Asian Digital SuperMovers

About Sidu:

Sidu is an engineer by training, a manager at a high-technology company by profession and an entrepreneur at heart. He is a programmer for pleasure, and has been building software for fun and profit for nearly 30 years.

Sidu's last startup, C42 Engineering, was acquired in 2015 by GO-JEK Indonesia (now Pt. AKAB), one of the fastest-growing startups in the world and Indonesia's first unicorn, growing from ~500 orders/day to ~7 million orders/day and $10B in GMV in just 4 years.

Monica talks to Sidu about:

About Sidu and his journey into product management having dabbled multiple roles including entrepreneurship as a product consultant, startup founder and Dev engineer.

What lead to his journey into PM and then heading engineering at Gojek and hiring a lean team.

How has Gojek grown to being a unicorn and giving more established players a real run for their money? 

Simon is a Product Expert, Writer, Singer and New Yorker.

He talks about:

• His journey into Product Management.
• What does a typical day in your life look like?

Becoming a PM

• Which parts of your education best prepared you for a career in PM?
• What do you think about product certifications?
• How did you grow from being a PM into being a leader of people?
• What are some of the most important skills you acquired along the way?
• What type of person should consider a career in PM?

Measuring Success

• How do you track and measure success, meaningfully? Are there any metrics that you value more than others?
• Being measured by outcomes vs output? How do justify to yourself your efforts as a PM and then your direct manager about your contribution to the business?

Personal Brand and Communication

• How did you take to writing about PM and what would you suggest to someone starting out with ambition to write like you do?
• How important are your communication skills to your success in PM
• Does your having a passion other than building products help create your communication style and develop your personality?

Leading Product Teams

• What are some of the greatest challenges of being a product leader, and why?
• Building Product Teams: Is it hard? If so why?
• What are your successful hiring strategies?
• Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill?

Rapid Fire

Neil Soni is the author of "The Startup Gold Mine" and an Innovation/ Growth consultant. Neil’s book "The Startup Gold Mine" is a playbook for corporates partnering with startups and curator of In this AMA, we talk him about:

1. How founders should think about corporate partnerships & M&A
2. How to navigate through the corporate landscape in an effect way
3. Landmines to avoid while presenting and negotiating with cooperates
4. Open Innovation Newsletter

William is the founding partner at Frontline Ventures. He was the youngest VC partner for a European VC fund when Frontline was set up. Eight years later, Frontline has €250M under management and 100 investments.

We speak to him about building a venture capital fund and what he has learnt about investing in startups.

Building for Asia’ Series on Product Management: Habit Building communities w/ TheProductfolks.

A discussion on building a volunteer-based product community. How "The Product Folks" community was created and how to drive engagement with the community via a product build.

Monica host's Sugandha in a free wheeling conversation about her journey into Product Management and now content operations at Netflix , building habit forming products and building products with exponential customer experience and value.

About Daman:

He has built and led/advised marketing/growth teams across multiple hyper-growth stage tech businesses in India: Milkbasket, WeChash, MobiKwik, LINE.

He has advised Whitehat Jr, Snapchat and many more.

We speak to him about:

Career Overview

Among all the industries you have worked in which has even the most challenging?

Why WhatsApp has such mammoth market penetration, and no one has been able to compete with them?

How is Growth different from Marketing?

How is a Brand Built?

Daman's thoughts on:

How do you think about the referral programs?

How to use Reviews for Copy creation?

Clubhouse's growth strategy?

Our guest is Shravan Tickoo, the Product Guy at BYJU's. About him in words:

Hey, I am Shravan, a Product Manager by Profession & a Growth enthusiast/ Entrepreneur by Heart!

I tell a little truth about Product Management, with a tinge of humour to it. You find value with joy - that's the bonus you can find on my profile :) - Check out the next PM Story for sure :)

In the last 6 years+ of Product Management Experience, I have worked across diverse industries in the startup ecosystem i.e Flipkart, Blackbuck, Times Group, Edureka and Now BYJUs for driving growth and product adoption across diverse verticals

A passionate first principle thinker, I believe in the concept of collective conscience - which means if you contribute back to the ecosystem and help it grow, the ecosystem contributes back and helps you grow as a network effect. I help startups grow & build user-centric products with immense adoption, drive GTM and mentor product enthusiasts on learning the fundamentals of product mindset/growth mindset i.e first principle thinking, user empathy, business models etc

Currently, I work at BYJU's where I am focused on making learning fun for kids by building personalized & engaging products for kids, am a Product Mentor at the BigShyft Platform & also a mentor/founder @ The product tree ( 2500+ PM / Growth enthusiasts community & growing)

In my free time, I read and write blogs on value creation, GTM and the evolution of consumer-facing products. I am also an avid reader of books especially on Psychology, Growth Mindset and Scaling startups

If you want to talk more about product management, go to market strategy or just want to discuss an interesting problem that could be solved, just drop a connection request or just email me: [email protected]

PS: I have a large book collection - you can also hit me up for recommendations