Carlos (00:00)
Welcome to the show, Vinod.

Vinod (00:00)
Hey Carlos! thank you.

Carlos (00:03)
I heard you've studied in 13 schools growing up. Tell me more about that.

Vinod (00:08)
Yeah, I mean first things first I was not kicked out of any school or fired from school But you know, I I just moved a lot, you know growing up You know in India I studied in third as you said in 13 different schools in about five different states And actually I you know, it was painful going through all the change but on the hindsight It actually shaped my behavior

I'm actually very grateful that that happened so early in my life stage. That now I think, know, we all know that the only constant, especially in the corporate world, is change and transformation. you know, it keeps happening both internally driven and externally driven. But I think what the 13 schools growing up has done is I actually look forward to those changes. I actually get very uncomfortable when I get very comfortable. So...

So, you know, it has really shaped my behavior and I try and embrace change naturally, which I think I don't have to put an extra effort or think over it or lose my sleep over it. It just comes naturally. So I'm actually very thankful that that thing happened.

Carlos (01:22)
In fact, I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and I saw that you listed over 20 courses and certifications that you've been taking even during your professional career, right?

Vinod (01:32)
Yeah, absolutely. One of my core beliefs I have for, one of my core beliefs is being student for life. And as you said, I've been going back to school every year. I've done that during my professional career for last 16 years. And this is after my masters. I actually have two masters. But I try and go back to school every year. And I was talking to someone yesterday.

And I, you know, I said this yesterday. That's when it struck me. I've also figured out method to this madness. I try and look for the certifications around the Q3, Q4 of each year. The reason being is I have learnings or pain points that I've captured in the first two or three quarters of the year where I've seen some gap or I've seen the need to learn something new. And Q3, Q4 also gives us some outlook in terms of how the following year is going to be.

Right, so it kind of, you know, provides enough learning from the current year, but also provides an outlook in terms of where we are heading in the following year. So I try and, you know, fill that gap during the second half of the year so that I feel like I'm more prepared going into the next year.

Carlos (02:47)
I'm a huge believer in lifelong learning. Obviously, that's what we do here at product school. And I admire leaders that are also having that student mindset because I believe that no matter how senior you are in your life, there's always something new to learn. And ultimately, that makes you a better leader for others. So in this case, I want to learn more about what are you currently learning and how do you make time for it?

Vinod (03:11)
Yeah, it's tough, right? And I think one thing that comes naturally to us, I mean, I say us, I mean, like the product managers is prioritization. And this one is just ruthless prioritization because I think as you grow up and as, know, I have two young daughters, you know, five and 10. So that takes a considerable amount of my time. Personally, I'm also affiliated with a few nonprofits, I also have obviously the work part of it, which kind of takes considerable time, but it essentially comes down to prioritization and which is why I like this method to the madness that I just spoke about, like trying to time it and carving out time ahead of time for this. It just makes it more natural, and you know that it's happening, it's not like you're not taken by surprise. I also have to, I plan my vacations ahead of time. I try and time it in a way where all the must -dos are done. try and look for, I think there are two things that goes into the course selection. Number one is essentially what I said, which is like, what is the area that I wanna go? there are, I generally go with.

Two or three areas that I wanna go into. The second thing I obviously look for is, most of these courses are live, right? It's not like an offline thing that you could just listen in your own time. Because I think I actually believe learning from your cohort, you learn as much from your fellow cohort members than along with what the instructor gives you as part of the course curriculum. So I think that live interaction is very important for me personally.

And it also helps with networking, connecting with people from different walks of life and all of that. So from that standpoint, think just, I also look for the days and the time that those courses are offered. I think that's the second part from a constraint standpoint that I look for so that I'm trying to time it both from a quarter of the year, but also from the day of the week when these courses are offered and the time of the day, right? So it's like.
You know, just put the product management 101 philosophy to this as well.

Carlos (04:36)
Totally, and I always say that busy people always find time for what's really important. In fact, when I have something important to delegate, I try to give it to the busiest person in the org because they have a method, right? Like they are good planners. They know how to rudely prioritize. And the people who are not too busy, if you give them more, they still won't find time to do the things that really matter.

