Welcome to…

About Products and Businesses

👋👋 Hello Y’all, Nikhil here. I am a writer and founded Products and Businesses (PB) to provide analysis of the strategy and economics side of technology, businesses, and products. Currently, there is a weekly essay that provides an in-depth analysis of the news of the week.

Please subscribe to get my weekly essay directly in your inbox. You won’t have to worry about missing any important news or analysis. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.

Why subscribe?

Let me be direct here, 2 reasons.

Number 1️⃣: By subscribing to PB’s Newsletter you will get access to an in-depth analysis of a Product, Business, Technology, or ALL. In today’s world content is everywhere but not everyone talks about the tiny details that make up a business. I pledge to give you those tiny details that made a product or business successful. Now, I understand my essays could be long but read point 2 👇 before you make your decision.

Number 2️⃣: We have 24 hours a day. We work for 8, We sleep for 8. Subtract another 3 hours for family, necessary chores, and food. We are left with 5 hours. Netflix, Facebook, Hulu, Print Media, Gaming, and others want a pie of that 5 hours. I want a pie too. But my pie is small and needs only 10-15 mins a week, which is 2 mins a day. (PS: I am also working to shorten my content while keeping the same details 😉)

PB bring you the answers with a WHY? These essays will enable you to understand core business processes and why certain strategies worked vs others that failed. Subscribe 👇👇

About me

I am Nikhil Varshney. A Seasoned Product Manager, Writer, Tennis Player, and Photographer. Connect with me on:

👋 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilmv/

👋 Twitter - @nikhilmv1990

I am a product manager and currently working as a product lead at Wayfair.com (the online furniture company). My product helps customers get their deliveries on time and in perfect condition. I have spent the last 7 years building and scaling products that have generated millions in revenue globally.

I firmly believe in capitalism and why it is necessary for economies to function. The simple circle of capitalism:

employment —> salary —> expenditure —> market (economy) —> employment,

drives me to learn more about how this really works and how business strategies can be formulated around this circle that helps businesses to excel. Now having said that, I also believe in the concept of luck. There are things beyond one’s control and they do play a part in success and failure.

I was born and raised in Delhi, India. I feel lucky being a boy raised in Delhi (The capital of India) as I got the opportunities that most people raised in rural parts of India or even girls in cities do not get. I feel lucky to have had parents who themselves were pretty learned (my father is a doctor, my mother a Ph.D. and a teacher, my grandfather a Ph.D., a writer, and a professor). Growing up in such an environment inculcated the right values towards education but this was sheer luck that I got into an amazing environment.

I have realized that to grow, I have to read and learn as much as possible. This is where I build the habit of writing and taking notes. As I wrote more, I realized this is a great way for me to understand topics better. Slowly I gave my writing the shape of an essay and share the analysis with my audience. Web 2.0 provided a great opportunity to be a content creator.

Web 2.0 enabled the content to play a central role in binding the society and communities which were initially fragmented. The internet increased the consumption of content. Smartphones and tablets enabled us to build tight-knitted societies which flourished as we shared a lot more content.

I want to use my learnings to be part of the content-creating world and share what I have learned over years with the intention of enabling people to understand more about businesses and products in general. I have a writing style that is fun yet informative and I will keep building on that.

Long story huh!!.. Let’s get to Products and Businesses and read some essays. Subscribe today to get an in-depth analysis in your inbox.

Ethics Statement

My goal is to be a truly independent analyst and provide an impartial view of the business landscape. I will be honest and share if I have an investment in a company I am writing about. My intention is not to spread false news and create havoc.

I am not being paid by any company that I write about. I pick my own topics based on news and upcoming earnings report. I do quote from reliable sources such as WSJ, Barrons, WIRED, Forbes, etc. I have paid subscriptions for all media outlets I quote from and I mention and share source links for anyone to check.

My Experiences

Technology changes the quality of life, technology cannot replace human intelligence— Dr. T. P. Chia

Finding the right passion that drives your growth is critical. Building and scaling products that enable organizations to gain users is my passion. After 8 years of creating products and delivering growth, I have exposure across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C organizations.

