TheProdcast: Recent Episodes
TheProdcast
The Prodcast - all about the stars behind stellar products. We interview people who are passionate about product and ideas.
In this episode, Anuradha Bharat, VP of People Operations at Razorpay, along with Ashish Pathak, Solutions Consultant, talks to us about a fun topic—memes. They discuss how the habit of communicating with memes helped build a culture of candidness among teammares, improved creativity and performance in building products, and finally helped beat burnout in engineering teams. Tune in to this year-end special!
In this episode, Dalia Katan, Founder and CEO of Presently, talks to Aishwarya about the age-old concept of gifting and how she uses tech to reinvent the joy and celebration that gifting brings in. She also shares her strategy around building early-stage startups, about developing curiosity and knowing when to pivot based on market signals, and more. 'Tis the season of building and gifting, so tune in!
In this episode, Manasi Vora, Founder of Komorebi Collective and VP of Strategy & Ops at Skynet Labs, talks to Aishwarya about her journey into the world of bitcoin and DAOs. She explains why decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are increasingly growing up now, and what the future beholds for crypto. Manasi also talks about crypto-based funding and how it could help creators in the verge of web3 adoption. Tune in to understand the basic things you got to know about crypto, DAOs, and web3!
In this episode, Helen Huang, Co-Founder of Co.Lab, talks to Aishwarya about how everyone can belong in tech. An earth scientist turned Product Manager and now a founder, she shares her early days of working with Zynga, GitHub and Microsoft, and how she picked the thread to start Co.Lab, a collaborator based approach to learning the skills needed to break into tech. Helen also loves talking about tackling uncertainties, so she shares her opinions on co-founder compatibility, things essential to build your first startup, and how to develop your product management expertise. Tune in!
In this episode, Aarti Ramakrishnan, Co-Founder and COO of Crayon Data talks to Padmini about a day in the life of a woman entrepreneur—from building the tech culture ground-up and understanding the market to employee management and running operations seamlessly. Dive in to know about her journey, candid stories on what failed and what worked out, and how to accelerate women-led entrepreneurship in a bigger scale for the upcoming tech generation.
In this episode, Aishwarya Goel, Co-Founder and CEO of PeakPerformer talks to Aishwarya about grooming India's tech professionals with executive leadership. She goes on to demystify what 1-on-1 mentoring and coaching comprise of, sharing anecdotes from her prior founding and working experiences at leading startups. Having tech as a great catalyst for promoting the power of leadership coaching, it's pretty exciting to see how PeakPerformer aims to make human mind, psychological decisions, irrationalities, and emotions—all measurable. Tune in to the episode!
In this episode, Chaitra Chidanand, Co-Founder of Salt and (earlier) Simpl, talks to Aishwarya about women, their money decisions, and choices that led to those decisions. Sharing personal anecdotes and experiences, she covers why there's always been a layer of fear and inhibition around investing and discusses how she's using tech as a means to solve for those utilitarian yet essential needs. Tune in!
In this episode, Anubha Maneshwar, Founder of GirlScript Foundation, talks to Aishwarya about the role of tech in the social entrepreneurship space. She discusses how learning to code isn't just enough for career preparedness and goes on to share how GirlScript is making a change in the lives of thousands of rural students in helping them learn coding, leadership skills, and teamwork. She also speaks about her fair share of struggles as a young founder, starting a venture of her own from her last year of college, and puts forward opinions on how tech is playing a crucial role in shaping the nonprofit and education verticals of the future. Tune in!
In this episode, Tanvi Raut Dessai, Founder of the news company Filter Coffee, talks to Aishwarya and Srinidy about her story of how she set up the company from its initial side project days. Filter Coffee is transforming the way media is consumed by the audience, and she throws some light on how memes became a superpower to drive business news through Filter Coffee, the journey of getting 10K subscribers for their newsletter, picking and highlighting the right tech trends, using humour as an armour, and dealing with the stress of running a ground-up business. Tune into the episode!
In this episode, Zainab Ghadiyali, Product & Tech Leader, Ex-Facebook and Airbnb, talks to Srinidy about navigating different career paths and transitions within the tech and product space. She touches upon what it means to discover unconventional routes and also discusses her unique success stories as a leader in a gender-biased society. She breaks the silence around imposter syndrome, how it actually does good provided one develops the right mindset, and how to trust in passion and driving oneself towards learning new things. Tune in to hear what it takes to build a curiosity-driven career in the tech world.
