How can product leaders balance company value with user value? In this episode of the Product Leaders to Watch series with Cognizant Product Director Chenny Solaiyappan, ALPHA Camp Director of Tech & Data Karen Hsieh shares insights on driving growth and optimizing user journeys through data analysis. Tune in to learn about Karen’s success with a recipe platform and her views on the skills needed to excel at product management, such as curiosity, learning, and collaboration.
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Show Notes
- An experienced product manager can drive growth through a user-centric approach and data-informed decision making.
- Combining data analysis, user interviews, and a curiosity about users’ problems helps inform strong product strategy.
- Turning passions and skills into products that solve real problems can lead to significant business success.
- Emerging technologies like natural language BI tools make data more accessible and empower non-technical users.
- Great products balance delivering value to both the company and users.
- Considering what users are willing to pay for indicates a product meets real needs.
- Curiosity is key for product managers to deeply understand problems and learn.
- Continuous learning across different domains is important for product managers.
- Leveraging the strengths of others through collaboration is vital given the breadth of product work.
- Qualities like leadership and influencing without authority are important for the role.
- Data-informed decision making can optimize processes like experimentation and marketing.
- User-centric design leads to increased engagement through optimized journeys.
- Aligning product work with business objectives and founders’ visions is part of the job.
- Measuring outcomes helps shape strategies and priorities.
- Testing assumptions helps uncover hidden user needs and problems to solve.
- Storytelling skills are useful to socialize findings and recommendations.
- Mentorship and guidance can help others transition into product management.
- Industry experience provides valuable context for product work.
- Recognizing non-titled product work broadens access to the career path.
- Continuous learning and growth are hallmarks of top product professionals.
About the speaker
A product manager fosters a learning culture and promotes data literacy, empowering teams to create value for users while ensuring company profitability. I develop data literacy across different teams by providing reports, self-served data tools with visualization. Designers analyze the data funnels to optimize user journeys. Engineers run more experiments due to quick feedback. Marketers, editors, etc., adopt this data-informed decision-making process to grow marketing, content performance. I’ve launched SaaS from 0-1 became 25% of the annual company revenue, got 4.8 ratings with 150K votes on App Store and Google Play. I aim to focus on the users’ problems and test assumptions, solutions with the teams. With aligned outcomes, I craft product strategies with founders or C-level executives by the facts gathered from data and the insights discovered from user interviews with the product team. I’m passionate about delighting users and monetization by combining data for how users behave and user interviews for how users think.
About the host
Chenny Solaiyappan is the Director of Product Management for Cognizant Trizetto's Government and Quality Solutions, and a founding member of the ClaimSphere suite of products, encompassing quality, HEDIS ®, CMS Stars, and clinical solutions. An accomplished Intrapreneur and Lean Startup Practitioner, he plays a pivotal role in shaping the overall product strategy and serves as the HL7 DaVinci Business Co-chair. With a notable track record, Chenny has provided consultancy to over 30 health plans across the nation, consistently raising Quality and Star ratings in Medicaid, Medicare, Federal Employees Health Plan, and Commercial health plan sectors, collectively supporting 30 million lives. His outstanding leadership and innovative contributions have earned him prestigious awards, including the 2023 Top 20 Global Product Manager Award by Products That Count, as well as the 2021 and 2019 Product of the Year awards by Cognizant Trizetto.