Full-Stack Product Management: Building for India's Lazy, Vain, and Selfish Users

Jupiter Money's Anuj Rathi shares battle-tested frameworks for building products in India's complex market, from working backwards to managing three-way marketplaces.

Key Takeaways

• Modern product management in India started around 2010 when startups began building specifically for Indian consumers rather than back-office services
• Users are "lazy, vain, and selfish" - they won't change habits, want immediate value, and need compelling reasons to try new products
• Full-stack product managers must influence users, stakeholders, and markets while understanding the complete customer journey from marketing to retention
• The working backwards framework requires three divergent press releases to explore all options before committing to one strategic direction
• The 4BB framework allocates resources across Brilliant Basics (tech debt), Bread and Butter (optimization), Big Bets (major initiatives), and Breaking Bad (transformation)
• Marketplaces require different management approaches since traditional OKRs fail when optimizing for conflicting user groups simultaneously
• Product managers need three core qualities: raw intelligence for problem-solving, drive/grit for persistence, and influence skills for stakeholder alignment
• "Show don't tell" methodology creates detailed user journey maps with specific personas rather than abstract user stories or generic personas

Timeline Overview

• 00:00–04:28 — Background and India Focus: Anuj's journey from Flipkart's first PM to Jupiter Money CPO, his reputation as India's most recommended product leader, and why India-based product expertise has become essential for global companies
• 04:28–14:01 — Product Management Evolution in India: How India's product landscape developed from back-office services to consumer-focused startups, the infrastructure revolution through UPI and digital payments, and unique challenges of building for 1.4 billion diverse users across languages and income levels
• 14:01–23:59 — User Experience Philosophy: Scott Belsky's "lazy, vain, and selfish" user framework, why product managers must understand non-customers as well as marketers do, and examples from Swiggy and Jupiter of focusing on single value propositions throughout the customer journey
• 23:59–30:10 — Working Backwards Implementation: Amazon's framework adapted for Indian startups, creating three divergent press releases to explore all strategic options, using FAQs to address compliance and marketplace complexity, and building leadership alignment through concrete scenarios
• 30:10–41:27 — Full-Stack PM Methodology: Why PMs must think beyond features to own complete outcomes, the "show don't tell" framework for detailed user journey mapping, creating strategy walls that align entire organizations, and moving from abstract personas to specific individual scenarios
• 41:27–48:59 — Strategic Resource Allocation: The 4BB framework for balancing Brilliant Basics, Bread and Butter improvements, Big Bets, and Breaking Bad transformations, why product strategy requires explicit tradeoff conversations with leadership, and examples of strategic prioritization in practice
• 48:59–56:21 — Contrarian Product Opinions: Why excellence should triumph over speed, most experiments should be thought experiments before implementation, many people shouldn't be product managers, and the three essential PM qualities of intelligence, drive, and influence
• 56:21–1:07:48 — Marketplace and AI Insights: Why traditional OKRs fail in three-way marketplaces, managing conflicting stakeholder interests across consumers/restaurants/delivery partners, the importance of human intelligence complementing artificial intelligence, and practical lessons from building successful marketplaces

Product Management's Unique Evolution in India

• India's product management journey began around 2010 when startups shifted from building back-office solutions for Western markets to creating products specifically for Indian consumers. Before this period, talented Indian engineers primarily worked on technology for American and European customers, lacking experience in building for their home market's unique needs and constraints.
• The absence of formal product management education or established playbooks forced early practitioners to learn from international resources like SVPG and YouTube, then adapt those concepts to India's fundamentally different context. This trial-and-error approach led to multiple waves of learning as the ecosystem matured through practical experience rather than theoretical frameworks.
• Three major technological shifts accelerated India's digital transformation: the transition from desktop to mobile, smartphone adoption, and Reliance Jio's internet price revolution that brought millions of new users online. These users arrived hungry for content and digital experiences, creating unprecedented demand for locally relevant products and services.
• The Indian government's digitization initiatives, particularly the India Stack encompassing digital payments, identity verification, and banking infrastructure, enabled entirely new categories of products. UPI (Unified Payments Interface) revolutionized financial transactions, allowing even five-rupee payments to happen digitally and reducing cash dependency across economic segments.
• India's diversity presents unique product challenges, with languages changing every fifteen miles and vastly different cultural contexts across regions. Traditional product frameworks break down when building for such heterogeneous populations, requiring more nuanced approaches to user segmentation, feature prioritization, and go-to-market strategies.
• Economic constraints significantly impact product strategy, as India's per capita income remains roughly thirty times lower than the United States. This reality forces product managers to carefully identify paying customers while serving massive user bases that provide engagement but limited revenue potential.

