Focusing on the wrong customer segment? Fire them - Asheesh Birla @ Ripple

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak.) 

Fire the customer if you need, says Asheesh Birla, Ripple’s SVP of Product, when talking about the importance of customer segmentation. Asheesh says if your company is going after the wrong customer and fixated on why they’re unhappy, it’s time to re-evaluate if they’re a fit for your product. Instead, the winning Venn diagram in his opinion is this: a customer segment whose pain points your product can easily solve.

Also in this episode, find out how early in Asheesh’s career he volunteered to carry luggage on a work trip for Thomson Reuter’s COO (who was 20 levels higher than him on the org chart at that time!) and how he was able to gain a mentor through that.

For Asheesh, product teams who are too tactical in their daily triage miss the forest for the trees. He says you need to understand whether the landscape is changing in a macro way or if a new competitor is coming in. Your product org may be making incremental changes, but startups need to make massive changes to be successful, he adds.

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