My name is Teagan, and I’m a Managing Consultant at ISL Talent. I specialise in product and have worked hard to build a solid network over the years. I’ve created this blog series to gather insights from high level product people and help others in the community with advice to take their careers to the next level.

In this interview, I chat to VP of Product, Anup Hirani. We talk about everything from the current challenges within product to upcoming trends for 2024 and the influence of AI on product.

Can you start by introducing yourself?

“I’m Anup, a Product Leader and I have spent the last decade in SaaS B2B companies. I have focused my career on startup and high growth scaleup environments, building products and solutions in the HR tech and Life Sciences industry. I started my career in operations and expanded from there into product leadership roles. I have a great passion for growing and empowering product teams, building impact products using emerging technologies and looking to solve challenging opportunities wherever I see them.”

What’s involved in your current role?

“I’ve recently been focused on building an AI powered microbiome innovation platform for the life sciences industry, to help scientists generate insights from complex biological data sets. Essentially, our aim was to help scientists become more effective and provide them with best-in-class enterprise data and analytics tools that could generate more novel health insights in their research. My role as VP of Product was to help define our product vision and proposition and establish an MVP, then scale the platform with several additional applications and deliver that to our customers. We targeted customers in many different industry verticals from the beauty industry and the food industry to the agricultural and biopharma industries; which involved a very diverse set of use cases and target personas. What’s been most interesting is figuring out advancements and challenges and opportunities of technology with biological advancements, and figuring out how you can help some of the smartest people in the world working for leading research teams become even more successful. The bio-revolution provides a very compelling product and business opportunity.”

What challenges have you faced recently?

“2023 was challenging from a financial perspective. There was a squeeze on capital availability, which forced companies to think differently and operate in a way that many were not prepared for. I think that was challenging because you had to rethink strategies and initiatives and from a product perspective, we had to think about what our core proposition was and had to move away from thinking about what all the next features of our roadmap could be, and focus on our differentiated value proposition and how we best spend our money and our resources to bring that value to our customers. You had to be more ruthless in your prioritisation. That was one dimension to it. At the same time, what we also learned was we were still in an environment where a lot of companies, including us, had expectations to deliver improved products and experiences to customers and users. It was a challenging transition in making sure that you’re still satisfying existing customers and incorporating their feedback and future wishes whilst balancing your roadmap. Towards the end of the year, we also started to see how AI was beginning to disrupt products and ways of working, and many organisations and Product Managers weren’t really ready for it.”

Were there any unexpected trends that influenced the product development within the business that you were in?

“Because I was working in the AI and Data space, we were already working on important themes around how to process large amounts of data, create natural language interfaces, generate answers to complex search queries, and to ultimately help users generate insights and experience personalised recommendations.

We saw the rise of generative AI using large language models, and as a business we were already working on things like how do we helps scientists ask better and more relevant questions? How do we help them create and validate their hypothesis? How do we help them choose the appropriate data sets to look at? How do we recommend a workflow that is relevant to their needs?

One thing I don’t think we expected is how quickly large language models like Chat GPT would become part of everyday life. We recently during the pandemic became comfortable with remote working and using collaborative tools like Teams, Slack, Miro or Figma, and now we’ve started understanding how to use Gen AI tools to become more productive at work. Building self-service orientated products and easy to onboard customers workflows, leveraging product led growth principles, has become key in order to cut product costs and become leaner.”

Is there anything you see becoming a trend in 2024?

“It’s easy to get overwhelmed when we see something being as hyped up as generative AI. I believe it’s going to become an even richer part of our everyday life. In terms of AI powered systems, product recommendations and customisations – it’s going to become more powerful than what we have recently experienced, as we are still very early in that technology life cycle. I believe that because of the potential value that AI can bring across so many products, it’s going to be increasingly important for us to build more robust models and feed these with higher quality data to produce even better outcomes.

However, it’s not going to be enough that companies are using AI, companies need to understand how these AI tools are going to influence their business and business model over the long term. Ultimately, we will see a lot of disruption happening in many industries as AI grows bigger.”

What advice would you give businesses trying to adopt new trends, and do you have any advice on how to maintain a USP?

“I believe that adopting AI is key for a lot of businesses. Secondly, I’d say unity-based thinking and getting closer to users to validate ideas at an early stage. Optimising for costs is important, and you can do that in different ways. As product people, we have tools to do this. We can do either qualitative or quantitative research, we can test early-stage prototypes with clients, we can carry out A/B testing. I think product people need to put the right analytics tools in place to be able to track key data points for both prototypes and launched products to ensure it meets expectations, and if not, quickly react and adapt their solutions. 

Essentially, it’s about ensuring the feedback loop isn’t broken. It’s also about empathy-based thinking, having inclusive designs and a deep understanding of all of your users and how to create value for them. Even though some innovation efforts are being put aside, in this environment, we’re going to have to be hyper focused on properly validating our big bets, and making sure that those big bets are differentiated and that there is willingness to pay.

One other interesting trend is immersive technology experiences. Apple is launching their Apple Vision Pro headset later in February, so it’s going to be interesting to see how immersive AR/VR can accelerate and win peoples mind space again. There has been a period of time where people have forgotten about it due to the lack of relevant use cases, but I think it can definitely come back, especially in workplaces with staff training simulations, and in creative and entertainment sectors. 

One final thing that I think will keep people engaged this year is the ESG (environmental, social and governance) topic. I’m hearing product leaders and companies talking more and more about wanting to drive positive impact, and about not just having an ESG strategy, but actually implementing practice within their own business, as well as making sure they are incorporating some of those decisions into the products that they’re building.”

Are there any other points that you think are important or that people should focus on?

“Being outcome focused rather than feature focused is key especially as competition becomes fierce. We talk about it all the time in product management. Overall, I think companies need to be leaner, and product people need to take initiatives to support this. This is where companies that thought ahead and emphasised initiatives within Product Ops, Design Ops and Dev Ops, will benefit when it comes to keeping things efficient and focus on executing what adds most value. As an example, Product Ops is essentially a response to the fact that companies were not operating effectively when collaborating around new and existing products, impacting customers and operations negatively. This function can help in terms of product related communication of strategies and roadmaps, managing customer feedback, evaluating tools, and making sure workflows are optimised so that the right products can be brought to market faster. That’s definitely something I’d advocate for.”

Get in touch

In this interview, Anup shared valuable insights into the challenges and trends shaping the product landscape in 2024. Navigating economic challenges last year, Anup emphasised the importance of prioritisation, being lean and staying true to core propositions in 2024.

These blogs are all about connecting people, so if you liked what Anup had to say, connect with him here. Alternatively, if you’d like to feature in a blog or would like to talk to me about product roles, drop me a message on LinkedIn here.