Our Senior Vice President of Product on how to adapt to a diverse and ever-evolving market
Veriff operates in a rapidly changing sector where constant evolution is vital to stay relevant. Our Senior Vice President of Product explains how our inclusive, informed, agile approach to product development makes sure Veriff’s products lead the field and meet the ever-evolving needs of our customers.
Chris Hooper
Geography lessons
Veriff takes full advantage of today’s highly connected world to draw on a global pool of talent for our internal teams. For Suvrat Joshi, our Senior Vice President of Product, that’s both a challenge and an opportunity.
‘Working with teams across multiple geographies has a lot of elements to it. It makes the learning that much better, but it needs to be managed as well through different mechanisms that allow teams to come together,’ he says.
For Suvrat and his team that involves working both online and offline, virtually and in person, to get maximum benefit from opportunities to work both collaboratively and independently. Despite being very much a digital native, he’s still passionate about getting face to face with colleagues, and travels regularly from his home in Seattle to our offices in New York, London, Barcelona and Estonia.
Just like us, our customers are often global businesses, who are also juggling the challenges and opportunities that brings.
‘Sometimes customers span multiple geographies that themselves have multiple needs,’ comments Suvrat. ‘We do have products that are more centered around certain geographies, that meet, say, a government regulation, for example, or a particular way an industry operates in a particular geography. We take that into account to build those geographically centric views of the product.’
At the same time, it’s important not to be constantly reinventing the wheel – instead, it’s about efficiently adapting products to meet particular needs, whether geographically or industry specific.
‘It's really about creating this common platform that enables us to do these sorts of configuration-based customizations or adjustments,’ says Suvrat. ‘That enables us to bring to market a product that feels very market centric, but behind the scenes is really built in a way that's a lot more scalable and can extend into multiple scenarios.’
"It's really about creating this common platform that enables us to do configuration-based customizations or adjustments."
Management lessons
As the possessor of an MBA from Berkeley and an enviable CV filled with senior roles for Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, Suvrat’s approach to management is founded in both solid theory and practice. Though a relatively recent arrival at Veriff, his management style aligns closely with the company’s philosophy and has quickly helped to reinforce a highly collaborative approach to product development.
‘My management style is, I would say, inclusive, data-driven, and focused on decision-making,’ says Suvrat. ‘Inclusive in the sense that I like to look at multiple inputs from different places. Then I think we look for both qualitative and quantitative data in all aspects of the work that we do at Veriff. And finally, making a decision is important; discussion is awesome, debate is awesome – but at the end of the day, you don't decide if you're not driving towards something.’
Recently Suvrat was a guest at a Gillespie Manners's podcast talking about building high performance product teams. Here are some of the key takeaways that he as a product leader follows when building high-performance teams and helping them to be successful.
- Make sure you have the right culture fit in your team. People thrive in a culture of transparency with open communication.
- Establish common goals for the team and drive towards them as one. You make so much more progress with a common goal rather than people pulling in different directions.
- Push for decisions. Decisioning is often underrepresented - make fast and data informed decisions to avoid "analysis paralysis" . This helps to remove blockers for the team to move forward.
- Foster a learning culture. No team is perfect, and teams continue to evolve. People learn from each experience and fostering creation and evolution brings teams to a better place.
To listen to the full episode, please click here.
"My management style is inclusive, data-driven, and focused on decision-making."
Cookery lessons
The word “spicy” may not yet be common parlance in the tech sphere, but if Suvrat has his way it soon will be. He uses the word liberally, and only half-jokingly, to describe the approach to product development he is encouraging at Veriff.
‘The intent and the spirit of that word is really about being provocative, but in a positive way, to move the discussion forward, to move the agenda forward,’ explains Suvrat. ‘Oftentimes, being provocative is thought about as being confrontational. But being “spicy” is not about being confrontational – it's about bringing a different thought to the table or putting a thought forward that moves the agenda in the right direction.’
Extending the culinary metaphor, Suvrat acknowledges that this approach is one that works well, when administered in the right proportions with other ingredients.
“You have all sorts of flavors – sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, umami… Spicy is just one amongst those flavors and being spicy once in a while is okay. So long as you do it in the right way, it actually adds more flavor to the food. That's kind of the way to think about it.’
"Being “spicy” is not about being confrontational – it's about bringing a different thought to the table or putting a thought forward that moves the agenda in the right direction."
Lessons from customers
One final point Suvrat is keen to reinforce is that fundamentally, product development must always be customer-centric, both in terms of addressing our customers’ problems and ultimately meeting the needs of their end users.
‘Customers are at the heart of all of it,’ asserts Suvrat. ‘There are several stages of the product development process, and the customer lies at the core of it for sure.’
‘It really starts from product discovery, understanding what type of products you want to build, what sorts of customer profiles you want to work with. Then it gets into product feature scoping and spec’ing. Next it gets into building and finally it gets into releasing the product with the right quality that we aspire towards.’
‘In some cases, it's driven by velocity and time to market. In some cases, it's driven by how we want to shape the market. And so, it's really a mix of all of these elements.’
"There are several stages of the product development process, and the customer lies at the core of it."
‘We recently launched Age Estimation as a product, and I'm really enthused about it because of course it meets customer needs, and it does follow this journey quite nicely. We learned about the customer need, we identified it, we worked on it with high velocity in mind, developed the product, and brought it to market with great internal cross-team collaboration.’
Veriff’s Age Estimation solution uses facial biometric analysis to estimate a user’s age in cases where no formal identity document is provided. This makes it perfect for situations where users want to access age-gated products but are unwilling or unable to share official documents for ethical, privacy-related or practical reasons.
‘We already have a customer live and are working with several others on prospect modeling,’ says Suvrat. ‘It’s exciting to see that a lot of the things we’ve worked on as a team are coming together to prove that value back to customers, reducing the cycle time between what we learn from customers and bringing a product to market.’
To find out more about our Age Estimation solutions, click here.
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