Meet the Masters - Manish Gajria, Koru Kids

MANISH GAJRIA

To kickstart our 2021 Meet the Masters interview series, Pete Alexander, Director at The Up Group, spoke to Manish Gajria, Chief Product Officer at Koru Kids, on interview tips, diversity and leadership lessons.

What do you look for in a great product hire?

Great Product Managers are curious people – I like my team to have a natural interest in learning, whether that be through analysing data or talking directly to users / customers. They are driven by identifying the most important problems and working out how they can be solved. Optimism is also important: to believe that there is a way to solve an issue and to have the enthusiasm to find the solution. The best product leaders are often positive, creative people.

The third attribute I test is numeracy, which translates into analytical capabilities and the ability to use those skills effectively in a business case. This is especially important and comes hand in hand with the final attribute: storytelling. A high percentage of the job is bringing things to life for others, and to tell an effective story you need to be able to construct a compelling narrative with the data you have.

Fundamentally, product management is about getting people together to agree on a specific thing, whether that be a set of problems to solve, creating a strategy or a particular approach to a challenge you are facing. The more effectively you can bring people together, the easier your job becomes.

How do you test for storytelling and other qualitative skills in an interview?

Case study interviews are a great tester, where candidates either fail or make really positive strides right at the very first step. How you structure your thinking will determine how clearly you break down the problem and ultimately arrive at the solution. The most successful candidates will lay out and plan all the aspects they need to consider, narrowing it down to the most important actions and validation factors.

“A more diverse team breeds a better culture of learning”

In your opinion, why does diversity matter?

A significant proportion of the products we build are going to be used by a really wide variety of people. This was definitely the case at Hotels.com given the global nature of the travel industry. So the first obvious thing to say is that a team will end up with a narrow set of perspectives if you do not have a diverse mix of thinkers helping you solve a problem.

At Koru Kids, we recognise that although we need empathy for our paying customers – parents – we are also working on behalf of nannies, and those opposite sides of our marketplace have very different drivers and motivators. Plus, they need different things from our platform. So it is critical that we have varied life experiences across our team to ensure that we can better understand the needs of all of our users.

More generally, a more diverse team breeds a better culture of learning. Employees can challenge and teach each other things in ways that a group of people who all have similar life experiences might not be able to do so.

Do you have an example from your career where you have seen a business recognising the need for improved diversity, and what they did to change it?

Expedia, being a global company, have done pretty well with cultural diversity. With a global product, it is important to have a diverse team to provide alternative perspectives. Through heavy A/B testing, Expedia worked to better understand the habits and preferences of customers all over the world, and the cultural reasons behind those choices.

They also identified that, like a lot of large organisations, they had a gender diversity problem across the senior level of the company. The business made several positive changes by aligning diversity goals to specific business goals. It was not just an ambition; they understood that diverse companies perform better and recognised that they had to fix the problem to retain their position as a successful, global business. One example of the provisions they put into place was to provide employees with more flexibility and ability to move around the business – into different teams and functions. This encouraged female leaders to feel more comfortable returning to the company after maternity leave.

How do you solve for more educational diversity?

Our founder Rachel [CEO of Koru Kids] will admit that we were, like most companies, biased towards hiring people who had been to top universities and worked at marquee organisations. The reality is, neither of those were a strong indicator of the candidate's success in the role they were being hired into. There are also a huge number of fantastic people you might miss this way. 

We have recently changed the way we hire and, by using a blind recruitment process in the early stages, any educational bias is eliminated. We ask candidates to answer a series of questions relating to the skills that the job requires and blind score their answers against a meticulously crafted scorecard. We have no idea who the candidate is, nor can we match one of their answers to the rest of their application. Those who are successful in that stage then move to a CV screen and phone interview to bring those answers to life and test for values, too. It creates a very fair process and has gained strong buy-in across the team and, surprisingly, positive feedback from several candidates. 

What have been the most important leadership lessons you have learnt over the past year?

“Flexibility cannot be created overnight - it has to be built into the company’s DNA from the start which Koru Kids has done admirably.  ”

Flexibility. Being able to alter your approach in different circumstances is critical. Koru Kids did a great job when the first lockdown happened. Customer demand dropped under uncertain circumstances and our approach had to change overnight but the company acted quickly. Being able to pivot its focus quickly to automation and changing the organisation accordingly meant it could continue to operate strongly against the headwinds. However, the team only managed to do this because the culture attracts people who are nimble and the company is willing to change quickly when needed. The lesson for me here is that this flexibility cannot be created overnight - it has to be built into the company's DNA from the start which Koru Kids has done admirably.  

What organisational strategies have helped Koru Kids particularly during the pandemic? 

The pandemic has been tough on lots of people, and on many different levels. We as leaders want to support and help people be the best version of themselves. Every week at Koru Kids, we send out a survey to gauge how everyone in the company is doing and to learn about what needs improvement. As a leadership team, we make sure to respond to the feedback – and act on it – so that our teams can see they are being heard. Most companies today have systems in place to listen to their employees, but I've rarely seen responding to the feedback being taken this seriously. This has kept employee engagement high despite everyone being remote which is no small feat. 

Have you got any suggestions of great books / podcasts / content?

The Knowledge Project by Shane Parish is a podcast that covers very diverse topics with access to incredible people around the world. Shane talks a lot on mental models and decision making which is really important for me. Another suggestion is the blog Wait but Why which addresses some really complex philosophical questions. Definitely worth a read.

One interesting book I read recently was ‘Factfulness’ by Hans Rosling. By laying out the facts and the realities of world issues, it gives you a different way of thinking about big numbers and problems, which can be very useful when transferred into a work capacity. A great read, and one that we base our interview techniques on, is ‘Who: The Method for Hiring’ by Geoff Smart and Randy Street - I highly recommend it.