Vishal Kapoor, Director of Product at Shipt, talked to us about making an impact with product.
Heather: Hi! Tell me about your company and role on your team.
Vishal: I am a Director of Product at Shipt, which delivers groceries and other packages, and is similar to Instacart, DoorDash, and Fedex / UPS. Target acquired us a few years ago, and we were their largest acquisition to date. At the company, I own two big product areas and a few smaller ones. One of them is called Bundling, which is our B2C equivalent of UberPool; instead of a Shopper or Driver going from a store to a customer to deliver only one order, we give them multiple orders to deliver around the same time and in the same vicinity. Another area, which is the biggest of all, is called Shopper Earnings. It manages every dollar that goes into our Shopper's or Driver's pockets once they onboard into our app. Between the two, my portfolio per year manages about a billion dollars. It's a lot of power with a lot of responsibility, and it’s personally very gratifying for me to be in such a hugely impactful role.
Heather: How did you get into this space?
Vishal: I'm just about to finish my two years at Shipt. I came to Shipt from Lyft, which is another on-demand ridesharing marketplace. Before I moved into product management, I was an engineer and an engineering manager. I received a Master's in Computer Science, and my very first job was as a software engineer at one of the world’s largest marketplaces, Amazon. Then I worked for Microsoft Bing Search, Yahoo Search. Along the way, I took business courses, and switched from engineering to product to work on the social game “Words with Friends” at Zynga. Eventually I came back to working on marketplaces at Lyft and Shipt. So in a sense, my career has come full circle.
What keeps me here and motivates me to get up and get going every day is a sense of personal connection with the problem space. I always think that maybe there is a student out there who is trying to support themself financially, similar to me in graduate school when I first came to this country many years ago. And maybe the work that I do is helping me “pay it back” by providing them an alternative to earn a side-income. Or maybe my work is helping a parent out there trying to raise kids.
In fact, I have a screenshot of a message that one of our Shoppers sent to our shopper support email list thanking Shipt for helping them pay rent and put food in her dog's bowl everyday through the tough years of pandemic when employment opportunities were limited. I’m also a dog dad and whenever I read that message, it really inspires me. So I find a lot of fulfillment and pride knowing that the work that me and my teams do creates more economic empowerment for people. This sense of personal connection with marketplaces, versus other areas that I've worked in before, is what keeps me very motivated every day.
Heather: If you’re successful in your mission at Shipt, how will the world look different?
Vishal: This cliche gets thrown around a lot, but one of my personal values is that I want my work to make the world a better place. I think there are points in time and instances in someone’s career where they have an opportunity to do that. For example, at one point in my career, I was writing search engine algorithms and uploading them to the cloud. I'm sure they were impacting the world positively, but it wasn’t very tangible to me. In contrast, I remember that after I joined Lyft, when I pressed a button and a car actually came within a few minutes to pick me up, it was the first time that I felt a tangible intersection of technology and the real world. I feel at Shipt every day: to avoid the chore of shopping and save time for me and my family, I create an order on the Shipt app and push a button, and someone physically shops or picks up and delivers my order to me. And internally my teams try hard to do the right things to create work and pay equity across a broad spectrum of people who give us a chance by choosing to come and work for us over others in the industry. At the end of the day, we are really trying to make somebody's life better.
Heather: What advice do you have for aspiring product leaders?
Vishal: The biggest lesson that I learned in my career that unlocked a big door was that for a long time, I used to try to win or influence others through intellectual arguments I made using my technical skills; things like using data to make a solid business case, arguing that my ideas are better than others due to higher impact or more reliable numbers, and so on. And until others agreed with me, I would push hard to convince them to see things my way, which would cause external or internal friction for me. A few years ago, I actually realigned my mindset to a frame of mind that it's not about having the best data and making it my ideas vs everyone else's. Technology and problem spaces change quickly. Web 3.0 is going through many challenges right now with the volatility in Bitcoin and FTX issues and all of that. But the people that I work with every day will continue to work on new ideas, and make a difference regardless of the problem space. So for me, it was a very important lesson to realize that it's not about winning with numbers, it's actually about winning with people. Being data-driven helps to win, but it should be used to persuade vs challenge others, and to augment connections instead of replacing them.
So my two pieces of advice to anyone is: develop your ability and skills for listening and learning, and instead of treating your career as a zero-sum game, commit to winning together with others as a team. And realize that even the CEOs at the highest levels of every company are still playing a team sport along with their C-Staff and the Board of Directors. Lastly, I'd like to share that I believe that there are three necessary pillars to achieve great outcomes: talented people, clear goals, and efficient processes. A team of talented people who set and share clear goals and work well together create an extremely powerful synergy to do great things. Exceptional products and companies that change the world are just an outcome of that.
