Dhrumil Barot

Right, sure. So first of all, I'm doing this AI interview for the first time, so I'm not really sure if anything breaks, but here it goes. Sure, in terms of my background, so by background, I'm a computer engineer, I've done bachelors in computer engineering, completed in 2020. I have six years of total experience, where I started my company in 2018, my own company in retail analytics space, which I merged with another startup in Bangalore called Vsense.ai. So my core expertise was built right then when I started my company, which is in computer vision, and mostly AI and deep learning, which was a lot less sexy at the time, although it still was. Yeah, so I worked in that entire retail analytics space for roughly three to four years, then I joined Medica Bazaar, which is a healthcare supply chain company. I joined it when it was roughly 250 people, when I left, it was 2000 people plus, I joined it at a very early stage. So everything, nothing had a process or a system, so to speak in, in place. And I built most of the internal platforms, internal processes ground up, including hiring developers, I actually built a lot of tools myself, like coded myself ground up, and then handed over to different developers and teams. So I joined obviously as a product manager, I've been a product guy my whole career. The six year span so far, I was at Medica Bazaar for three years, where I led multiple projects. For the first one and a half year, I worked on internal platform products. So stuff like supplier management, pricing management, and so on. And catalog management, and business strategy, basically, it connected with everything from your finance systems to ecommerce portal to your lenders, and so on. So it was a complex, a big project. When I joined, it was just me, I was the first person. And when I handed it over, it was 30 developers, three tech leads, and two PMs, two APMs working on it. Then I moved to another business, which we again built from scratch, which was in pharmaceutical raw materials marketplace called API drug.com. So I became its product head. This was within Medica Bazaar only, I built that business and that product from ground up to an ARR of $7 million in six months. So that was a hugely successful project. I worked on it for another one and a half years, that became a very mature, we hired more people. And then I moved back to the original Medica Bazaar main marketplace because that was struggling at the time, because of some changed regulations in healthcare. So I worked on that for another year, roughly. And that's when I left Medica Bazaar. After leaving Medica Bazaar, I joined FIND, F Y N D FIND, which is owned by Reliance. And how it works is FIND is a platform product, where ecommerce companies can use FIND to manage their inventory, orders, catalog, their UI. And they can also integrate with other marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, to, you know, sell their basically enable multiple channels, including their offline stores. So it's an omni channel ecommerce platform. I joined them in June 2024. I've been there since then. And mostly I'm working on Reliance's electronics business.

Uh, which includes so okay. Share the type of products you manage with your description about them. Sure. So I already shared it in the intro. Um, I have, uh, managed internal platform products, mostly, um, that are about data management and, uh, integrations. I have also managed customer facing products, which involves a lot of UI and QX and, um, the you know, stuff like edge processing, uh, client side processing, and so on, which includes AI products as well, um, as I've mentioned in my intro. And, um, yeah, beyond that, I've so I'll just go through 1 by 1 all the product that I managed. When I started my own company, I built a product called Countervision where, um, basically, we installed we consumed CCTV footages from retail stores, uh, took it to cloud, um, frame by frame, and we analyzed we basically did person detection, object detection, where we ran some algorithms like that. And then we mapped them throughout the frame to create a trajectory for each person that travels to the store and then map that on top of, uh, store layout to identify what kind of, um, uh, you know, engagement and interaction the customers were having inside the store. We did a few successful pilots, then I merged that with another company, vSense dotai, which was doing exact same thing, um, in Bangalore. I became their, uh, head of product and solutioning there. Um, so product was same, so I think, uh, I don't need to explain that better. I joined them because they had more capital experience, team, etcetera. Then I joined Medica Bazaar. I worked on an internal platform tool called Catalyst, which was used to, uh, manage supplier's data, catalog data, pricing management, um, order management, and so on. So it was a platform product, full fledged. I built that from ground up up to, um, like, to handle 500,000,000 of GMV of that marketplace. Um, then I worked on customer facing 2 customer facing products at Medigapazaar. 1 was API dotcom. That was a reverse auction and bidding platform for pharmaceutical manufacturers to buy raw materials. Um, I worked on that for about 1 year, then I worked on Medica Bazaar's main marketplace business where, um, hospitals and small clinics come to their website, buy, you know, medical supplies and raw materials and so on. So, yeah, that was my experience of 3 years at Medica Bazaar. Uh, and, um, then I joined FIND in June 24 where where I've been working on multiple products because I own, uh, electronics verticals product end to end. So that includes, um, finance products, um, that. So any product that is involved in ecommerce flow, ecommerce, any all the way from your UI to, uh, fulfillment are overseen and seen and managed and, um, developed by me.

