In this fireside chat hosted by Kuldeep Kelkar, Senior Partner at UXReactor, Mayuresh Ektare, SVP Product Management at Brinqa, discusses the importance of user experience and user research in product development.
He emphasizes the need for a deep understanding of the customer’s needs, goals, and daily life to create products that fulfill their requirements. Mayuresh also highlights the challenges in user research, such as the narrow focus on usability analysis and the lack of domain expertise. He suggests that designers and researchers should specialize in specific domains to enhance the quality of their work. Additionally, Mayuresh discusses the importance of aligning with business KPIs and understanding market trends in product management.
Thank you Mayuresh Ektare for being part of this Podcast.
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Full Transcript
Kuldeep Kelkar
Today, we have a special guest, Mayuresh Ektare. I’ve known Mayuresh for years now. Mayuresh is an SVP of product at Brinqa. Mayuresh’s career started as a UX designer and a Researcher, but then he quickly moved into leading product management. Welcome, Mayuresh.
Mayuresh Ektare
Thank you so much for the wonderful introduction and great to have a conversation with you, Kuldeep.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, good to see you again. Tell us a little bit about your journey into product management and how things got started.
Mayuresh Ektare
Absolutely. So like you mentioned, I started my career as a UI Designer, UX Researcher. This was almost 20 years ago. Designing quite a few enterprise products really got me thinking in terms of what was the impact I was making on the products. And it was great actually. I soon enough ended up in a place where I thought my impact could be much more than designing the product. And this is when I sort of took on additional responsibilities of really understanding the domain, the market, the competition, the pricing models, and decided to extend my reach into product management. At Trend Micro, after designing enterprise-grade security solutions for a couple of years, I was presented with an opportunity to move into the product management role and never looked back. It was really a great entry point for me because, at Trend Micro, the team here in the Silicon Valley was fairly small, maybe about 100 people in a 4,000 person company. And our charter was to really find out gaps in the product market and figure out new solutions to solve those security challenges that our customers face. So this was a perfect blend of my expertise as a user researcher and UI designer to really intimately understand the customers and then identify where the business gaps could potentially be and translate them into new solutions that we were offering. That sort of led me to my journey towards moving into smaller organizations where I could actually have more impact, more significant impact on the product, right from the inception all the way through delivery of a new solution. After spending about eight years at Trend Micro, which is pretty much eternity in the Silicon Valley timeframe, I decided to move to a close cousin of security, which is networking. And took on a design role actually to begin with at Aerohive Networks. Aerohive Networks was a very, very interesting place. They had built out a phenomenal solution for unified network management. Think of it as network management for enterprise, wireless infrastructure, routers, switches, what have you. And the challenge at that time was everything was moving up to the cloud. The solution was built for on-prem deployment. And I was sort of brought in to lead the next generation solution to really migrate everything that they had, almost transferring about $100 million of business onto this new cloud-native platform. After building that platform, we started getting access to customer data, a tremendous amount of customer data. And one thing really stood out to a couple of us. It was the fact that majority of the devices that were connecting onto our customers’ networks were not the traditional IT assets that you would imagine, like laptop servers, cell phones, and tablets. But they were these IoT devices that barely had any security on them. So few of us found this as an opportunity, stepped out and started Zingbox, an IoT security company. Building something from the ground up was a phenomenal experience. Really, at Zingbox, we created a new category for IoT security, built it out with Gartner, really to identify Zingbox as the leader in that space, dominated the healthcare security market for IoT security, medical device security, when after a few years Palo Alto acquired us. Coming into Palo Alto, the charter was really to scale the product, integrated with the Palo Alto’s portfolio of solutions that they had. After spending about three years at Palo Alto, I finally decided to take on the next challenge that I wanted to pursue, really enjoy time scaling companies. And I came forward to Brinqa to take Brinqa to the next level. So that’s a brief introduction of me and the background.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Amazing journey, Mayuresh. And full disclosure, both Mayuresh and I went to Clemson University together. So I’ve absolutely known him for the last 25 years. And it’s just amazing to see your wonderful journey from design into product management and now leading product and strategy for organizations.