In this episode, Yana Welinder, Co-Founder and CEO of Kraftful talks to Aishwarya about how interaction with the physical world can be made smoother and seamless with the right tech interface. She discusses her eclectic background, of combining law with product management, how building products for software and hardware industries differ, and why she's passionate about helping smart home companies develop better and valued apps for consumers. No more broken systems and myriad apps to control your physical devices—Kraftful is changing the way humans interact with IoT.
In this episode, Katharine Jiang, a former investor and currently the Co-Founder and CEO of WizForm, talks to Aishwarya about the good, great, and ugly things about building a business ground-up. From inspirations to applying the investor mindset, she goes on to candidly share her first-time founding lessons, how she wants to build a community for helping people kickstart their own business, and more. She also gives a clear picture of what's it like to balance the investor hat with the founder mindset, rightly putting forward the best experiences from both. Tune in.
In this episode, Ayushi Mishra, Co-Founder & COO of DronaMaps talks to Aishwarya about 3D mapping and geospatial analytics that help helping in covid hotspots detection. She goes on to explain how this AI-based technology works, how it could be helpful for sustainable development of rural and urban cities, and why drones would become a larger part of the future world. She's a Forbes 30 under 30 alum and is one of the 8 women in STEM actively leading the battle against Covid.
In this episode, Mansi Verma, an experienced investment specialist from Ventureast, who has a demonstrated history of working in the venture capital and private equity space, talks to Padmini about a variety of topics—why only a very few % of women are funded in the Indian startup ecosystem, the journey of women-led startups, what constitutes the right pitch especially when the product has a women-centric need, how to raise fund when you're starting up for the first time, and more. Tune in!
In this episode, Aamna Khan, CEO and Co-Founder of Binks, talks to Aishwarya about the role of technology in designing customized clothing. Traveling through the years of sartorial traditions, Aamna covers why women haven't always been able to find a perfect fit for their clothing. Binks is a technology startup addressing this important problem in the Indian market, and it aims to provide not just the right fit but a seamless outfit experience from the comfort of our homes. Bonus part of this episode is Aamna discussing about how her startup got selected in the Y Combinator accelerator program, how the interviews and funding process work, and more. Listen on!
In this episode, Aditi Agrawal, Founder of School of Future talks to Aishwarya about the concept of future-proofing students. She discusses the gaps between the current education system and the demands of the real world, just as students start to shape their career. Using technology as a leverage, Aditi has built the School of Future to help students become purposeful, collaborative, and entrepreneurial.
In this episode, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Founder of Ness Labs, talks to Aishwarya about the power of mind, the way neuroscience works with tech, and how she kickstarted and scaled her entrepreneurial ventures from zero to one. Having been a former lead for Google Fit's brand marketing efforts, Anne-Laure has a deep-rooted connection with health and wellness, and combing her passion in neuroscience along with technology skills, she not only founded Ness Labs, but also a couple of other projects like Teeny Breaks and Maker's Magazine. Listen to her candid conversations on everything science, brain, and technology.
In this episode, Nita Singh Kaushal, Founder of Miss CEO and professor at Stanford University, talks to Aishwarya about her growing up in the Silicon Valley, early product experiences in Intel and Yahoo!, the importance of leadership training especially for high school girls and young women, and the role she gets to play as a technologist with a purpose.
In this episode, Linda Zhang, former Product Lead at Faire, and current entrepreneur, talks about a potpourri of stories—the way she transitioned from being a biology major to becoming a consultant and then a successful PM, why she rejected a $375K offer from Instagram, the importance of growth mindset, why product entrepreneurship is crucial, and more. She also runs a newsletter project titled 'Product Lessons' and she's currently launched a toolkit for product managers.
In this episode, Shruti Gandhi, the founder of Array Ventures and a Professor at Columbia University, discusses with Aishwarya about her journey into investing being an engineer. She uncovers the challenges she incurred as a South Asian woman in this is field that's so far outweighed by men investors. She explains the concept of reverse engineering in VC, along with her passion to work with entrepreneurs in the AI and ML space.
In this episode, Aishwarya hosts Polina, a seasoned product manager in the Valley, who also invests efforts into building aspirational side projects. Polina shares her story about mentoring people and guiding them to solve real-world challenges, and she goes on to emphasize how adopting a problem-centric approach helps in our tech careers.
It all started as a small try and where we ended up is pretty cool. This took few hours a day but the impact is bigger and we're loving it.