Have you demonstrated success defining and launching excellent products or custom solutions? Explain in detail. Um, Yeah. I just, um, already did. Um, so, yeah, I have demonstrated success in defining and launching great products, like I said. I've built multiple products from ground up to handle, like, 500,000,000 of GMV for a marketplace. I've built, uh, pure product tech solutions, like a SaaS product, um, for API drug, which was a reverse auction and bidding platform for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Um, I took it from 0 to 7,000,000 ARR in 6 months of launching. Um, and, uh, so yeah. I mean, you can refer to my previous answer because I already answered this.

Do you get to meet the customers and is your role customer-facing? Do you have an example of a difficult customer situation you managed? Sure, so I'll give a recent example of Find where we were facing an issue with one of our integrations with Find Labs where for a small fraction of transactions it was less than 0.1% but at 1300 CR per month GME that still adds up to quite a few transactions I started getting complaints from a lot of customers and a lot of our franchisee stores that basically money is getting deducted from the device but they are still receiving order failures on the UI and that was a very difficult situation to handle because people are paying huge sums especially when iPhone had launched, there was one particular case where a guy was out to buy an iPhone at roughly 11pm and he had to gift it to his wife for her birthday at 12 and he faced the same issue where the payment is deducted and invoice is not generated, order is not created and so on so I've managed a lot of difficult customer situations I can give a longer list but there's a lot to name

Describe the most complex product you managed and explain why it was challenging. Um, most complex product I managed. I would say that API Direct's, uh, reverse auction platform was definitely one of the most complex products because there were multiple types of auctions, uh, like French auction, Dutch auction, and Bungele auction. Lot of, um, different variations involved and each company, each industry had um, different processes. So there was a lot of, um, back and forth involved where in some cases, for large enough companies, we had to customize features. In some cases, we had to push customers to change their internal process. We had to work on, um, basically, improving efficiency, but not at the cost of, um, you know, allowing supplier frauds where they supply bad pharmaceutical materials to manufacturers and so on. So there was, um, and I had to on my product, I had to cover the entire part of supply chain all the way from the original chemicals manufacturer to the, you know, final seller, uh, because a lot of our customers were FDA approved and they were selling in EU and US. So I had to manage a lot of compliance, lot of data security, um, you know, problem statements, um, and so on. So, yeah, that was definitely one of the challenging products.

Their average day look like as a PM? Who are the key stakeholders you have to work within your role? Uh, my average day looks like this. So, um, in products that I have spent long enough time that I have been control of or that I've built from scratch, I have very, very good analytics, um, and very like, really good analytics system setup. So I can see my entire systems in front of me anytime I want real time. Right? So any count, any data, any graph that I want to see, I can see it, and I usually have those set up. My day starts with looking at those numbers, um, to see if there's anything. Right. Uh, so, yeah, my day starts with, uh, looking at, um, the the metrics, the dashboards that I have built for myself. If something has to see if something has gone wrong, if or if something odd has happened overnight. And, um, that takes us usually first half an hour to 1 hour. Then I have daily huddles with my developers, uh, different teams. I see what is the progress, are there any challenges, where I need to connect them, I need to get any kind of support from other people. Uh, and then the rest of the day is made of lot of meetings with either business or, uh, stuff like debugging solutions, brainstorming, um, solutions to problem statements that I've already identified from, let's say, newly launched features or a feature that's already in place, but we want to increase any metric or reduce any metrics. So then that, uh, rest of the day is mostly in brainstorming and, um, firefighting. Lot of it. Yeah.

