Appul Vats and the problem with a good idea

A good idea has several advantages in a product meeting. It can be explained, illustrated and defended. It may even have a handsome mockup. The listener who eventually uses it enjoys a simpler privilege: leaving. Appul Vats’s public writing gives that listener a place in the conversation before the product team becomes too pleased with itself.

Vats is a founding team member and Director of Products at Pocket FM, based in Bengaluru. The company builds entertainment around serialized audio stories. His work belongs to the part of that experience a listener might scarcely notice: the decisions that connect a story, a screen and the person trying to enjoy both.

There is a pleasing complication here. An entertainment product has to accommodate imagination while remaining usable. A thriller can get away with a mysterious locked door. A login screen needs to open. A romance can make its characters wait. An app should have a better reason.

That makes product work an interesting place to look for a personal story. Careers in entertainment are often told through the people whose names appear on the finished work. Vats’s record offers a different view, through priorities, experiments and the colleagues who have worked alongside him.

The list that needed numbers

In June 2021, Vats published an essay about product prioritization. Its title proposed replacing bullet points with numbers. He discussed the pull of convenient tasks, the importance of a product’s stage of development, and the distraction of jumping between problems. He also brought in the streetlight-effect parable: searching where the light is good rather than where the lost object actually lies.

It is a useful image for anyone who has ever tidied a desk instead of tackling the difficult thing on it. The task gets done. The problem waits politely. A product backlog offers many such opportunities for industrious avoidance, with the added benefit that the result can be presented at a meeting.

A numbered list changes the terms of that meeting. Two requests can both be reasonable while still competing for the same afternoon. Putting one first gives the other a consequence. Someone must explain the order, and someone else must live with it. Even the typography has acquired responsibilities.

Vats’s essay treats focus as work in its own right. That is a concrete subject for an early product career: deciding what deserves the team’s attention when there are more possibilities than hours. The attraction of a new feature is easy to see. The cost of interrupting an existing one is less photogenic.

“Delighted to be working with them.”

Appul Vats, on the Truecaller collaboration

Before audio, a different sort of audience

His earlier roles began with people and coordination. During 2017, he served as Head of Sponsorship at Manipal Institute of Technology. The role involved sponsorship initiatives and internal communications. He studied at the institute, earning a Bachelor of Technology, after attending D.A.V. Public School.

He then worked as an OYO ambassador, with responsibilities that included volunteer engagement and event promotion. A short product-management stint at RentoMojo followed, from December 2018 to February 2019. There, his work included examining order cancellations and collaborating on customer-retention strategies.

These are distinct assignments, worth keeping distinct. Getting an event supported, involving volunteers and examining cancelled orders each presents its own practical question. A job title can make an early career look tidier than the work feels. The details give it some texture.

He joined Pocket FM in February 2019. His designation is founding member, a distinction that describes his place in the early team. The company’s named co-founders are Rohan Nayak, Nishanth S. and Prateek Dixit.

His educational record includes a KVPY Scholar credential; he speaks English and Hindi. These details belong to the educational and personal outline of the career, alongside the engineering degree. A professional record need not make every credential explain every subsequent choice. Sometimes a detail is useful because it lets the person remain a little more particular than the job description. A campus, a field of study and languages spoken make the outline more particular. The subsequent jobs add the professional detail, giving the career a sequence that readers can follow.

The sequence matters because it puts an actual career underneath a substantial title. An early team is made of people arriving with particular experiences, rather than a collection of biographies written backwards from an eventual result. In Vats’s case, the preceding chapters include campus work, hospitality and furniture rental.

A login worth a thank-you

One of Vats’s public acknowledgments concerns the entrance to the app. He thanked Truecaller’s team for its login solution. The accompanying developer post described the collaboration as addressing Pocket FM’s onboarding difficulties through Truecaller SDK and faster verification.

This is a modest episode with a very legible purpose. A person wants to start listening. Verification stands between that intention and the audio. The collaboration addressed that step. Vats’s acknowledgment also names the other team’s contribution, giving a small piece of product work a public record.

Consider how unusual that is in the wider business of entertainment. The opening scene gets discussed. The opening form usually gets endured. Yet both belong to the same encounter for someone holding a phone. The listener experiences the whole route, regardless of which department owns each part.

An app can have a considerable library and still depend on ordinary transitions: getting in, finding something and beginning. There is no need to dress those transitions in grand language. Their appeal is precisely that they become easier to pass through. Successful plumbing has always suffered from a shortage of ovations.

A promising feature meets its listeners

Vats returned to product decisions in a September 2023 PocketBytes essay. He described a process that starts with a hypothesis, gives a prototype to a limited group, and examines the results before wider release. Engagement, retention, satisfaction and technical reliability all figure in that account. He also described involving colleagues across functions.

A test gives a proposal an ending other than an argument. Instead of asking a meeting to predict every response, it creates an opportunity to observe some. The important moment is the point at which a team has to make a decision with the result in front of it.

The distinction is especially relevant to an entertainment service. A listener may enjoy a story while finding the surrounding controls awkward. Another may understand the controls and simply prefer a different story. These are different questions for the product to accommodate, even when both encounters happen on the same screen.

At company level, Pocket FM’s March 2024 announcement put its Series D funding at $103 million, led by Lightspeed with StepStone participating. The announcement also described more than 400,000 episodes and over 100,000 hours of content. These figures describe the company at that time, rather than an individual’s results.

Scale gives those small product choices a larger setting. It does not make them disappear. A company can add content, capital and markets while a listener still faces one screen at a time. The local encounter remains remarkably local: a person, a phone and the next action.

The colleagues in the picture

Two colleagues have publicly thanked Vats in accounts of their own careers. Engineer Akash Agarwal credited Vats and Arun Nambiar with trust, freedom and mentorship while discussing his Pocket Toons experience. SDET Aditya Patil also thanked the pair for guidance and support after work involving Pocket FM and Pocket Toons.

Those acknowledgments give the profile another dimension. The product process has people inside it, and some of those people have chosen to describe what working together meant to them. Their accounts remain their accounts, with the particular weight of someone remembering a shared period of work.

There is room for that beside the roadmap. A product role can be discussed through features and metrics until the actual colleagues become invisible. Here, their words put them back into the picture. The work included engineering and testing, and the recollections include learning and professional growth.

He describes himself as someone who appreciates creativity and brainstorming. That sits comfortably beside the less glamorous subjects in his writing. An imaginative product conversation can still end with a practical choice. The notebook gets to be expansive; the next release has to be specific. There is room for both, provided somebody eventually closes the notebook and decides what the team will build.

Vats’s public record therefore has a human scale as well as a company setting. The sponsorship role, the cancellation problem, the login acknowledgment and the essays are manageable pieces of a career. Taken together, they give the career its sequence and the product work its everyday texture.

A good idea still needs its chance. Someone has to choose it, make it usable and let people try it. For the listener, the reward is wonderfully uncomplicated: the app works, the story begins, and there is a reason to hear what happens next.