The Lazy, Vain, and Selfish User Framework

• Scott Belsky's insight that users are "lazy, vain, and selfish" provides a powerful lens for understanding customer behavior and designing effective user experiences. Lazy users lack time and attention, demanding immediate value or they'll abandon products quickly. Vain users resist changing established habits, requiring compelling reasons to adopt new solutions over familiar alternatives.
• Selfish users focus exclusively on personal benefits, making "what's in it for me" the primary question that products must answer clearly and immediately. This framework helps product managers empathize with reluctant users rather than assuming enthusiasm for new features or capabilities.
• Anuj applied this framework at Swiggy by completely reimagining their user acquisition and onboarding strategy, shifting from generic "we're a food delivery app" messaging to specific value propositions that addressed individual user situations and motivations for downloading the app at that particular moment.
• The approach requires understanding the complete customer journey from first awareness through onboarding, connecting marketing messages seamlessly with product experiences. Rather than treating marketing and product as separate functions, successful implementation demands coherent storytelling throughout the user's interaction with the brand.
• At Jupiter Money, this framework helps explain why users adopt one financial service but ignore others within the same app. Rather than assuming customers want comprehensive financial solutions, the product team focuses on understanding why users find specific value in particular services before attempting cross-selling or expansion.
• The lazy, vain, selfish lens fundamentally challenges product managers to think like reluctant customers rather than enthusiastic internal stakeholders, forcing more realistic assessments of user motivation and clearer value proposition communication throughout the product experience.

Working Backwards with Strategic Divergence

• Amazon's working backwards methodology extends beyond customer value propositions to encompass the complete organizational machinery required for successful product launches. Anuj's implementation focuses on creating comprehensive scenarios that include go-to-market timing, resource allocation, stakeholder alignment, and success metrics rather than just feature specifications.
• The press release format forces concrete thinking about customer quotes, business impact statements, and competitive positioning while providing a negotiation tool for timeline discussions with engineering teams. This approach enables realistic project scoping before detailed requirements development begins.
• Anuj's innovation involves creating three divergent press releases for each major initiative, ensuring thorough exploration of alternative approaches before committing to a single direction. This methodology addresses leadership concerns by demonstrating consideration of various stakeholder perspectives while providing clear rationale for the chosen path.
• The FAQ component becomes particularly powerful in regulated industries like financial services, where every initiative must address compliance requirements, legal considerations, and regulatory approval processes. Rather than treating these as afterthoughts, the working backwards framework integrates them into initial planning discussions.
• For marketplace businesses like Swiggy, FAQs must explicitly address impacts across all user segments—consumers, restaurant partners, and delivery executives—forcing product managers to consider systemic effects of seemingly isolated changes. This prevents unintended consequences that could destabilize marketplace dynamics.
• The three-option approach also serves as a leadership tool for pushing back on executive demands, presenting alternative ways to achieve similar goals while explaining why certain approaches were rejected. This creates more productive strategic conversations and reduces arbitrary direction changes mid-project.

Show Don't Tell: Detailed User Journey Mapping

• The "show don't tell" methodology requires product managers to create comprehensive visual representations of user experiences, moving beyond abstract user stories to concrete scenarios with specific individuals, contexts, and emotional states. This approach forces deeper empathy and more realistic product design decisions.
• Rather than working with generic personas, teams develop detailed individual profiles including specific demographics, recent experiences, current needs, fears, and motivations. For example, instead of "busy professional," they might focus on "Lenny, 30 years old, specific income, particular relationship with food delivery, recent usage patterns."
• The process involves mapping exact user scenarios from initial triggers through complete task completion, considering real-world contexts like time of day, emotional state, and competing priorities. This granular detail reveals friction points and optimization opportunities that high-level user flows typically miss.
• For marketplace products, simultaneous journey mapping becomes essential, tracking what happens to delivery executives while customers wait for food, including various failure scenarios like restaurant delays or vehicle breakdowns. This systems thinking prevents isolated optimization that degrades overall experience quality.
• Implementation involves creating physical or digital "walls" that display complete user journeys with screenshots, copy examples, and step-by-step flows. These artifacts become central alignment tools for stakeholder discussions, enabling detailed conversations about specific design decisions rather than abstract concepts.
• The approach extends to strategic planning through "strategy on a page" visualizations that show complete business models, user acquisition funnels, retention mechanics, and growth loops. This comprehensive view helps leadership understand how individual initiatives connect to broader company objectives and success metrics.