Have experience in UX or UI design. If yes, can you share how you applied these skills as an example? Uh, sure. So so like I said in one of the earlier answers that there was a regulation change where, uh, in Medica Bazaar, the change was that for every customer we sell to, we have to make sure that the buyer is a licensed medical practitioner. Now everybody like, offline stores don't have to because there are just too many. But for ecommerce sites like Medikabazar, b to b marketplaces, heavily FDA funded, we had to make sure that we follow that. So to do that, we had to introduce, uh, I mean, the team that was in place before me had to introduce a KYC process where, um, before a customer goes on to purchase something, he has to upload his documents. He has to input certain information, then we have to there's a back end process where it has to be verified, um, by a team. And these are all medical documents. Like, there's, um, uh, for example, their FDA approved certificate, their drug license, or, um, their if they're a dentist or an MD, then their degrees and stuff like that. So there is no centralized repository or or fixed list from which we can, um, you know, read and verify. So there were a lot of, um, issues in that, um, entire journey when it was implemented, and our orders went down by 88% the day we, um, or the team that was in place before me. The day they made it live, it was just deadly. It was just the company came to a grind halt, uh, for that matter, and that is when I actually joined, um, the marketplace business back. And how I really improved it is, um, I created a few smooth and smoother processes from user experience perspective. For example, when they come to the website, we don't ask them to, you know, share their documents immediately. When they're trying to check out, instead of, um, asking them to sign up, we just make it a guest checkout kind of a form because we know that ultimately they are doing KYC. So we know it's a legit user, and we're not worried about, you know, any kind of spams coming to our system. Um, so, yeah, then they check out, and finally, after they are done, we place their order. In many it's been over a year, so I don't remember exactly. But, yeah, in, uh, we further remember for some of the payment modes, we used to take the payment as well and confirm the order that, yeah, we've received the confirm your order. By the way, you need to upload these 2, 3 things, and we will run our OCR in the back end, and there's a team which is verifying the exacted text. If it works well, then your order is delivered automatically. You don't have to intervene and, you know, upload anything, take our call, nothing. And if it doesn't work, if it fails, like they uploaded some junk, uh, then our back end support team will call them, get their valid document, and upload in our system from back end. But their order is confirmed. Right? So regardless how it is verified, soon as the KYC is done, um, it is dispatched. If it fails, then the order is canceled. Yeah.

Uh, what are some of the metrics you are you are tracked on for the success in your role as a PM? Uh, so, I mean, it depends. I've worked on a lot of different products. So I will just mention about my current role. So in my current role, the one of the key metrics that is drag this growth, actually, the growth of the platform. And, um, that involves multiple things, including our website, including, uh, increasing our website visitors, introducing new kinds of promotions and coupons that our category teams can create, um, including new, uh, avenues which increase footfall in our offline stores, then making the entire UI UX of the apps, um, easier and simpler both for our own staff as well as for the customers so that the order checkout can be easy integrating good financing options, um, and, ultimately, just adding a lot of assisted sales aspect to it so that at any point if the customer drops off, there is somebody who will call them, text them, reach out to them, and say that you are interested in this. We have this great offer. We want to buy. So, yeah, um, conversion, growth, key business metrics are really my metrics right now.

You are previously as a QA or software engineer, if yes, how has this experience help you understand the SDLC? How can you contribute to the development team? So like I said before, I'm a computer engineer by background, and I have built production grade ground, you know, applications ground up, coded myself. So in terms of my own experience, I am well versed with Python stack because mostly I worked on AI applications. Um, so that includes your Django, Flask, um, TensorFlow, PyTorch, um, and then I have used, um, normal architectures, um, software architectures that are kind of popular. Beyond that, I worked a little bit on React myself. So but I'm I wouldn't call myself an expert. Um, Yeah. How I've understood the SDLC is number one thing that I would want to do is put this down in a contract with the developer that if I find a single line of code without a test case, I will fire you on the spot because I think test driven development is the best thing in software development. But most companies don't follow that, uh, because they're stupid. Yeah. I'm gonna stand by that. Yeah. I understand SDLC well because I've built things around the I've handled. I've seen bad parts. I know how things go wrong. When bad software is developed and shipped, it it creates a huge success because I've worked in health care, so I know how bad it can get. Yeah.