. I think there are some misconceptions, too.

For example, we've heard that our customers have said that I don't want my customer data, my data, private data, to go to OpenAI. I don't want GPT learn. Well, the truth is the foundational models don't need learning on your customer data. It's written clearly in the terms and conditions of OpenAI. But there are some misconceptions around it, too, going back to fear of AI.

Within the umbrella of fear of AI, there is individual preferences too. So you get that a lot from product managers. I have emails from product managers that literally state that my job is to write a PRD. My job is to write user stories. So I think there's a little bit of a timing thing going on here.

There's a little bit of maturity and acceptance that you have to do. I mean, these technologies are not there to replace, these technologies are there to augment and enhance. So we don't claim that we are going to automate 100%. We cannot. You know your business better than anybody.

What we claim is that we are automating the mundane stuff. We are automating the regular stuff. We are automating the, the use cases that will take you weeks to do. Now, you can do that in days. You add your layer of sophistication or specialization on top of it, and therefore you will be able to do maybe two x of what you're doing right now.

That's productivity. That's where you actually start making real money and start making real impact in your jobs. I think there's a couple of things that are going on, and we are fighting that battle every day. Both the fear of AI and on the other side, the privacy battle. I think we are winning the privacy battle because now we have the best infrastructure available for our customers.

The fear of AI, I think it will take some time to call, but we are working every day on that. That just comes with territories. You're trying to blaze a trail at a new area. That's right. That's amazing.

And thanks again for coming back and sharing with us. Terrific progress since last time. We hope that you'll come back again maybe in six months and we'll learn what's new. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Sumit Rana

Thanks for having me. It was fun. Thanks, Sumit. So our guest today has been Sumit Rana. He is the CEO and founder at Prodhub AI.

Available at Prodhub AI. P r o dash u b AI I'd like to thank you again for coming down here. Sameit, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'd like to thank our sponsors nearshare, Unida and Prodhub AI.

Ethan Cole

You can build better products with Prodhub AI where innovation meets efficiency. Automate your prDs, fast track story creation and speed up your product team with a single platform. It's your co pilot for product management. Discover how at Prodhub AI. Sumit, anything you want to add to that?

Sumit Rana

No, I think you hit it on the head. As I said, we are pushing more towards the strategic areas right now, especially the opportunity dashboard and things like that. But I think this is pretty well put. Well, thank you. Thanks again for coming down.

Ethan Cole

Like to thank you all for listening to us again. And if you like what you hear, please smash that subscribe button. Thanks again for joining us and we'll catch you next time on Founders in LA.