The 4BB Framework for Strategic Resource Allocation

• The 4BB framework addresses the perpetual challenge of balancing different types of product work by creating explicit categories for resource allocation discussions. Brilliant Basics encompass technical debt, infrastructure improvements, and foundational capabilities that enable future innovation but don't immediately impact user experience.
• Bread and Butter represents ongoing optimization work that product managers would naturally pursue within their existing product areas—incremental improvements, bug fixes, and feature enhancements that serve current users better. This category ensures continued product quality while acknowledging that innovation requires additional focus.
• Big Bets involve cross-functional initiatives that require coordination across multiple teams and significant resource commitment with uncertain outcomes. These initiatives typically address major strategic opportunities or competitive threats that individual product managers cannot tackle independently.
• Breaking Bad encompasses transformational changes that redefine company identity or market positioning, such as Swiggy's expansion from food delivery to comprehensive convenience services. These initiatives often require fundamentally different organizational capabilities and go-to-market approaches.
• The framework enables strategic conversations about resource allocation percentages across these categories, helping leadership make explicit tradeoffs rather than assuming teams can simultaneously excel at everything. This prevents unrealistic expectations and provides clear context for quarterly planning discussions.
• By creating three alternative allocation strategies, product leaders can demonstrate the consequences of different priority choices—showing how heavily investing in Big Bets might result in more technical debt or how focusing primarily on Bread and Butter improvements might leave companies vulnerable to competitive disruption.

Contrarian Views on Product Management Excellence

• Anuj advocates for choosing excellence over speed when forced to make tradeoffs, arguing that most experiments should be "thought experiments" that don't require implementation because their failure is predictable through careful analysis. This challenges the prevailing "fail fast" mentality that often wastes resources on obviously flawed concepts.
• The belief that many current product managers shouldn't be in the field stems from people entering product management without understanding its core requirements or developing necessary skills. Rather than coaching everyone into success, Anuj suggests honest self-assessment about whether the role's demands align with individual strengths and interests.
• Three essential qualities define successful product managers: raw intelligence for problem identification and solving, drive or grit for persistence through challenges, and influence skills for stakeholder alignment. While technical skills can be learned, these foundational qualities determine long-term success potential.
• The "can't do, won't do, wasn't set up to do" framework helps leaders diagnose performance issues systematically rather than assuming individual failure. Most problems stem from organizational setup issues—unclear goals, misaligned incentives, or inadequate resources—rather than individual capability or motivation gaps.
• Traditional OKRs fail in marketplace environments because optimizing for one user segment often directly conflicts with another segment's interests. Increasing delivery fees might improve unit economics but harm customer acquisition, while reducing restaurant commissions could destabilize supply while benefiting consumers.
• Full-stack product managers must understand and influence the complete customer journey, not just product features. This requires thinking like marketers, salespeople, and customer success managers while maintaining deep product expertise and technical understanding.

Marketplace Dynamics and Leadership Principles

• Three-way marketplaces like Swiggy require fundamentally different management approaches because traditional frameworks assume alignment between team goals and customer outcomes. When serving consumers, restaurants, and delivery partners simultaneously, optimizing for one group typically creates negative impacts for others.
• Network effects complicate A/B testing in marketplace environments because changes to one side affect the entire ecosystem. Testing delivery partner incentives with only half the supply base creates artificial scarcity and demand patterns that don't reflect real-world implementation scenarios.
• Successful marketplace management requires establishing which customer segment receives priority during conflict situations while maintaining stability across all sides. Amazon prioritizes end customers, Alibaba focuses on enabling Chinese sellers, and Swiggy serves consumers while partnering with restaurants and delivery executives.
• Managing multiple empathies simultaneously becomes essential for marketplace product managers, who must understand and advocate for different user types while making systematic decisions. This requires deeper customer research and more nuanced feature development than single-sided products demand.
• The AI integration philosophy of balancing artificial intelligence with human intelligence ensures that technological capabilities enhance rather than replace thoughtful user experience design. Without strong foundational product thinking, AI features often become solutions searching for problems rather than addressing genuine user needs.

Building successful products in India's complex marketplace requires full-stack thinking that connects user psychology, organizational dynamics, and market realities into coherent strategies. The frameworks and approaches developed through years of building for India's unique constraints offer valuable lessons for product managers worldwide facing similar challenges of scale, diversity, and resource optimization.