Right now, I lead a strategic division within Wayfair’s delivery network called the shipper’s interface. You guessed it right, Wayfair is an online home improvement and furniture company. Wayfair also owns its delivery network called Wayfair Delivery Network (WDN, which was not hard to guess, was it). WDN is responsible for Wayfair’s large parcel delivery. Large parcel delivery includes big shipment items such as beds, sofas, dining tables, etc.

Currently, there is a huge gap in the market for large parcel shipments. It is a huge pain to manage supplier data accurately and build optimized delivery networks for first, middle, and last-mile deliveries. This is where my team comes in. I ensure data reaches the right teams for optimal decision-making and network designs. The shipper interface works with Wayfair the shipper and carrier to ensure large parcel items reach the customers as promised. More to come on Wayfair as a company and my role. Stay Tuned.

Stop 1: Highmark Health (PA’s largest insurer)

My passion for building products started with my first venture in healthcare where I developed an enrollment application that increased membership by 2.5 million members. I joined HM Health Solutions (HMHS) right after my master’s. HMHS is a sister company to Highmark, Pennsylvania’s largest insurer. It is a product company with more than 15M healthcare members and helps insurance organizations with a premium suite of healthcare products that help them enroll members, process claims, manage providers and create care management programs. My ideas for enrollment application were simple and focused on solving critical customer problems of not being able to select the right benefits and failing to understand insurance lingo. Customer research showed me that more than high insurance premium costs (which by the way do play a role in acquiring members) members were struggling to understand the benefits presented to them. I utilized artificial intelligence to utilize existing/past patient data (claims, care management, provider notes, SDOH, etc.) to come up with suggested health insurance plans that will enable maximum cost savings.

My top three learnings from this experience:

• Simple solutions that focus on “needs” rather than “wants” work

• Choose the right market for your product. Employer group was the best opportunity for this work as compared to Medicare, ACA, or Medicaid

• NPS matters. Customers who like the product are the ones that talk about it. Make sure you are listening to the strategic customers

Stop 2: Athena Health, Yeah the EHR company

I continued my journey in healthcare and joined Athena Health with a focus on “increasing patient access to care”.

I lead product management for intelligence (artificial intelligence and machine learning) at Athena Health. It’s a $17B dollar company recently acquired by Hellman & Friedman and Bain Capital in the largest ever levered buyout. At Athena, I am helping our customers increase access to care by adding more appointments on calendars and reducing wait times.

As a senior product lead, my responsibility was to create a calendar management application that will enable Athena’s customers (doctors, providers, and hospitals) to build calendars and schedules in an automated fashion. You will be surprised to know that practice with 1- 15 providers spends around 600 hours per year (i.e. 0.3 FTE focused away from patients) on calendar management. Any guesses what is this time spent for practice with >30 providers? (the right answer is close to 1000 hours which is 0.5 FTE away from patients). My solution to this problem was simple, it’s not a productive job for a human to create a calendar. The machine should be able to do it. I used simple AI/ML algorithmic tools to gather inputs and create a calendar specific to each provider’s needs that increased scheduled density by 25%, i.e. 10M more appointments and faster access to care (reduced patient wait times by 2 weeks). I will elaborate more about this problem in one of my blogs.

My top three learnings from this experience:

• MVP need not be a working prototype, it can be a video showing your intent. This helped drive growth even before the product was built

• Don’t lead the witness. While framing surveys and conducting interviews create a bias-free environment

• Increasing user engagement is more important than going to GA. Wait till critical features that drive adoption and engagement are implemented before thinking about GA

Through this blog, I want to share my thoughts and passion for businesses, products, investments, and books. I like reading investor presentations, 10K’s, 10Q’s, product management principles, and books. After reading those, I like compiling my thoughts for later references and as notes. Hopefully, these notes will help you make informed decisions.

Thank you,

Nikhil Varshney

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.