Digital Marketplace Innovation! Key Tenets for Product Managers to Succeed | Vik Bharadwaj

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In this episode of the Hour of Innovation podcast, Vikram Bharadwaj shares the unique challenges and opportunities of Product Management in Digital Consumer Marketplaces. He describes the essential skills Product Managers need to succeed in these dynamic environments, from balancing multiple sides of a marketplace to leveraging network effects, driving experimentation, and ensuring collaboration across all participants.

Vik is a seasoned product manager with over 11 years of product experience in large-scale e-commerce and digital marketplace companies. Currently, he works at Zillow, developing innovative capabilities for mobile customers.

Takeaways

• Digital customer marketplaces connect multiple providers and consumers.
• Marketplaces can be two-sided, three-sided, or four-sided.
• Unique Tenets of Product Management in a Digital Consumer Marketplace:
  • Mental model of a marketplace
  • Network effects associated with the marketplace
  • Measuring success for the marketplace
  • Experimentation thought process
  • Collaboration across the sides of the marketplace
• Identifying the true end customer is crucial in any marketplace business. 
• Balancing supply and demand is a significant challenge for PMs.
• Understanding network effects can create a virtuous cycle in marketplaces.
• A North Star metric must focus on the end consumer and marketplace health.
• Leading metrics are crucial for predicting successful deliveries.
• Experimentation in marketplaces is more complex due to network effects.
• Switchbacks allow for better measurement of feature impacts in marketplaces.
• Collaboration is essential for successful product management in marketplaces.
• Understanding the readiness of the other side is critical for experiments.
• Successful product management in marketplaces requires foundational PM skills.
• Engaging with marketplace communities can enhance learning.
• Being a consumer of marketplaces helps build intuition for PMs.

Sponsors

Webflow – Create custom, responsive websites without coding

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MeetGeek – Automatically video record, transcribe, summarize, and share granular insights from every meeting to any tool

• https://get.meetgeek.ai/yjteozr4m6ln 

Connect with Vik

• Website: https://topmate.io/vikram_bharadwaj 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharadwajvikram/ 

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

01:50 What a digital consumer marketplace is?

06:01 Key tenets of product management in marketplaces

10:29 Understanding the mental model of marketplaces

18:20 Navigating network effects in marketplaces

27:54 What is a North Star metric?

36:17 Experimentation techniques in marketplace businesses

49:27 Collaboration and communication best practices for PMs

52:58 Advice from Vik

Podcast Links

• https://linktr.ee/anhourofinnovation 

Connect with Vit

• Website: https://vitlyoshin.com/contact/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vit-lyoshin/ 

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