Shankar Ganesh

Product Manager

Rippling

Ex: Freshworks

Career Milestones

Seven-year long career at Freshworks spanning public relations, product marketing, product copywriting and product management.

Led Freshdesk's product revamp, Mint.
Led ‘Tsaheylu with customers’, a user research initiative inside the organization, kickstarting a culture of testing our ideas and design before we ship.
Led product and marketing for the Freshdesk help widget, used by more than 12,000 businesses worldwide.
Championed the importance of product copy in the org and wrote every piece of copy in the product for Mint, the revamped version of Freshdesk. Setup a review process to ensure every line in the product makes sense for our users.
Owned and drove Freshdesk mobile products from July 2015 till March 2017
Doing everything from talking to users, planning releases, collaborating with the design team and developers on unique use cases and ideas. Because of my efforts, the mobile app's average rating jumped from 4.1 to 4.7 in quite a short span of time, and we had tens of thousands of new installs.
Conceptualized, thought through and delivered three dozen product improvements with the single goal of making users go 'wow' as part of a side project inside Freshworks.

Organization and You

At Freshworks, my typical day involved:

talking to customers and running user research to discover problems to solve for,
brainstorming ideas and solutions with designers and engineers,
ensuring the solutions we build are aligned to the goals of the business and product strategy
overseeing the details in the user experience and ensuring the final product we ship is world-class
reviewing everything from screens, flows and interactions down to the product copy
running marketing to drive adoption for the features that my team works on
mentoring product marketers and product managers to be better at what they do

It's pretty much the same at Plum, except Plum is more early stage and I probably will be even more hands-on solving an even broader set of problems.

Core Competencies

Design and product marketing are my competencies, beyond my understanding of the domain and my ability to talk to users and uncover problems.

‍

Go to food for thought

I think this keeps changing, there's no standard list. There's a lot of product people I follow on Twitter (Steven Sinofsky, Shreyas, etc.). Twitter is the best source of product related content.

Favorite Products

Slack, Uber, Swiggy.

They solve big problems and care about the little details. And they do it at scale - which means they've hired great people, and built fantastic product and org systems that make this happen even as they grew bigger.