Importance of who you learn from, what you learn and how much you learn: Story of BYJU'S English Product

Two major things I have learnt for Management of a Product are:?

1. It's important to know what to learn and how much of it to learn.

2. It's important to learn the above NOT from the best person, but from the right one.

A friend of mine, back in college used to tell me,

"If you are studying on the last day before your exam and you are a 7 pointer, never learn from a 9 pointer, learn from an 8; he'd know exactly what and how much you need to study".

He was a 7 something pointer who turned down the highest paid Mechanical job offer to pursue an MBA and is now an AVP at a leading Investment Banking firm in India. Ah! And he was the one to convince me to join BYJU’S instead of TCS!!!?

?At BYJU’S I was the Product Owner of the English product (ELA) and handled the Media and Production. I was exposed to terms like 3D animation, rendering, compositing, colour correction etc.. Compositing, a VFX (Visual Effects) term for making a subject look like part of a realistic environment in green screen production! This was a huge bottleneck in our pipelines. We had industry superstars working on it but compositing was a high fidelity and no margins job in the industry (Remember when Gamora was translucent in one of the Avengers scenes? That was a compositor messing up!). At ELA we had a heavy requirement for compositing as the lessons were all story driven and it was important that the realistic feel came through well.

Importance of how much you learn:

We took excruciatingly long on setting the apt pipeline and review cycles. I tried my hand at the software for a couple weeks, much to my boss’s rightful indignation (AVP Content and Media). He suggested I create documented guidelines and go from there. I connected with one of the superstar heads of compositing, who made me aware of the various elements in compositing like colour, shadows, keying, rendering along with what the directors were looking for like story, content, additional animation required etc. The issue: in a creative field, everyone has a different perspective on everything.?

Importance of who you learn from:?

In the midst of all this, I had a coordinator (we had various studios where we got our work done, primarily our Trivandrum Studio) who wasn’t a hardcore technical person. But having 8 years of experience in the field, he knew more than me about some technicalities and which pipelines worked across the industry. Together we figured out what elements should be reviewed by whom and then which elements are to be reviewed in which round. From an average cycle of 5 reviews, we brought it down to two - one for VFX and other for Director. All corrections given were documented and a sanity check was done post that.?

Importance of knowing the balance between time and quality:

Since BYJU’S is an educational company, the content delivery, correctness and visualisation is something that we could never compromise with. The quality of the wow! Factor is something we could change!

A creative person would spend a lot of sweat and blood to bring a 95% product to 99% even if it triples the timeline! It’s important to have creative folks to maintain the overall product quality. It’s also important to know when to intervene.

Hence at BYJU’S media, the management is divided into Creative Directors who take care of the wow factor and Producers who take care of timelines. We put the dreaded third and final review of the Product Owner, the hated ‘numbers guy!’ that became a veto, changed only by the Creative Head. Now this guy didn’t care that the contact shadow of the foot of the instructor was a little off. He’d taken the ingenious suggestion of another Product Owner (who recently launched the biggest 3D product in the world), of putting grass in the foreground of the shoes to hide the foot all together!??

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Here is a fun fact: Out of some 500 odd videos; in the last 3 months, we’d finished only 7! Two weeks into the new pipeline, the number was up to 28 to eventually reach a run rate of 12-17/week.?

Obviously there was backlash from both VFX and Production directors on the new pipeline for their individual videos. The only but strongest respite: the Creative Head looked at the larger picture and not just each video. He was looking at how to maintain quality across 500 videos rather than 10 and understood what should be approved and what not. Scenario Post this: ELA launched earlier this year for not just 4th-5th but for grades 1-8th. I moved on from ELA after creating 4th-8th, and the Creative Head is currently handling both the responsibilities seamlessly and has recently closed Grades 1st-3rd along with multiple other projects (including the incredible ICC videos).??

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Learnings in Action:?

Saw the above learnings in action by an AVP at BYJU'S during a similar time, who had just taken over Social Studies which was one of the biggest projects on the floor with over 150 people working on it. I jokingly called him the tie guy (Always in formals with a tie on in an office that only recently made shoes compulsory!). There was a compositing requirement in that product as well, though at a lower scale. He, like myself, came from a non-media, business background and randomly called me to his cabin (somewhere when we were about to figure it out ourselves) and asked if I had 15 minutes,

“Prannay tell me what compositing is, and why we spend SO much time on it. Tell me in 15!”

Yes, 15 minutes!!!?

The result: He delivered the maximum amount of content created at BYJU’S the next month!

I would like to believe that we broke the record in ELA a few months later (I’m cheekily being humble), but it was close and no one crunched the exact numbers!!!?