Lessons on data mistakes with Tokopedia’s CPO

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Hello reader,

I initially wrote a long intro with several paragraphs talking about my past experiences playing pool and about how it’s about not making mistakes.

Then I started queuing for Taylor Swift tickets and realized, who cares about life lessons?

The real thing you need to make sure you don’t screw up is getting your tickets once you enter the buying page – for instance, misplacing your phone so you can’t find it when you’ve got to get the one-time password for your credit card payment, or taking a little too long in the toilet and getting booted out of the buying page once the time limit runs out.

And with that, before we focus on our main story and the rest of the newsletter, I leave you with some final words: Every man and woman for themselves!

Today we look at:

• A product manager’s guide to avoiding mistakes with data
• Whether Baidu’s AI model can beat GPT-4
• Other newsy highlights such as Neu Battery Materials’ successful seed round and Alodokter’s acquisition of a pregnancy app

Premium summary

Product managers beware

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Products come in all shapes and sizes, but that means that mistakes can also take many forms. That said, there are some overarching ideas that apply to most, if not all, product managers. Ramesh Gururaja, Tokopedia’s chief product officer, shares his thoughts on them.

• Avoiding bias: When collecting data, product managers need to consider many factors to ensure fairness in what’s being reported. Gururaja cited a case study where Boston City launched an app to help locate and fix potholes. However, because only affluent citizens could afford smartphones at the time, only potholes in well-off areas ended up being fixed.
• Man in the mirror: Another trap is vanity metrics. When looking at data, it might be easy to hone in on numbers that look good but some of them might not mean much at all. Instead, product managers should focus on metrics that can be acted on.
• Check your attitude: Product managers need to be patient too, says Gururaja, because “data isn’t going to speak in your language on day one.” They need to recognize that collecting comprehensive data takes time and effort.

Read more: How Tokopedia’s product chief avoids costly errors when using data

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