Welcome to the first installment of our new Ablyan Spotlight blog. In this series, we’ll dive into the lives and roles of our amazing team members, uncovering what makes them tick and what they love about working at Ably.
To start things off, we’re meeting our Senior Product Manager, Srushtika Neelakantam. Let's get to know her!
What do you do at Ably?
I’m a Senior Product Manager. Right now I’m mainly focussed on our Chat product, which is currently in active development. I also contribute to shaping our product strategy, aligning it with the company’s goal of becoming the obvious choice for developers building realtime experiences at scale.
Can you tell us about your journey into product management?
I joined Ably around six and a half years ago, originally as a Developer Advocate. I was employee number six!
I’d previously been in a similar space, working on pub/sub and API problems. Back then there was such a small team that we didn’t really have hard and fast boundaries in our roles so I was doing a bunch of work that fell outside my job description like developer documentation, research, discovery and, whilst I didn’t have the label back then, a lot of things that I now understand are a key part of a Product Manager’s role.
As we started growing the team and focussing more and more on implementing a solid product process, I realized that this is what I really wanted to do with my career. Luckily, there was an opening at Ably, so I moved into a full-time product manager role.
The first major project I worked on was Ably Spaces, a set of APIs that enable developers to integrate collaborative experiences directly into their applications. It was a fully cross-functional, end-to-end effort with a huge focus on market discovery that gave me a good taste of building products from the ground up.
Since then, I’ve worked on a whole host of different projects, improving features and delivering entirely new products that help solve more problems for developers building realtime experiences.
What does a typical day look like for you?
Honestly, there’s no such thing - every day is a new day! I don’t think I’ve ever had the same two days in all my time here but I suppose that’s what keeps me excited.
Generally, what I’m working on day-to-day depends on which stage of the product development process we’re in. In the early stages I invest a lot of time doing discovery and research on the problems we’re solving, including interviews with customers and market experts. If we’re in active development, most of my work is collaborating with Engineering to figure out exactly how to build the thing we’re building. When we’re close to releasing something there’s a lot of collaboration with DevEd and Product Marketing on go-to-market strategy, to ensure we’re positioning and messaging the product in the right way.
Some things don’t change regardless of which phase we’re in. I block out time every week for deep thinking, and most days I’ll have meetings with the Engineering team developing the product. Other than that, you’ll probably find me in our product dashboards. I’m obsessed with our product data and I’m constantly checking for new signups and exploring who our users are and what they’re trying to build with our products.
What are the most important traits of a Product Manager at Ably?
I think what’s important for a PM is contextual to the company and the product. Because of the nature of Ably, Product Managers really need to understand the technical breakdown of the product.
At a typical SaaS company, Product folks might obsess about UI and how users interact with it. If you’re building a hardware product, you might think about physical design or button placement. Ably is a developer product and the thing we obsess over is the quality of the APIs we provide. How do developers experience it? Is it providing users with the right functionality? And we’re not only thinking about our own customers, who are the developers, but also the end users who will ultimately be consumers of the experiences powered by our APIs.
I know it’s one of the clichés of product management, but being customer-focussed is so important too. Everyone at Ably is really passionate about what we do and we’ve got so many ideas about what we can build so it’s crucial that we don’t lose sight of the customer problems we’re solving. I think the worst option you could take as a Product Manager is releasing a great solution, which you’re then retrofitting into a market which may or may not have a need for it - in a technical space it’s especially important to avoid this.
What's your favorite thing about the culture at Ably?
My favorite thing about Ably has always been the people I’m working with. In this day and age it’s not common to stay with one company for as long as I have, but I’ve been fortunate to work with really passionate and intelligent people who aren’t constrained in their roles or how they think about solving problems, and who just want to build amazing products for our customers. And that keeps me feeling challenged and motivated and inspires me to my job better every day.
What are you most excited about for the future?
Ably is constantly evolving and we want to solve even more problems for developers building realtime experiences. Right now we’re transitioning to a multi-product company and I’m really excited about meeting developers where they are and being able to provide them with more solutions by abstracting more of the problem space from our side. Giving our users a more complete toolkit means we can create more “wow” moments by powering realtime experiences with much lower effort, so it’s very exciting.
