Ali is the VP of Product at Bolt. Having built 0 to 1 products and also had the privilege of scaling out teams to 3x in the world of e-commerce and ride hailing, he is motivated by complex problems and products that can shape the lives of millions.

In our chat, Ali shares with us some of his learnings on Product Development, on how to give back to the community and share some of the knowledge, but also what keeps the business running.

You can hear Ali talk about how to scale product teams and not lose efficiency at PROW conference in Timișoara, October 18th.

”We build products for millions of people across the world, so it’s normal to get things wrong sometimes. Making mistakes should be absolutely normalised as long as you have thought things through and done your best (spoken to customers, identified their needs and the jobs to be done). Then it comes down to how quickly you can accept your loss or how quickly you can pivot. Even the greatest organisations will have failures, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

1. What does a VP of Product at Bolt do?

It’s a mix and match of collaborating with stakeholders, managing my team, driving the product strategy and being involved in 1-2 projects myself, as I always like to be just a little hands-on. Some of my time is also spent working with my engineering counterpart to see how we can deliver more value more efficiently and at a higher quality.

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2. Bolt is such a well-established company and brand right now, that people can easily take it for granted and forget that this is still a product. How do you describe Bolt from the inside out, what are we missing as the end client and you would like us to know?

Quite often, people think that the app or the website or the payment option that they are using actually is the product. In reality, the product is what we holistically offer a customer – it’s the entire experience of using an app, booking a trip, waiting to be picked up, being driven to your destination and charging you a price for it. It’s a physical product that has digital elements.

When people think of a product from the outside, they often assume: “Oh, so you work on the app?”.

3. You got Bolt Send, Bolt EV, Bolt Business Coupons and all sorts of products of Bolt, which were a spin-off from the company's core mission: mobility. Can you share with us your top 3 favourite Bolt Products?

I will not say what my favourite product is as I’m sure it will cause mayhem in my teams, but I’ll tell you which product I use the most and find most useful. I moved to Tallinn from Dubai where owning a car is very second nature; the city is built around car ownership.

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In Tallinn, while the city is quite walkable and I’m personally a fan of the public transportation system, there would be times that I would need a car, for example, weekend trips, taking my dog to his physio etc. Courtesy of Bolt Drive I’ve never even thought about buying a car, I’ve not just saved money on car payments but also on parking, car wash etc - and for that I’m truly thankful to the team.

4. I saw on your blog an open letter to all food ordering apps with the design and the building system for the unshakeable bag. Can you walk us through the steps of creating this product? And also, why did you choose to offer the open source for this invention?

I wish I could take credit for this, but we have a super talented brand team who has been hearing the same complaints we’ve heard – “Hey, my food got spilt” or “it was not in the box properly”; and a lot of the times it’s beyond anyone’s control – road conditions or traffic all play a role. So the brand team decided to take the lead on this as it aligned with our mission of making cities for people.

I believe they’ve done a spectacular job and honestly if something is beneficial for everyone in the grand scheme of things, we should enable as many people as possible to benefit from it whether it’s through us or through our competition.

5. Do you take into consideration inputs from your clients? If so, what is the roadmap from these collected ideas and do you have one which you converted into a Bolt product in the end?

All the time - the job of a product team is to ensure that they represent the customer internally, as unfortunately, the customer doesn’t have a seat at the decision-making table.

Our team regularly speaks to customers to ensure we know what their needs and wants are and how we are fulfilling them or disappointing them. It also helps us prioritise our backlog, and we quite regularly bump items from that list up – for example, same-day payments for drivers and Bolt Send were both ideas that were solidified based on customer feedback.

6. I read your nice entry on your blog about product managers and there you say that most forget the human side of these professionals. What makes people good product managers?

There’s not a one size fits all unfortunately, but certain things that do stand out in my opinion are the ability to understand what drives people, the ability to lead a cross-discipline team, the ability to empathize, not having an ego and the ability to take feedback and not to take things personally.

Recommendations from Ali:

Ali Khalid Rana will be a speaker at the PROW conference in Timișoara, an event for which you can register here.