Vinod (04:50)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it also comes down to the 10 other. You have to say no to 10 really good things to do two great things. Right. So, you know, there is there is always a trade off. You know, I wish we all had more time in a day, more than 24 hours and we could do more. But unfortunately not. So, you know, we just have to figure out, you know, what break in, out. Right. Like, what do you do and what do get out? Yeah.

Carlos (05:25)
Let's talk about that because you obviously as a VP, general manager with a large team and I want to dive deep into your team specifically, need to get some leverage. There's only enough, we all have the same amount of time. So how do you go about getting leverage?

Vinod (05:40)
Yeah, yeah, I learned this, I would say about 12, 12, 13 years ago. I'm a big believer in Opmex, we call it Opmex at GoDaddy, but you know, process feeding itself in a way where you're not doing one of things, you know, to your point, method to the madness, you create a process that kind of feeds itself. So if you see, I think I have certain Opmex like,

We do weekly business review, we do experimentation review weekly, we do a monthly business review, we have a monthly operations review. When we are looking at all of these OpMaks, I try and time it where, for example, the monthly ops review feeds into the monthly business review or the weekly business review is essentially the experimentation review feeds into weekly business review. So essentially I've created kind of a process of Opmex that kind of feeds itself so that there is no unnatural followups or unnatural things that I need to do which kind of optimizes my time because we know that, I just go through my daily weekly routine. I know that I can get 80 % of my job done. I there will always be things that will come sideway; which you have to figure out, but I think general course of action is good. I think the second thing that I learned from my manager at Walmart, he's currently the chief e -commerce officer at walmart .com, Tom Ward. One thing he told me, and this was about five years back, six years ago, he said that, know, he said that, you know, figure out how you want to optimize the time even on your regular communication, whether it's email or Slack or, you know, teams or whatever software we use in the company. Like his method to the madness was if you want something from me, mention it in the subject line and put it in the email so that I can read the email on the phone. And if I can act on it within three seconds, I do it immediately. But if it's going to take more time, then I'm going to put it in the back burner. I'll get to it, you know, through the week or end of the day or whenever. But then so I think what I figured is I actually embraced it and I embraced it even my personal life.

Like if I need something done or if I need to go, I'll give you one very simple example. I have this log box and mail, the physical mail that I get at my house. So I do it, I go pick it up once a week or sometimes it's once in two weeks. But I'll go pick it up, but the moment I pick it up, I set aside about 15 minutes. And most of the time, the junk actually doesn't even come into the house, I just put it in the garbage outside the house even before I bring the rest of the stuff inside. And once I start, I just finish it. I finish the whole thing and if bills need to be paid or something needs to be done, if there is action needed, I'll finish those immediately and then they go straight from mail to bin like that. So I'm just giving a very small example, but I think that's the same philosophy I use even at work. I generally don't like to keep things prolonging. If I start something, I want to finish it because I know that, one, I think it gives me confidence that I've completed a task, which is a good feeling. It keeps you going for completing more tasks. And two, you know that you don't have to come back to it. So, you know, there's always more work coming, but you're constantly prioritizing and knocking things off. So, long-winded answer, but I think that's kind of defined how I behave, I guess.

Carlos (07:01)
Yeah, and I love that because I think time management is a key skill for anyone that is in a people management position, especially at your level. And that sometimes simple is better. And some of the things that work at work can work in personal life and vice versa. In fact, I have a hot take for you. I like meetings. And I know they have some bad press because I understand bad meetings are horrible and waste everybody's time, but good meetings can really be an incredible charging function for people. So for someone who I can imagine has so many of those meetings, how do you go about ensuring that those meetings are actually a plus for everybody involved?