That was a wonderful introduction, Mayuresh. So why don’t we get started with some general questions. As a product leader, and someone who has been a designer, what does user experience mean to you?
Mayuresh Ektare
User experience is really about understanding how the product fulfills the key requirements for the customers, right? Understanding the users or the buyers’ persona so intimately that you understand what their day in life looks like, what matters to them the most. Sometimes it is just not the product, right? It also is important to understand how the product fits into their overall ecosystem of things that they do. How does it fit into their daily life? And what are the outcomes the customer is really expecting out of using your product? Understanding how your product is actually used in the field is something that we look forward to from user research. This also brings us to a couple of things that in my journey for the past 20 years, I’ve oftentimes noticed that user research is oftentimes narrowly viewed from the perspective of just usability analysis. It shouldn’t be limited to that. The scope of user research is much beyond how the placement of the buttons are, how the UI looks like. And those areas are the ones that actually are more important to me as a product leader than anything else.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, well said. There are many researchers who aspire to do that, who hope to do that. And so this is wonderful news, hearing a product leader saying so. But in your experience, when that happens, why does that happen? And if it doesn’t happen, what are some of the common reasons and challenges why it doesn’t always happen across many organizations, just in general? So any thoughts around that?
Mayuresh Ektare
So one of the key reasons is lack of domain expertise. You wouldn’t be able to understand or interpret what the customers are really trying to convey unless you are deeply embedded within that domain. User research, as you know, Kuldeep, very well, is an art of interpreting what the customer may not be saying. And now, for that to really effectively happen, you have to not just understand the product, how it is used, but also the competition, the market, the value. Sometimes the pricing, right? There are so many different subtle factors that sort of come into the play that have to be taken into consideration. So user researchers oftentimes have to instill trust and confidence that they do have the understanding of that domain to be effectively able to derive constructive feedback from the users.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, well said. I think in general, the design and research community would generally agree with what you just said. So as a product leader, how do you get close to the customer use cases? How do you understand the domain? How do you understand your market? What are some of the things that researchers, designers can do more of, learn from their product counterparts? Because this is a challenge, with or without research, you are still keeping in touch with your market. What do you do to do that?
Mayuresh Ektare
Yeah, so you know it is all about specialization. So in product management, when I’m building up a team, I look for individuals who have really embedded themselves in that domain, have a very deep understanding of not just the existing solutions and challenges that the customers face, but also emerging technologies. Same goes to user research and UI design as well. I’ll give you a couple of examples. In my past roles, where I’ve hired a couple of UI designers or even contractors in the past, right? I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m really teaching them what an IP address is. And that actually has been the case, right? When you’re designing enterprise grade security solutions, there’s some basic baseline knowledge that you expect out of everyone. UI design knowledge can be applied to any domain cross-functionally. I think there is something to be said about having a really specialized understanding of a certain area of the market and really calling yourselves as a specialist in that area. I think the way we bring in product management people into the team, I think the same structure needs to be also followed when we are looking at UI designers or UX researchers so that we can get better quality of designs as well as better quality of user research out of them.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Interesting. So I guess somewhat related but a different question. In your experience in the last 20 years, I’m sure you have worked with a lot of designers, some researchers you have in the past. I know you have managed design teams, research teams. What are two or three things that you think a designer or a researcher does well? So the ones that you thoroughly enjoyed working with. What are the two, three attributes that they demonstrated that you said, wow, I love to work with this person?
Mayuresh Ektare
Critical thinking. You know, now being able to challenge the decisions that are being made around the product, around the solutions that the engineering is putting together. And again, critical thinking, having really a confidence about a deeper understanding of the customer, that really triggers a certain workflow that user researchers or UI designers have in mind, right? And bringing that perspective into the team has always been interesting for me. I always look for those healthy dialogues and conversations where different team members are actually able to challenge the solutions that are being put together.b
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, nice. And so anything else to add to that in addition to critical thinking? And it’s very interesting. I talked to a lot of leaders on the design side, on the product side, marketing, sales. Rarely have I heard the answer “amazing pixels” as the first response. Or I guess many leaders assume that is the core asset. And that you should be good in your craft if you’re a designer, and should be good in your craft if you’re a researcher. Outside of that and critical thinking, anything else that jumps to mind?
