Viveck explains why he joined PropertyGuru to lead product, moving the company from founder-led to professional management and sales-driven to product-driven. He coaches product managers to focus on outcomes over output, and recent metrics show the team exceeded targets at 112%.
Chapters
So what led you to joining the PropertyGuru team? Yeah. So my experience was primarily focused in the US and a bit of Europe, and I've never dabbled with Southeast Asia. At that point in time, I had some interesting opportunities come my way. And out of those, when I met with PropertyGuru folks, it was very different at that point in time. It was kind of startup-ish in Singapore. was a founder-led company at that point in time when we joined. But I liked the people, I liked what I saw there, and I felt like that's the right move for me. And especially about learning about Southeast Asia, it was also an infrequent space. So all of these things kind of made me join them. And the ride has been phenomenal because I think a couple of things that has happened is one transition was founder-led to professional-led management. So that transition happened. And it was incredible to witness through the front seat. So I'm part of the exec team in PropertyGuru, so it was good to see and witness those changes. The second thing was we were extremely sales-led, and so that pivot from sales-led to being product-led— I've heard this so many times in the conversations, but what it is really when you're in the thick of things, it's a very different journey, but we are successful in navigating this in terms of where we were and where we are right now. And the third thing that you read on the books, which sounds extremely easy but super hard to do, is this output to outcome translation. Um, I think it's much more easier to read in the books. Like, for instance, I'll tell you, I, I slapped a bunch of goals for my PMs and a couple of them left after a year because they didn't know how to— if you've never been trained and if the ecosystem around you, it's just not your company, but the ecosystem is not very outcome-oriented, you're going to have a heavy task of taking PMs, nurturing them to see how to visualize a goal and march towards it, and then getting them there. That's kind of an experience that for us it took almost— that transition took almost close to 2 years. And finally, I'm glad to see the dashboards with outcome metrics and saying that we are like— the latest one I was reviewing was we are 112% one of the metrics that we wanted to hit through, but that was not a conversation that we had 5 years back when we joined. So that is an interesting transformation from where we started.
