Nidhi Aggarwal is the coauthor of the the Medium publication Radical Product. An entrepreneur who is passionate about building radical products, most recently Nidhi led product, strategy, marketing, and finance at data integration company Tamr. Previously, she cofounded cloud configuration management startup qwikLABS (acquired by Google), which remains the exclusive platform used by AWS customers and partners worldwide to create and deploy on-demand lab environments in the cloud, and worked at McKinsey & Company, where she focused on big data and cloud strategy. She holds six US patents. Nidhi holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

What motivated you to start Qwiklabs? 

The desire to contribute to education in a meaningful way motivated me to start QwikLabs. I firmly believe that we learn by doing. I noticed that while cloud computing was enabling us to deploy our computing resources anywhere students still needed to go to a physical location to learn any system software. Companies required students to come to a specific location where they managed a data center to host the training at a specified time and sit in lectures and use the software on their infrastructure. These data centers were expensive making training costs extremely high. 

I thought it must be possible for students to get hands-on training anytime anywhere at a low cost. The problem was there was no simple platform to create different training modules for different software easily on the cloud. It took the trainers and students an inordinate effort to set up a training environment before they could start their learning. We partnered with Amazon Web Services to enable them to create their hands-on training labs or all their customer and partner training using the Qwiklabs platform. We served Fortune 500 companies and now, the company is part of Google, which is something that I am really proud of. Everything I have achieved in my life is because of an emphasis on education and learning. To be able to give back in some form has been very gratifying for me.

The key was recognizing a customer problem that was real both in the pain and cost to customers and then creating the technology solution to solve the problem. Too often I see the reverse where companies have a solution chasing a problem. We were laser focused on solving the problem and not distracted by the trappings of entrepreneurship. We had a customer before we had a product which allowed us to bootstrap our company and turn it highly profitable soon. 

My Phd advisor instilled in me the value of practical research. He encouraged me to actively collaborate with industry even during my Ph.D. I was fortunate to be able to do my thesis research at HP Labs with some brilliant researchers and filed 6 patents for that work. During my Phd I became very interested in how we can actually solve problems in the real world versus just publishing papers. I chose to work at McKinsey for a few years to learn about business and operations. That experience gave me insights into problems various industries/companies face which became the basis of QwikLabs. It helped that I come from a family of entrepreneurs :) 

What motivated you to create the Radical Product toolkit? Could you describe the toolkit? 

Radical Product came about as a collaboration with Radhika Dutt, Geordie Kaytes and myself because we all had  seen too many good products become bloated, fragmented, directionless, and driven by irrelevant metrics or abuse of execution methodologies like agile and Lean Startup. It has almost become fashionable to not have a vision and strategy for the product but to wing it as you go and “pivot constantly”.  We called these recurring issues "product diseases". We think that vision-driven product management is the cure. Product development should be guided by a vision that is supported by a comprehensive product strategy. No one disagrees with that but there was no easy way to create the vision, strategy or the roadmap.  

We created the Radical Product Toolkit because our industry didn’t need another big-idea manifesto — we needed an instruction manual. Radical Product is a practical toolkit to help founders and product managers stay focused, align their teams, and build world-changing products. The toolkit guides you and your team through how to create a: 

* A clear and powerful vision for your product

* A cross-functional product strategy based on your vision

* A detailed roadmap for delivering on your strategy

* Specific activities and metrics to guide execution

I think AI is going to decrease the importance of the “how” to do something but radically increase the importance of asking “what” should be done and “why” we should do it. With AI, the cost of doing something is going diminish rapidly because we will be able to automate the routine tasks that are repetitive in nature. However, it would take human judgement to decide whether we should do something and what benefit will it provide. For example, coding something will not be as expensive in the man hours required but knowing what to build and why it will solve a problem will still be important. 

I think education needs to focus less on skill building but more on the fundamentals of problem solving, critical thinking, philosophy, morality and ethics. We will have an incredibly powerful tool at our disposal but will need the mental, emotional and psychological maturity and training to be able to use it effectively. We need to prepare people to ask the right questions. Once we have the right questions, finding the answers won’t be as much of a bottleneck as it is today. 

My main advice would be to not take rejections too seriously and to persevere. Fundraising is hard and there are too many biases at work against women. However, now the cost of starting a company has reduced a lot due to Cloud, co-working spaces and subscription based software etc. etc. If you are solving a real problem, focus on finding a customer so that fundraising is based on the strength of your customer acquisition skills rather than any subjective criteria. I was able to bootstrap my company due to the obsessive focus on customer versus any other glamorous metrics. 

Be unapologetically yourself, have confidence in yourself and define what success means to you. Don’t let anyone else tell you what you need to do to be successful according to their definition of success. I started my company when my daughter was 1 month old while I was on a H1B visa. Now, I have deliberately created a work/life balance that allows me to spend more time with her.