Mayuresh Ektare
Yeah, another thing that definitely comes to mind is driving alignment across the cross-functional team. Because UI designers and UX researchers really are the folks in the team who are setting the frame of your discussion, right? They are coming up with a proposal that could potentially get shot or could be enhanced. That is really the craft.
Being able to understand what battles to fight and when to give up is a very interesting skill set that I’ve seen with great designers.
There are some times you simply don’t want to push too hard in making minor changes in the UI in favor of achieving bigger goals and having that delicate balance is really important. What also happens is UI designers or UX researchers have a certain perspective of the product, right? What they might be missing sometimes is the “why” piece of it. And this is really the product management’s responsibility to help everyone understand under what constraints these decisions are being made. Sometimes product managers don’t have the bandwidth or a complete visibility into why these decisions are being made as well. But think about all the aspects that really influence a certain approach in the product. It could be market dynamics. It could be competition. It could be how you are being perceived by the customers. Many of these factors play into how you want to take the solution forward. It may not necessarily align with the best design that the UX researcher is coming up with, but having this broader understanding of the market and where your product fits in really is extremely important.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, well, well said. You’ve worked with designers and researchers in the past, and without naming names or referring to specific companies. What are some of the times when you wish they could have done something more? And I think you partly alluded to this answer in your answer to the previous question. But what would you recommend designers, researchers do more of, do better to align with product, to align with strategy, to align with the business, that way they can exert more of their influence and their critical thinking onto the product roadmap?
Mayuresh Ektare
I think product managers and the entire UX team are really joined at the hip, I would say.
All the data points that influence the product manager’s decision should be the same data points that influence the UI design as well.
And when I look at products, there are multiple different maturity levels at which products are. In a startup, when we were starting Zingbox, you really are trying to find that initial product market fit. So while UI design is important, what we are really looking for is the value there. So the hat that you’re wearing as a UX designer is a completely different one. It’s more focused on delivery of the value rather than designing the product. But as soon as you identify the initial product market fit and you really want to scale the solution, you have to switch gears and move into a different domain, which is more about, how can I optimize the solution? How can I incrementally add the value on the platform that we are building? And furthermore, when you are trying to scale the organization, this is where optimization comes in. You look at individual features, individual SKUs, products, and then really start thinking about how you can optimize. One thing that oftentimes gets ignored early on is onboarding, right? Onboarding new customers. And I’m speaking from the lens of an enterprise solution. It often gets neglected in the organization. Now, why is onboarding so important?
Having a functional product is great, but if it takes too long to really derive the initial value out of it, everyone loses focus. Everyone loses their interest in the solution. And you don’t want to sell shelfware.
You really want to deliver value, particularly in the SaaS solutions. So figuring out an end-to-end experience of the user journey with a heavy focus on the first 30 days, 90 days, six months of engagement with the customer is really important. Because after you have delivered that initial value and your solution is sort of plugged into their daily ecosystem, it’s easy enough to incrementally keep adding additional features or delivering additional value. But the initial ramp up is where I’ve seen many companies struggle.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, great, fabulous, fabulous examples. This, essentially, I mean, you alluded to several topics. From everything from alignment to end-to-end experiences to having access to similar data sets and making the lifecycle of the product, the stage at which the product is, understanding the market, essentially having that well-rounded background experience, as well as it’s not just about which method fits when, it’s not just about which design fits where, it’s the 360 degree view of the market, of the users, of the context, of the pricing, and many more things. So in that regard, I’m sure you are held accountable for… in your current job as well as previous jobs for certain KPIs, certain business outcomes, KPIs being the Key Performance Indicators. What’s your take on some of the general typical KPIs that product managers are held accountable for? What is the outcome that your head is on the line for?
Mayuresh Ektare
So this is always on top of my mind. So three things. First is business, meaning sales. What’s the market looking like? Are we able to bring in enough customers on a quarterly basis? Second is really engagement. Once the customers do come onto your platform, how well are they engaged? What’s the rate at which we are onboarding them, what’s the rate at which the value is delivered? And the third one is retention. I look at these three things on a daily basis, on a weekly basis.
