Accelerating Change is Product Management

Rajesh Midha, Chief Strategy & Operating Officer at Bottle Rocket, discusses how organizations should embrace a growth mindset to build the right products and future-proof their businesses.

Rajesh Midha is the chief strategy and operating officer at Bottle Rocket, a digital experience consulting firm that builds digital solutions for clients. There, he’s focused on growing and scaling many aspects of Bottle Rocket’s business, such as revenue, product, engineering, and client innovation.

Before Bottle Rocket, Rajesh was the chief product officer at ooVoo, a video chat company, and chief product officer at Quartet Health, a healthcare technology company focused on behavioral health. Since joining Bottle Rocket, Rajesh has helped the company make a fundamental change to its strategy, moving from building products the right way to building the right products.

“Building the product right has been in our DNA from the beginning, and that’s still there. But this shift to building the right product really links back to the idea of defining a key measure of success. The right product sits at the intersection of the customer problem and the business aim,” Rajesh says.

The goal, of course, is to solve the right problems for their clients. For Bottle Rocket, that means defining success metrics, uncovering unmet needs, and focusing on the user journey. “We call ourselves rocketeers. Everyone has embraced that mindset, and it's really transformed our relationship with our customers and, in turn, their customers,” Rajesh says.

Gathering user research, like direct consumer feedback, and concentrating on the user journey is a key component as companies consider how to grow, retain, and engage customers most valuable to the business.

“The companies that are thinking about the future are not just thinking about that early stage of de-risking a product before they build it, or the build phase when it’s being engineered. They're also thinking about the adoption and growth phase,” Rajesh says. “We know that as we provide value to the customer, if we built the right product, it’s going to provide value to the business."

In this episode, you’ll learn about digital product strategy, user research, and engaging customers.

Here are the highlights: 

• Why the Bottle Rocket team shifted to a growth mindset (3:40)
• How direct customer feedback helps uncover business opportunities (6:54)
• Why it’s so important to focus on the user journey (15:37)
• How product and marketing teams can work together to make products more successful (20:02)