In this episode, Sangram Vajre, the co-founder of Terminus, three-time CMO, and a podcaster, talks to Aishwarya Ashok about the power and value of communities, growth lessons for product, and the importance of plugging-off in a forever-busy world.
We interview Shyam Sundar, CEO of GoFloaters. GoFloaters aims to foster dynamic and vibrant community of start-ups, entrepreneurs, freelancers and business professionals. Hear Shyam talk about what is "future of work" to some inspiring journey on validating his idea and building this rocketship- GoFloaters.
In this episode, Aishwarya Ashok hosts Dinesh Varadharajan, the Vice President of Product Management, Kissflow Inc. Dinesh has got a wonderful career trajectory, and he shares with us some of his career experiences contributing to building products.
Many of us juggle between ideas or actions, and may even have questions to ourselves whenever we kickstart something new. Here's Vijay Rajagopal in this episode with Aishwarya Ashok, talking about how his passion led him to multiple roles—from a fin-tech geek to investor, founder, and strategic lead.
In this session we have Srikrishnan, Founder of Rocketlane talk to us about his story of starting up with 2.5 lakh and his journey after his startup got acquired by Freshworks and again the journey of startup during the COVID.
We are in conversation with Hena Mehta, Founder of Basis. Basis is a platform to encourage women to manage their money. Hena talks more about what made her start this venture and why it is important for women to manage their money efficiently.
Listen to the latest episode on Theprodcast where we strike a very interesting conversation with Rahul Ganjoo, VP of Product Management, Zomato. Rahul shares his key insights on building all the delivery efforts that were formulated to cater to these unprecedented times and much more.
In this episode, we are in conversation with Jiten Puri, Founder and CEO of Policyadvisor.com a modern, technology driven company aimed at solving traditionally driven insurance brokerage industry. Insurance brokerages are a 100 billion revenue industry in Canada alone and super inspiring to see what policyadvisor has set out to solve for.
Tune into Shobhit Chugh talk to us about the mindset essential for PMs and how he founded intentionalproductmanager.com which helps many Product Managers get better that what they do!
About time we acknowledge the elephant in the room- Cyber bullying and harassment against women because creating a safe space for everyone is our responsibility!
Ever felt profound gratitude for helping other? Had moments that impact and touch lives? In this episode we have Padmini Janaki interviewing Karthee Vidhya, Founder &CEO of Team Everest.
Shesh brings 23 years of experience in Product Management/Product Marketing, Business Strategy Consulting and Engineering spanning across US and India, across the entire gamut of Large Enterprises to SMBs to early stage start-ups. He was Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of a US based Cloud Management startup - Xervmon. His Corporate experiences include Walmart, Amazon, Cisco, Groupon, Ericsson, Netgear and Lemnisk. He holds an MBA degree from Santa Clara University and post that completed Executive Program in Product Management and Business Strategy at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. With BE (ECE) from UVCE, Bangalore and MS (CS) from The University of Texas, he is passionate about role of technology to solve business problems. Shesh is an active Startup Mentor and an Executive Coach and prides with his Product Thinking workshops and Panel discussions at IITs and IIMs. Recently in Feb 2020, he was Keynote speaker at Finance Club of IIT Kanpur on "Taking an Idea to Product and role of Product Management"
How did this tiny startup from Kerala was acquired by Fullcontact? What went well after four failures back to back?
If there’s something that unites us all now, across the world—it’s the thought of embracing this quarantine and making the most out of it. Learning is the best way for utilizing your time, and this episode hosts Shuba Bhaskaran, Enterprise Relationship Manager, LinkedIn Learning. She’s worked with many organizations in imparting the true value of learning and is ready to highlight the importance of having meaningful knowledge experiences to cope up with the times. She also emphasizes on building a personal brand on LinkedIn, and gives some actionable tips for doing the same.
Technology platforms today are led by determined women leaders, who not only take care of an organization’s strategies, but also contribute in building empowering communities. Especially during this quarantine period, it’s important to take advantage of both technology and global communities to stay engaged and keep learning. In this episode, Sarah Joyce Franklin, the EVP of Salesforce Trailhead, discusses some effective ways for women (and men) to take control of the times and use technology at its best.
Spondon Hazarika, Senior Product Manager at Verizon innovation labs, talks about how innovation is critical in Product Management. Bonus: Tune into to know more about how Product Management works in Telecom industry.