Vinod (07:44)
Yeah, in fact, you know, at GoDaddy, I think we are a no-meeting culture. So I think the three meetings or the four meetings I said are the only meetings I have on a regular basis. In fact, we also have, you know, it doesn't work every week, but we also have like a no-meeting Friday, no-meeting Wednesday. You know, we end up having some meetings, at least at the leadership level, but for the rest of the folks, we try and clear it up for them. But we have very minimal meetings. It's a very written-down culture. So we write on docs, we comment on docs, we respond on docs. It's a super Slack culture. We are all power users of Slack, which actually was one of the things, change management that I had to personally adapt coming in from Walmart to GoDaddy because Walmart is a very PowerPoint-heavy presentation and meeting-heavy culture, and GoDaddy is right opposite to that. So I think, you know, I went through the change management myself, but to your point, that is one thing that we are very prudent on. We want to make sure that if something can be done asynchronously, we'll do it asynchronously. In fact, there was an initiative that my product ops person, along with the marketing ops, sat down and did at the beginning of last year or maybe Q1 of this year, where we shaved off close to, I would say about 70 to 80 hours of team meetings for the team, giving time back to the team members. And we did that by optimizing, by collapsing meetings. As I said, I think we already had a schedule that kind of feeds itself, where the teams are giving updates and we just consume it. It was pretty seamless, but I think we optimized it further because, you know, that 1% optimization always works, right? So we went through that exercise and we'll probably do one more of that moving into next year. You know, that's one of the things in the docket for Q4 and for my team offsite, which is coming up next month.

Carlos (09:32)
Yeah, I do that every year. We actually hired a Slack agency before I thought that was even a thing to come in and audit our Slack channels, the different random groups that get created, audit certain people's calendars, including the executives. And it was kind of painful, you know, but it was such a good opportunity to really match, what it is that we are saying is a priority with how we're spending our time. And we shaved at least 10% of time on things that weren't core.

Vinod (10:17)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think as long as the team knows that we are working through it, essentially my philosophy is I want to minimize the time for material prep for the team. I don't mind spending a little extra time consuming it because it's meant for me. If I need to consume it, I need to put more effort than people preparing it, right? So, there is almost no baby feeding happening to leadership here, and we are all self-consuming data as we go. And we do the same, right? And that culture comes right from the top from our CEO. So it's a well-oiled machine at this point in time.

Carlos (11:01)
So Vinod, let's talk about your company, GoDaddy. I see that you are the Chief Product Officer for the North America's business units. What does that mean? What are you specifically in charge of?

Vinod (11:14)
Yeah, we call this internally the US Independence business unit. So essentially, we are building products, tools, and platforms meant for our entrepreneurs. And we call it US Independence, but we also end up building product tools and platforms globally because most of the time the global or the international team is either just customizing or adding a lens of localization, which is now all done by AI. But the capabilities are pretty common. Maybe I'll take a step back and walk you through the different tools and products we have at GoDaddy. And I'm happy to go through the details to answer your question. We internally have a strategy we call the Entrepreneurs' Wheel. So essentially small businesses, side hustlers, entrepreneurs who want to go down that path of financial independence or who have a great idea and want to execute on that. We call this as identity, presence, and commerce as the three key categories. With an idea, you establish an identity for your business as a starting point.

Then you want to go into creating a presence, which essentially means, so the idea generally starts with you purchasing a domain. Again, this is not a sequential process. People can enter anywhere, and I'll go into that in a sec. But you essentially start with a domain, and then customers go into establishing some kind of presence. The presence could be creating a website, creating an email address that gives them the authenticity of a business, especially with all this fraud happening. I think that's a very critical part of business creation. And then eventually, entrepreneurs and side hustlers go into doing full-fledged commerce, right? Commerce happens when you, as a small business, are actually making sales and bringing in revenue for your company, right? And so there are products and platforms in each of these areas.

