3⃣ things to keep in mind in order to ship a successful product 👇🏽
✅Shipping the right product
✅Shipping the product right
✅Shipping at the right time
#productmanagement#products
Influence
Negotiation
Conflict management
Delegation
Strategic thinking
Product Sense
Taste
Clarity of thought
Clarity of communication
Hiring
Leadership in general
This is incredible 🔥
"As for me, I’ll be joining Meta to lead WhatsApp globally."
@kunalb11 I'm looking forward to all the kickass features that you'll build and exceptional things you'll do at @WhatsApp@Meta 💯
Congrats @miten and excited for the next phase of @CRED_club ✨
It’s been a minute.
2015–2018
- Exited FreeCharge. Spent time learning and investing.
- Pondered about: Why can't trust be rewarded? Started with $1M of personal capital.
- Launched CRED to reward people for paying credit card bills on time.
2019–2025
- Built a system run by a team that values ownership, judgment, and craft.
- Grew from 0 to 17M members by aligning incentives with behaviour.
- Built several products during COVID lockdowns.
- Raised $900M+ from global investors. Did 4 ESOP buybacks.
- Made Indiranagar and IPL ads slightly more interesting.
- Received a full stack of regulatory licences.
- Lost 35 kilos.
- Scaled from 0 to ~$325M ( ~₹3,200 crore) in annual revenue across payments, lending, insurance, commerce, wealth, and credit cards.
2026
- First profitable quarter (yet occasionally asked what our business model is)
- Raised another $900M from Meta in primary and secondary capital.
- Announcing our 5th ESOP buyback.
Today
CRED is ready for its next phase. I am stepping back and @miten steps in as interim CEO, partnered with an incredibly talented team. He has been heading strategy and finance and suffering me since 2020. I’m stepping away from the operating role and will continue as a shareholder. My commitment doesn’t change. Just the role.
Extremely grateful to our members, partners, regulators, and investors who made this possible. And to our board, Shailendra, Micky, Saurabh for their extraordinary conviction.
Team CRED, I’ll still expect you to be a 10x version of yourselves.
As for me, I’ll be joining Meta to lead WhatsApp globally.
Meta comes in as a minority investor in CRED. No access to member data.
While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris, and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp’s journey. Will, thank you for scaling something the world relies on quietly, and for making this transition smooth.
Onwards.
The only way I know of to develop better intuition for your own product is to:
1. Constantly use your product as a real customer would
2. Constantly research your target customer
12 ways to make the above practical in your week-to-week:
1. Use the product daily as a real user would [15 minutes / day]
2. Watch one or two user research or replay sessions [10 minutes / day]
3. Check your key usage metrics dashboard [5 minutes / day]
4. Interview a prospective client and ask them to describe a specific workflow related to your product [30 min / week]
5. Email or slack 1-3 existing clients with a specific feedback question [30 min / week]
6. Read notes from recent sales calls or user interviews [30 minutes / week]
7. Read customer feedback queue tickets [30 minutes / week]
8. Read the latest data analysis on user behavior on your product [30 minutes / week]
9. Read industry blogs / articles related to your product area, ideally about either customer learnings or from the perspective of customers [30 minutes / week]
10. Explore competitor products as a real user would [2 hours / month]
11. Try selling the product yourself, or tag along on a sales call [2 hours / month]
12. Read 3 books a year relevant to the psychology of your customers
If you did EVERYTHING on the list above, it would take you 10-15% of your working hours. Doing half of them would be more like 5% of your week.
This is a tiny investment for
1) honing your product intuition
2) making better prioritization decisions
3) gaining greater conviction in your work
and frankly 4) having way more fun in your work.
If you are building solo or if you are engineering leader or product leader in organisation with advent of AI you are a solo builder
Read on…
https://t.co/5NmqRuVLKG
Most consumer products are opposite of this.
They largely overlook new users, and insidiously build for power users.
You can see it in the design process. Every screen a designer presents is dense with information, features whirring like engines, drawn as if the person looking at it has already lived inside the product for a year and shows up fluent.
You SHOULD ideally build your product first for new users. They are lazy, vain and selfish (Courtesy @scottbelsky ). They need to be persuaded outside of their comfort zone to even try your product.
My definition of power users- they are the ones already finding hacks in your product to make it do more than what it was supposed to. You should of course build for them too, but if you HAD to make a choice - optimize for new users.
Right from the marketing collateral to the warm welcome to the careful handholding to the setup so that you earn the right of becoming a "Power user platform"
Probably the best thing I did to accelerate my rate of learning after my mid-30s was to drop hierarchical thinking when choosing who to learn from. Easily 10x’ed my rate of learning.
I have since realized that, for talented high achievers, hierarchical thinking is the biggest barrier to mastery of their craft.
Most people don’t consciously think about it, but it’s always there.
They decide who is worthy to learn from and who isn’t.
They only learn from people they “look up to”.
And your look-up-to group shrinks in size as you achieve more success yourself, so you deprive yourself of the great opportunity available to you: you can learn from everyone, literally everyone.
Contrary to some beliefs and some (flawed) intuitions, learning like this
- does not take huge effort
- cultivates greater critical thinking
- feels better than hierarchical learning
- can take you to mastery much faster
It does require though that you confront your ego and quiet it a little, not for spiritual or moral reasons, but solely for the purely practical, capitalistic pursuit of your greater goals.
This sounds simple, but few can do it.
The ability to do this cannot be given to you.
Only thing that can be given to you is the pointer to what is truly going on. The rest is up to you.
"You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions."
— Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
https://t.co/AyIk5fnKZL
The engineers getting the most out of AI are the ones who pause for a few seconds before they build, to picture the person who will actually use the product.
That habit is a floor of product sense most engineers can reach without becoming PMs, and it compounds harder than raw speed.
Essential books for product builders
I've put together a collection of my all-time favorite books, organized by their jobs-to-be-done. When your manager tells you to work on a particular development area—or if you’re just feeling the itch for self-improvement—these are the books to read.
To keep this list extremely high signal-to-noise, I forced myself to pick only three books per category (so hard!), and only books I’ve completed.
The collection includes both classics and under-the-radar gems. I very much agree with @pmarca's take that you should mostly read books that are over 10 years old (because those are the books that have stood the test of time), so you’ll notice no super new books.
There are so many great books that I didn’t include here, either because I haven’t had a chance to read them or they just didn’t make the cut. I’m sorry if I didn’t include your book, or a book you love. I probably forgot some important titles, too. That’s why we’ll have a part 2 (coming soon)!
Here's the full collection: https://t.co/USi56JOxNa
P.S. What's a must-read that I missed (within these 12 categories)? Let me know in the comments.
P.P.S. If you’re feeling like you have no time to read, I was in the same boat, especially after having a kid. @bryan_johnson's suggestion of reading a book for 10 minutes before bed changed my life. I started reading more books, and I got better sleep! Try it out.
Bro to bro: Start thinking of your future very seriously. Be overly curious, accept you know very little, be selfish to learn new stuff & don’t get into stupid office politics. The world is very cruel to people who are not doing new things everyday. You will become irrelevant.
High agency, accelerated learning of AI tools, and commitment to own delivery will be the hallmark of AI-age executives.
If you ain’t hungry & prefer only managing people, it will be risky and you will resist AI-powered work. Be an #aiBull 🚀 own full context and decisions.