What happened
Chandrasekar Venkatesan opened by saying he was not going to teach anyone anything new, and that his model for the session was the Tamil writer Sujatha, whose non-fiction introduces a subject rather than explaining it, on the theory that a good introduction sends you off to read. He had been a business analyst at TCS, a consultant at an analytics startup, a product manager at Ford, and was then at PayPal building an internal FinOps product. He described his real education as learning by firefighting.
He started with a complaint people make about technology: where are the flying cars we were promised. A magazine in the 1900s, writing when the Model T had just launched and the Wright brothers were managing about fifteen minutes in the air, predicted them by 2000. His answer was that we have them, and they are low-cost airlines. What people wanted was a flying car. What they needed was to travel fast, cheaply and conveniently. He worked the arithmetic on Chennai to Bangalore, 360 kilometres in an SUV at twelve kilometres to the litre, and got to roughly 1,500 rupees a seat, which is about what the flight costs.
The second example was SpaceX. A rocket cost 65 million dollars, and the business does not scale the way a factory does, so Musk broke the rocket into the materials it is made of and had one built for under five million. He tied this to the conversation every product manager has constantly, which is whether to build or to buy, and to the version of it he gets at PayPal.
Then a quiz. Netflix's competitor is not Amazon Prime, it is sleep. Uber's is public transport. Facebook's is video games. All three came from the companies themselves, and his point was that each started before the rival everyone assumes they watch: Netflix rented DVDs, and had it treated another DVD rental company as its competition it would not be Netflix.
He was more interesting on why first principles are hard than on what they are. People optimise for form rather than function, and his example was that bags and wheels have both existed since antiquity while the rolling suitcase arrived in 1970, after millennia of better bags and better wheels. Continuous improvement crowds out the radical kind, which is how a decade of phones produced bigger batteries and bigger cameras. And everyone reasons from the mental model they happen to own: ask why birds fly in a V and an aerodynamicist, a biologist and a psychologist give three different answers, all of them confident.
The part most likely to start an argument was his claim that a product manager is responsible for the team's culture. He also pushed back on the idea that a good product manager does whatever it takes, which he thought made you a good employee without necessarily making you good at the job: if the product manager is doing the work, something went wrong earlier, in the planning or the budget. He wanted them coaching instead, with the style set by the team, leading a room of new graduates end to end and supporting a room of experts. He takes his own engineers, most of them fresh graduates, to present demos to leadership and sits them in customer interviews so they hear the complaints first-hand. Asked what had never got easier, he said stakeholder management, and that it is the one part of the job that resists being turned into a framework.