In this episode we have Vinod Kumar Shankar, Associate Vice President, Kstart Capitals talk to us about the world of venture capitalism.
Very compelling and insightful conversations between Krishnendu Majumdar- VP Product and Technology Flipkart and Padmini Janaki on Al& ML and much more!
After 20 episodes and talking to 20 amazing guests and gaining 3500+ active listners, we have decided to share a few ideas that worked for us.
In this episode, Yaagneshwaran Ganesh, a Product Marketing Leader in the MarTech space gets candid on how product teams achieve the market fit, the ways to scale up and manage more leads, the different avenues of marketing in an enterprise company, the technology marketers need to follow, and more. Tune in to learn interesting stories.
Padmini janaki interviews Sairee, CEO of Sheroes. Sairee’s Sheroes is a community for women, we can say it’s a Facebook for women. Padmini and Sairee discuss about entrepreneurship, women and a lot more details. Then a calling bell, guess who?
Srinidy interviews Clement Kao, Co - founder Product Manager HQ, Product Manager at Blend
In this episode, Padmini Janaki hosted Anuj Rathi, VP of Products, Growth, and Revenue at Swiggy.
Padmini Janaki hosted Karthik Chidambaram in this episode. Karthik talks about humbly beginning of DCKAP and how DCKAP is growing very strong since it began 15 years ago.
Srinidy Ravichandran hosts Pulkit Arora, Sr. Director of Product Management, Simplilearn
Padimini Janaki interviewed Sumit Kumar Singh in his journey in Gamification and Product Management
In this episode, Shrinedhi Rajan interviewed Andrea Ippolito, Lecturer, Engineering Management Program at Cornell University, USA
Interviewing Yega, CO-Founder Paperflite, about his journey on becoming an entrepreneur and managing a stellar content everything platform, his favourite books and much more.
We had a great privilege interviewing Ganesh Shankar- Co-Founder & CEO of RFPIO, but we have a twist here. What are you waiting for? Listen further to know more about a great company built and holding on to its strong roots.
Travel—the very word is enough to instil energy and happiness for most of us. Planning for vacations is by far the most enjoyable yet arduous job. From drawing plan sheets to checking a gazillion quotes, the process leaves you in a dizzy state. What if ‘Tech’ and ‘Travel’ combined together to give you the easiest solution to book your dream vacations? Here’s the session from The Prodcast, featuring Hari Ganapathy, Founder and CEO of Pickyourtrail, a DIY hassle-free platform that helps you book personalised vacations with deep insights. Let’s listen to their mission of unwrapping the world, one country at a time, for thousands of their customers.
To learn and let learn are the two most rewarding virtues of anybody’s life. Programming languages are ubiquitous, and are most essential in the current hiring and recruiting phases. Here’s a platform that can not only simplify the mode of online learning, but also provide AI-based peer learning insights for all the students. In this session of The Prodcast, meet Arun Prakash, the Co-Founder and CEO of GUVI, a tech-enabled learning platform, offering courses based on vernacular learning. What started as a small project turned out to be a well-funded startup, and here’s Arun explaining to all of us about his wonderful journey to empower learning.
YouTube has grown to become a second companion to us—thanks to all the music, videos, and fun that it provides. Not to leave out the kids, they almost learn their first letters and words rather on YouTube these days. Have you heard of how an animated character invented by a doting father for his daughter turned into Asia's biggest YouTube kids channel with 14 million subscribers across 75 countries? Here's The Prodcast, featuring Vinoth Chander, Founder and Creative Director of ChuChu TV, the biggest sensation that drew kids, with nearly 12 billion views on YouTube. Learn the story behind how ChuChu TV was born, how did Vinoth manage to earn so many followers, and the power of engrossing content and YouTube as a channel.
In this episode, we interview Aashish Chopra, Author of Fast, Cheap and Viral. Aashish shares ideas and his journey towards creating viral video contents.
Welcome to the second episode of "Theprodcast" and we are super thrilled to present conversation with Rajiv Srivatsa - Co-founder, Urban Ladder. This Podcast is hosted by Padmini Janaki, Product Managment Professional, Change Healthcare.
This is a first ever podcast of "The Prodcast" and we are super thrilled and excited to have hosted Nir Eyal - Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of "Hooked" and "Indistractable."
Nir talks about journey into becoming an author and motivations behind his books . He also focuses more on the Art of Indisractable and urges all the listeners to focus on what is the need of the hour and eliminate the unnecessary.