And what we've seen is that entrepreneurs can enter this entrepreneur's wheel anywhere. For example, I think with social media, historically people generally started with a domain and then went into it. It was a sequential process many, many years ago. But now with social media, I think, we all know how many small businesses we encounter on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or any of these social media. So I think social media has disrupted that sequential chain and made it more cyclical, which essentially means you could enter anywhere and exit anywhere kind of a thing. So I think, you know, a lot of businesses start on WhatsApp or Instagram or TikTok or wherever, right? And then they feel like just to seem authentic, have their own voice and brand and tone to their business, they end up creating a presence product. That could be their own website or email just so that they can communicate with their customers and not solely rely on social media communication channels, right? And then eventually they go into commerce, and we know that there are enough product tools and platforms where you could offer your service or your product and then accept payment, and so on and so forth, right? And if you want to go more sophisticated as the business grows, you want to get into point of sale and things like that if it's a physical business. If it continues to be e-commerce, then you have the checkout and the regular e-commerce funnel for that.

So essentially, those are the three key areas: identity, presence, and commerce. And we try to make it super seamless for our customers to go through that journey. So coming back to your question on what my team does, I have teams that own identity, which is our core part of our business, which is domain and domain protection, and areas like that. And then going into presence, where we have a gamut of tools: websites and email. Both of these have millions of users, so it's a pretty sizable area. Then, I have teams managing customer activation and return customer experience. We also have marketing services, which is SEO optimization, connecting to social media, automatic campaign management, and an email platform.

Carlos (12:30)
That's pretty impressive for a company that started in the last century, literally, as a domain hosting provider, to now have a full-on platform that does end-to-end for anybody who wants to run a business.

Vinod (12:54)
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think our charter is that we want to go create the GoDaddy ecosystem and make it really seamless for our customers. As you said earlier, the second part of my job at GoDaddy is also running subscriptions and bundling, as we call it internally. We have three very clear strategies that we laid out for subscription and bundling about two years back.

And we said three things. Number one, we want to increase value to our domains, which is exactly what you mentioned, right? We want to make our domain not just a standalone product, but we want to generate consumer surplus and make it super valuable for our customers. The second strategy around bundling is that we want to make discoverability of our products super seamless because, as you said, many customers still think of GoDaddy as a domain company. But eventually, we do provide the whole gamut of things end-to-end that you would need for a small business. So discoverability of our products is critical so customers see that, and we want to build that ecosystem out. And then the third thing is what we call a connected experience, which essentially means we want to connect all of these products and services with each other where it contextually makes sense and is hyper-personalized. As customers grow their businesses, they can discover and engage with the products that fit them best.

Carlos (14:09)
So from a product org standpoint, as you try to cover so much ground with the different products that you have, how do you structure your team?

Vinod (14:23)
Yeah, great question. I try to keep the team lean, structuring not based on the number of products we have, but on the impact we’re bringing in. This means staffing teams based on how many customers those products are serving, not simply adding product managers because we built a new product. We staff based on outcomes rather than output.

Carlos (14:37)
So does that mean some of your directs have more than one product?

Vinod (14:44)
Absolutely. In fact, many of my directs rotate across products. Senior leaders often play a player-coach role, managing teams of product managers while also directly leading something temporarily. This gives them a deeper understanding of the product, especially when rotating into new areas.

Carlos (15:09)
How big is the total product org that you lead?

Vinod (15:14)
The total product team is around 40-plus.

Carlos (15:17)
And what are the functions within product?

Vinod (15:23)
Yeah, so we have several key functions. There’s a product leader for identity, which includes domains, domain protection, and other products in that suite. Then there’s a leader for presence, which is a larger bucket because it includes websites and email, both with millions of users. We also have a leader for customer activation and the return customer experience. Additionally, there’s a leader managing studio and that area because it's a niche space, and the team is based offshore in India. Finally, I have a leader for product operations to tie everything together and govern the op-mechs, and a leader for marketing services because that’s also a significant area that interfaces well with our commerce products.

Carlos (16:36)
That makes sense. I've seen more product orgs taking over parts of marketing, especially when product is involved in pricing, subscription, and bundling, which impact the business directly and require constant optimization.

Vinod (16:50)
Yeah, exactly. I think product teams working closely with growth teams, go-to-market managers, product marketing managers, and corporate marketing functions is crucial. Our job as product managers is to create an amazing product experience, delight customers, and drive consumer surplus.