Chief Product Officer India

A clearer offer sometimes needed another decision

Product leadership through four leads: 34 staff; ₹7.2 crore FY 27 expense; separate ₹1.6 crore discovery
Trade services and marketplace products: 29 years; Career from July 1997; CPO from April 2021
Provisional first-board allowance: 24 days; Consent, preparation and relationships remain to examine

Decisions & consequences

Opening a partial-lot route without hiding the stock left behind

In 2021 I supported a whole-lot rule for surplus listings. It made the seller's proposition easy to explain: one buyer would take the available quantity, reducing handling and leaving no small remainder. Research into forty buyer proposals challenged the assumption that this was also the simplest useful product for the other side. Twenty-six proposals sought only part of a lot, while fourteen sought the whole. These were particular project requirements, not a representative estimate of every buyer's preference.

Seller operations wanted to retain the original rule. Splitting stock would require agreement on the quantity, more handling and a continuing account of what remained. Some small balances might be harder to sell than the original lot. Danish asked us to distinguish that legitimate operating concern from a universal product restriction. I accepted that my preference had privileged clearance over the buyer's project need. We chose a bounded partial-lot route for participating sellers, using whole cartons and explicit seller agreement rather than offering arbitrary cuts of material.

The programme cost ₹58 lakh. Eight participating lots contained 2,400 square metres in the defined listing account. At the review cutoff, 1,640 square metres had sold and 760 remained listed. The remaining stock stayed with the relevant sellers under their arrangements; it did not disappear from the product account after the first transaction. These figures did not establish that partial selling caused the sales, that every seller earned more or that the material would otherwise have become waste.

The choice gave up the cleanest clearance proposition and created continuing work around the remainder. It also let buyers consider a quantity closer to their project rather than acquire unwanted stock solely to access the part they needed. Qualified material and operating owners retained condition, handling and suitability decisions. I would now define the buyer's quantity task and the seller's remainder obligation together. A partial-lot feature is incomplete if its success is measured only at the moment a portion sells, while the unsold balance becomes somebody else's unexplained problem.

Separating a saved listing from a seller-confirmed hold

A 2022 task study examined the meaning of our saved-lot action. Of sixty participants, thirty-nine believed saving a listing would hold the stock while they discussed it with their project team. Twenty-one understood the action as a personal shortlist. The product had not explicitly promised a reservation, but its language and presentation had allowed a consequential expectation to form. A seller could be discussing the same stock elsewhere while the buyer believed the material was being kept available.

The commercial team wanted to preserve the short flow and add a note explaining that availability could change. Danish argued that the distinction belonged in the action itself, where the customer formed the expectation. I supported a ₹31 lakh redesign separating saving, requesting a hold and receiving seller confirmation. A confirmed hold would identify its quantity, stated period and conditions through the approved arrangement. The screen would not create a reservation merely because the buyer had shown interest; legal and seller-operation colleagues retained the actual terms and commitment process.

In a later account of fifty hold requests, thirty-four received seller confirmation, ten were declined and six remained pending at cutoff. Those were request outcomes, not fifty purchases or a conversion comparison with the earlier design. We kept the pending requests visible without calling them abandoned and made clear that a shortlist supplied no stock commitment. The product change required more coordination with sellers and more explanation for buyers who had previously completed the action with one click.

We gave up the appearance of immediate certainty in favour of an action the service could support. That did not remove all availability risk or make every confirmed arrangement immune to dispute. It made the stages more understandable before a project relied on them. I would now test what a user thinks has become binding after an action, alongside whether they can perform it. A clear interface is not merely one with fewer words. It is one whose ordinary meaning matches the commitment the business and its partners are actually prepared to make.

Keeping two batches visible inside one familiar product description

In 2024 a selected tile listing account contained 420 cartons under the same product description. Seller records identified 260 cartons from one batch and 160 from another. A simplified catalogue view combined them into one quantity. That made the offer easier to browse, but it left buyers to discover a distinction that could matter to their intended project. The product team needed to preserve the batch account without pretending it could decide how every buyer should use the material.

Research across thirty project enquiries found eighteen seeking a single defined batch and twelve willing to consider different batches for separate areas, subject to their own review. Those expressions were not technical approvals or a market-wide preference estimate. The seller sponsor preferred to show the combined quantity first because it made larger enquiries more likely. Quality colleagues and Danish asked us to give the distinction a more prominent place before the customer invested time in a proposal based on an assumed uniform lot.

We funded ₹42 lakh of catalogue and sample-review work. The revised proposition retained batch identifiers and quantities and provided a route for buyers to examine the relevant evidence with their qualified advisers. A sample or image could help that conversation without certifying identical appearance across every piece or suitability for installation. We did not assume that matching a product name settled shade, dimensions, condition or any other project requirement. Sellers and appropriate professionals retained their respective obligations.

The result was a more specific selection account, not a measured reduction in disputes or a promise that every mixed-batch offer was unsuitable. Some buyers could reasonably consider separate uses, while others needed a different lot. We accepted a less impressive single quantity and additional service work to make that choice assessable. I would now ask which distinctions are lost when stock is grouped for browsing. A marketplace should make discovery easier, but the grouping should not quietly remove information the buyer needs before deciding whether the offer belongs in the project at all.

Keeping a suggested alternative outside the automatic replacement path

A 2025 product proposal would have offered an automatic alternative when the requested material was unavailable. The discovery model compared visible characteristics such as dimensions, appearance and description. Commercial colleagues liked the prospect of retaining enquiries that might otherwise end when the preferred lot disappeared. I wanted to preserve that discovery benefit while examining the approval the word replacement could imply. Similarity was a reason to inspect another offer, not evidence that it met the project's specification.

We reviewed 120 suggested alternatives with the relevant records. Sixty-eight required qualified specification review before a conclusion could be reached, thirty-four contained clear stated differences and eighteen lacked necessary supporting records. These were review categories, not counts of approved substitutes. The sponsor proposed automatically offering the sixty-eight as equivalent and handling objections later. I opposed that step because the need for review was precisely what prevented us from making the equivalence claim. The missing-record group could not be made acceptable by a high similarity score either.

A ₹49 lakh programme changed the proposition to an explicit alternative for buyer-led review, with material differences and available records carried forward. No suggestion became an automatic replacement. Buyers and their qualified advisers retained specification decisions; engineering, quality and legal colleagues reviewed the platform's part. We did not claim that all 120 enquiries were recovered, that any particular alternative was eventually ordered or that the change proved technical suitability. The result was a revised decision path with important questions still assigned to the people able to answer them.

The trade-off was commercial friction and some unresolved enquiries. The alternative would have made the flow faster by making a judgement the product was not entitled to supply. I would now agree the boundary between discovery and approval when designing a matching feature, before its success is defined by the number of requests kept moving. Product leadership should reduce avoidable effort around a decision while preserving the decision itself where its consequences require informed acceptance.

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