These [sales, engagement, retention] are the three key metrics that any product leader would follow. Now, these metrics also inform where we put more focus from our product or engineering cycles. And these should be the ones informing the strategy that we lay out for the product.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, I could relate to the three metrics at every one of my last jobs. I mean, they transcend many organizations. And so if the designer or the user researcher wants to be more influential within their organization, I assume most of them want to. They have personal ambitions. They want to do an amazing job. They’re not always fully able to articulate those things, or they might not be able to influence, get budgets. And in my experience, it’s sometimes because they’re removed or disconnected with the business KPIs. Have you seen that in practice?
Mayuresh Ektare
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll give you an example. Now, having been part of startups where you are actually building new solutions, many solutions are absolutely needed in the market. But are they the top of mind for your buyer is an extremely important question for you to answer. I’ll give you an example. Honestly, when we were starting an IoT security company, IoT, Internet of Things, was a new domain. Not many solutions existed before us. We were probably the first ones to come up with that solution. Now, what it also means is, you have to scream from the top of your lungs that, hey, you need this new solution. And educating the market as a startup is an extremely hard thing to do. What it means is that you are actually swimming against the current. It is easier if you actually pick something that is on top of the mind for the buyer. Maybe today it is cloud security. I’m coming in from a security angle here. So it is cloud security. So building a solution in that space probably gives you the advantage of being aligned with where the money is spent. Now, take that analogy and apply it to UX design or user research. When you look at multiple data points in an organization and you identify, hey, customer retention is the biggest challenge, or support is the biggest challenge. If user researchers or UI designers are really focusing their efforts in terms of what the leadership really cares about today, it will really provide a better outcome. Flowing, swimming against the flow in the organization really does not get anywhere. There are multiple cycles that are spent.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Nice example. Yeah, nice example. So, if I’m a researcher within a large organization, how do I figure out what is top of mind for the key business leaders? Outside of the All Hands Meeting or some general very high level goals of revenue or other things, how do I find more of what the KPIs are and what does really matter to the organization?
Mayuresh Ektare
And here I would actually really encourage UI designers, UX researchers to partner with the product management team. The way I look at product management is, product management, if you ask me what I do on a daily basis, I do nothing, right? Now there isn’t one task that I can put it in a box and say, this is what product management does. But what product management is really good at is, we are the glue inside the organization. If you think of sales, marketing, engineering, finance, HR, what have you, product management stitches them together to really provide a holistic experience for the end users. So the answer to your question is to really partner with the product management, to really understand what are the most important areas of focus for the next quarter, two quarters a year, right? And particularly within Brinqa, I do that on a quarterly basis, right? We publish the key milestones that we are shooting for, a few takeaways that we are tracking for not just the quarter, but the entire fiscal year and have those expectations sort of grouped into multiple different buckets. We are all familiar with the big rocks, small rocks, and water strategy, right? So identifying those big rocks is extremely important. And if the product management team is unable to identify that, it’s a complete failure of the product management team, right? So my goal inside the organization is really to always… anyone within the product or engineering team should be able to identify – for the next three months, these three items are the only things that we’re focused on. Everything else is icing on the cake, but no one cares if you are going to be able to deliver or want to push it out to future releases. So having that insight allows even the UI designers and UX researchers to focus their efforts that are well aligned with the rest of the organization.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, well said. So a lot has changed over the last two decades in product, in design. Back in the day, 20 years ago, there were largely a handful of monitor sizes and a handful of browsers. So development pretty much meant a very limited set of things. That certainly has gone through a lot of change. Things have exploded from mobile phones to apps to even enterprise applications that are quite complicated and have lots of workflows and lots of things to touch on. And the consumer expectation, the customer expectation is largely driven by the consumer-grade front end that we all as consumers experience in the Googles of the world, the Amazons of the world, where we as consumers expect consumer-grade interfaces. And in the enterprise space, there’s an enterprise-grade back end. And of course, layer on security on top of it. So I guess my question is, what are some of the new trends? What has changed in the last few years? And how do you see the next few years evolving from a product standpoint, from a design, from a research? And we’ll touch base on the AI thing as a second part. So leaving AI aside, what are some of the latest trends?
