Meet the women product managers building the SHEROES app!
“The idea of using tech to solve issues for women fascinated me”
As someone who just joined SHEROES, the first thing other than the beautiful workspace I noticed, was how the aura of the office was different from the other corporate offices. The idea of joining SHEROES, the women-only social network excited me as it meant to work for building a better future, not only for me but for other women like me.
My mother gave up her career to take care of me, and now 20 years later she wants to build her own identity, to be known for her own talent.
I introduced her to SHEROES, and now she markets her homemade chocolates on SHEROES bazaar and also found a space to share her gardening experiments with other users. What amazes me is that SHEROES is nudging many ladies like my mother to find themselves, because age is just a number and limit is beyond the skies. So, I wanted to know more about my company, and what better way to find out more than quiz our Product Managers themselves.
So, let’s meet this awesome team and know more about their thoughts, ideas, and experiences of building this awesome network.
“My interviewer asked me ‘Will you be able to go home or you need help?’ And it was just 7:30 pm! In my previous job I used to go home at 8:30 pm and nobody ever asked me if I needed help. This really touched me”
Meet Shriya Chadha, our Product Manager who loves swimming and takes out time on weekends to catch up with Netflix and chill with her friends. Shriya recollects that the first time she thought of joining a women-only platform, she was prepared for the challenges ahead. She has previously worked with a lifestyle platform.
According to Shriya, one of the charms of this workplace is the “baby room” — meaning kids can accompany their moms to work. “Dog at the office” was like a cherry on top of the cake. She also appreciates how the CEO, Sairee’s interactive behavior makes her approachable and not intimidating like typical bosses. This makes everyone work the extra mile and to their full potential, as they have the freedom to let their creative taps flow and come up with new ideas.
‘‘How Do You Come Up With New Features?”
I couldn’t resist asking this question to Shriya, and she smiled and explained how data is her best friend. Shriya loves exploring and going to new places, this makes her daring with her ideas even, professionally. And she doesn’t back down from taking risks but with her preparation done.
She elaborates on how looking at users’ demands helped her and the team create the “Invite-Only communities” feature on the SHEROES app. She mostly works on the basic framework, coming up with new features with her team. She has successfully added cool and much-needed features like the referrals system, and contacts sync.
She also worked on making the user’s experience on the app better by improvising the onboarding process. She shares how she sets a timeline for a task to be put into action ensuring that it doesn’t pressurize her team, as this is what she has learned in her three years of product management experience.
“I was always actively working on social issues; I was also part of NSS in college, therefore, SHEROES seemed like a place I would fit into perfectly. And I feel lucky to be part of it”
Right out of College, Vertika Shukla joined SHEROES in July 2018 as Women in Tech community manager to create a tech voice on the platform. Later she transitioned to a Program Manager role followed by as a Product Manager. The nostalgia of being in college followed her into work as she came up with the creative idea to run a “Campus Program”, which launched with 56 girl campus leads from 45 colleges.
Having an affinity for her artistic side, Vertika added another feather to her creative cap as she joined the product team as “Product Manager” in January 2019. She loves being part of the team that trusts her skills and doesn’t discriminate against her, which as a student she was told that happens in some workplaces. she recalls how sometimes in college boys would not like to be part of the girl’s team while working on tech projects.
Have you seen the addition of the period tracker on the app?
Vertika asks me excitedly if I have noticed all the cool features on the wall of my SHEROES profile. She elaborates on how she has worked on the look and feel of the new App UI. She has done auditing the product and running her own minor experiments like the recipe listing, and minor course options for women to learn and grow from.
Also, how she is driving the Campus program to impact the lives of women in tech in colleges. The idea is to support the revolutionary cause of bridging the gender gap in tech and SHEROES can be the best enabler towards this.
The idea of creating a trusted and safe platform for women was very fascinating to her. She never imagined she would experience such a cool workplace and work culture as a part of her job. She enjoys working with a great team and finds it helps her creativity as she’s not restricted, and can openly share her ideas. Sairee, the CEO Of SHEROES has been her biggest motivation and she is inspired by how Sairee binds everyone together towards the mission.
“I was amazed to see Women speaking openly and honestly expressing their joys and vulnerabilities and just being truly themselves.”
Namita Nair works from home, all the way from Thiruvananthapuram. A mother of an energetic two-year-old, she organizes her time to smoothly manage work and spend time with her kid, because no mother should be given a choice to choose between her family or work.
She finds SHEROES platform unique in the way that women help each other selflessly, and bond without being concerned that they don’t know them personally. “SHEROES as a platform works on building that trust with both users and workers,” she adds. Namita agrees on how different the working space at SHEROES is from the typical corporate world, as it gives her more freedom to explore, tackle challenges and an opportunity to work with a high energy team with teammates who are proactive and ready to wear multiple hats at the same time.
Do You Know About Maya And Babygogo?
As a platform that aims to help women in every aspect, SHEROES has two arms namely, Maya and Babygo. Maya is a women’s health assistant app while Babygogo is a parenting app aiding young mothers with guidance, and conversations around their health and that of their young infants.
Namita elaborates on Maya, a reproductive health tracker app that helps women track their cycles, related symptoms, mood swings, and overall health. One of the features i.e Period tracker which is the menstrual cycle calendar has also been adopted in the SHEROES app.
