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Leader Spotlight: Zooming out and widening your aperture, with Vaarrun Bimbhat
- Vaarrun Bimbhat, former Head of Product at Shopify, discusses the importance of zooming out to see the big picture and evaluate a product portfolio to balance risk and innovation.
- When it comes to shifting focus from short-term goals to long-term growth, it depends on the context, as some growth teams focused on executing multiple experiments to achieve short term results do not need to pivot their focus.
- To identify problems that are overlooked and have potential to drive significant value, Vaarrun suggests looking at what competitors are doing, partnering with advocates and customers, and examining developments in other geographies.
- Vaarrun recommends designing and executing iterative tests to quickly get to the local maximum and to identify the global optimum, and to build a balanced product portfolio that effectively serves the company's long-term goals.
- To discover leading indicators of diminishing returns, Vaarrun recommends looking out for customer support tickets and tracking user satisfaction or revenue metrics.
- It's important to prioritize problem discovery and proceed with an open mind so that customer needs can be uncovered continuously, and to pivot quickly when making decisions to maximize outcomes.
- Vaarrun uses methods like pre-mortems, probing customer questions, and analyzing data with other teams to investigate patterns and identify risks. He emphasizes the need to widen one’s aperture to get stronger synthesis when evaluating the entire problem space.
- Vaarrun encourages his teams to zoom out, avoid confirmation bias, and to think about leading indicators of emerging trends, both in terms of the problem space and the customer landscape overall.
- Vaarrun's interview provides insights into how prioritizing a global optimum versus a local maximum, and a balanced product portfolio, can drive innovation and sustainable long-term growth.
- Vaarrun’s focus on product management strategies that help teams pivot quickly and widen their aperture empirically is a great lesson for product managers at all levels.
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