Mayuresh Ektare
Yeah, it’s a very good comparison that you bring up between consumer-grade solutions and the enterprise, right? The consumer-grade products oftentime apply to an individual user. They’re handling a manageable amount of data. So building out experiences on top of that data, it’s not easy, but it is a simpler problem to solve. Now, doing that at scale is the hard part in consumer-grade. Now, compare that with enterprise. You’re looking at a massive amount of data, and yet you’re expecting i.e. customers are expecting the similar experiences as they enjoy in the consumer space, at the same level of accuracy. Now, there are a lot of enterprise-grade solutions, like Googles of the world, or even Amazon. They have to deal with a massive amount of data. But precision and accuracy is not important there. If Google serves you a certain result one fine morning and a different one the next day, no one is going to question it. But that’s not the case in enterprise. So when you have to marry both of those things, you have to deal with a massive amount of data and yet have accuracy applied to it, those challenges become really hard ones to solve. And that is precisely the reason why enterprise products are difficult and hard to use. Now, there is a craft where you have to keep going deeper into understanding the value. So as we know, always question the value. And after five Whys, you’ll definitely know what it is. So applying that level of filter on that data to really extract that one metric that is going to be helpful for the end user is extremely important in enterprise. And figuring that out requires a tremendous amount of domain knowledge and understanding of the user.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah. Yeah, and I assume that will continue, that trend, especially in the enterprise space, especially where things are complicated, workflows, multiple roles, the interactions between those personas. I mean, when you sell enterprise software, it’s not just one person that is using it. There are different roles, different workflows, different sequences. There’s lots of interplay between those individuals. Every experience will have to be crafted to the point where no one person gets dissatisfied in that entire chain.
Mayuresh Ektare
Exactly. Or you want to find out who you’re selling to, right? Who’s the primary user? And it’s really important, right? I’ll give you another example. How simple pricing strategies affect the user behavior, right? Brinqa is a solution that sort of aggregates security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations in the cloud into a single platform with the purpose of allowing the customers to really orchestrate their risk reduction programs at scale. Now, in a scenario like this, the more data that comes into Brinqa, the better outcomes the customer can derive. And this is precisely where our pricing strategy comes in. If we start charging customers based on the amount of data that they ingest, naturally people start worrying about, hey, I’m going to be conscious about what I put into your tool, right? And it’s not just about Brinqa, it’s about any solution that, you know… I take an example of Splunk or SIM [Security Information Management] solutions out there in the market. So you really need to figure out how you align business outcomes, right? You know, the right business outcomes with the behaviors that you might anticipate in the field after the product is put to use. That alignment across the entire customer’s journey is so important that even the products that I’ve seen to be highly successful, really tick all boxes across the entire journey.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, yeah, fabulous. So, Mayuresh, you and I can speak for hours, as we normally do, on this or other topics. And for those that do not know, Mayuresh is a biker, a bicycle rider, and every few weekends, there’s either photographs or amazing videos on his bike rides and… I don’t know if there is publicly some of this information available, but if not, if the listeners want to reach out. I guess you are on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Mayuresh Ektare
Yep, I am on LinkedIn. So yeah, reach out if you would like to connect. And yeah, enjoy mountain biking. Bay Area is the perfect place to enjoy that. So yeah, I like to make the most of it.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Cool. Thank you, Mayuresh. Thank you to all the listeners. It was a wonderful chat with Product Leader, SVP of Product, Mayuresh, a designer who became a product manager. And this should be very encouraging for the designers, researchers, everyone to understand and partner with Product to be able to influence more, to be able to assign value to the activities that the researchers and designers do. And so thank you, Mayuresh.
Mayuresh Ektare
Thank you, Kuldeep, so much for having me here. This was a wonderful conversation. Catch you soon.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, thank you. Thank you to the listeners. Bye.
Mayuresh Ektare
Bye.