Interacting with the users, staying updated on the latest trends in the market, and finding ways to check if it can be applied to us is one of the few tricks to come with new features. Namita explains how looking at what’s working in the app and building on it is vital for a unique platform like ours.
“There’s one work motto we follow here at SHEROES; Ask for help if in trouble, and help will be provided!”
Sakshi Pruthi joined SHEROES even before the app was launched. She describes how her current workspace is different from previous ones; women techies have the freedom to execute a plan and don’t have to go through levels of approval and even the CEO is pretty approachable for new ideas.
Feedback and listening to your users’ demand is the key and requirement for success
Sakshi as a product manager typically takes care of the feed, aggregation and distribution channels. She ensures that the content created by users on the platform reaches a wider audience. She thinks that taking feedback from her co-workers is important but more than that its vital to talk to the users as well and then work on those shortcomings.
She understands that working for women has its own challenges one of which is that these women need to be heard as this is how our platform different from any other out there. She elaborates how the team works on improving the in-app experience for a user and making sure they get the value that makes them come back on the platform.
This process involves choosing relevant and engaging content at the right time from several thousands of potential posts that could appear on a user’s feed every day and put them in slots that they’ll browse through. They try to gauge the user’s intent basis for their behavior and interests by analyzing the content they like, share, view, spend time on and also taking into account their age, demographics for a personalized experience.
They’re also working on building and supporting an ecosystem for video creators and consumers and are trying to make their stay on the app worthwhile.
“I was curious about SHEROES. The idea of using tech to solve issues for women fascinated me.”
Rhythm Bhatnagar, having worked always in a diversified space, was attracted to the ideology of SHEROES, which looks to reduce the gender gap, leveraging technology.
Rhythm has previously worked for a chapter under the United Nations in conflict regions of Central America as a part of the team working to provide potable water to underserved communities. She draws a parallel on how the work in SHEROES is similar; how in both scenarios people are determined to work for the community.
Pushing New Boundaries Every Day
Rhythm shares that SHEROES platform being a women-only social platform, a product that has never been in the market before, brings new challenges and boundaries to be conquered every day. The target segment is also unique — every woman on the internet — offering a lot of diversity.
She says that though this job offers versatility, and the scope to bring multiple skills, together. She herself enjoys the creative freedom of her role and is now also working in the area of drawing on business insights, market research, helping business and product teams work better, and she loves what she is learning on the job. Apart from that she loves spending time with her family and catching up on light reading.
“The vision and the product attracted me towards SHEROES, the environment makes me happy to work here.”
The diversity that SHEROES has even within its employees can be easily seen, and this was further confirmed when I talked to Nidhi Gurnani. Nidhi had her own startup before she joined SHEROES, which is one of the reasons she understands the need for this product in the industry.
A platform that speaks for women had her interest and gradually she joined the company in June 2019. According to Nidhi, the work culture makes it easy to engage with other people. She says that working in SHEROES is another experimental chapter of her life, a chapter dedicated to working for women.
Have you heard of modularisation?
The concept of modularisation is to break the complexity of a system and in this case, work. Nidhi says that the product team is divided into squads and each squad has one Product manager leading the team through the tasks. This helps in giving an equal amount of responsibility, hence ensuring a better result.
This also gives them the opportunity to run their own tasks for the product to make it successful. Nidhi enjoys reading and writing; she has an affinity to multitask with many things at one time; she catches up on her reading while traveling to and fro from work and home.
“The cause to support women has always been my focus. So the very first thing in my mind when I heard about SHEROES was — ‘This is what I wanna do!’’
Last but not least, we have Poonam Brar, who is an innovative person with the determination for social causes deeply rooted to her being. Recently, she has taken this notion another notch by making her lifestyle eco-friendly.
Before SHEROES, she was working with women self-help groups in the tribal districts of Dhar. But she wanted to build a digital product and yet contribute to a social issue — therefore what’s better than SHEROES?!
Every morning Poonam is very excited to get to the office. She gets to learn new things every day here. The environment is healthy as the people working have the same goals, motivation, and mindset. And people are really supportive of what you do. The working space is ever so buzzy, which fills her with so much energy and enthusiasm to learn even more and keep excelling.
“G for Gamification, Gratitude and Girl Power”
Gamification, she elaborates in laymen terms for me to understand is basically “making the experience for users engaging”. For example, in games like Candy Crush, the selling point is the new level that you unlock with the gifts and treats in the game. Similarly, on SHEROES we give badges to our users. The badges are like rewards for users for their contribution and also the fact we recognize and hear them, it’s a token of gratitude from us to our users.
She says that coming up with a new feature is essentially about what users want. Understanding user experiences and optimizing technology to provide such solutions, also keeping the business goals in mind. Understanding and finding out solutions on how we can deliver our best and cater to the needs of millions of women at once. She finds it refreshing to see people forming meaningful connections and helping each other out in their journeys.
By the end of my conversations with this amazing team, I learned a lot not only about the Product Managers but how SHEROES is supporting, as well as the team is building it — giving them the freedom to express themselves in a safe space and grow together for a better future. The limit is beyond the sky, and it excited me how we are going to proceed in the future together, with creativity and mutual love and understanding for the community.
SHEROES, the women-only social platform is a safe, constructive, high-empathy space where women engage and chase dreams. It has over 70 communities, a dedicated chat-based helpline, champions, resources, and opportunities. It is accessible via Sheroes.com and the SHEROES app
