Nikita Gupta

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173 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2023 last heard Jul 2023

Nikita Gupta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Top Founders · Product vs. Engineering: The surprising way to create alignment in 2023 · 11 Jul 2023 podcast

So we'll start with alignment, and we'll start off, like I said, with Simba's product journey, what didn't work, and some of the lessons learned.

So right now, if you go on Simba's website, this is what our product page shows.

We are the end-to-end platform for early career programs.

We onboard, manage, and engage your early talent from program acceptance to alumni status and track important program and DEI data in one place.

So this has taken a few years to get to, and we've been through kind of a crazy journey.

In 2019, we built a product that really wasn't a painkiller.

Just to give everyone context, SIMBA comes into play after you've hired your interns or your apprentices or your new grads, and we help you manage the entire experience from as soon as you give them the offer to project management, performance tracking, feedback, community building and engagement, all the way to even post-program engagement as alumni.

In 2020, desperate times called for desperate measures, and we then became a painkiller.

2021, we kind of cruised with our product.

We kept improving, and we got a lot of great customers to give us feedback and ideas on new features to build.

But in 2022, with the challenges in the market, there was definitely a decrease in product innovation.

To be completely transparent, we struggled a lot with product in 2022, which is why it's really timely for me to talk about this and how we were able to maximize the skills from our product team, as well as get all hands on deck and then also create alignment between our engineering team.

To give everyone context also, we have an offshore engineering team.

I have about 10 engineers based in India.

They have been with Simba since day one.

So even with working with different time differences and having our product team, marketing team, business development, sales in America, you can definitely add to the misalignment that happened in the beginning as well.

So some of the things that didn't work for us was that we were becoming very reactive to what our customers wanted.

We only built features that when they complained about something or they asked for something, we would build that and weren't thinking about being proactive in what needed to be built.

So just like that, we depended on our customer input only.

There was a lot of lack of design research because we were only building what our customers were saying and what we thought would be easier for them and how to stick that into our platform and get them from A to B. We were not conducting enough surveys also, so it was just based on the phone calls and the Zoom conversations that we were having.

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