Josh Talks - Product Manager - Josh Skills

Job Description - Product Manager at Josh Skills

Role: Product Manager

Reporting to: Shobhit Banga (Co-founder)

Compensation range: 12 to 18 LPA

At Josh Skills, our goal is to help people speak in English without hesitation. It is based on our hypothesis that people will learn to speak in English not by knowing the technical aspects of the language but speaking as much as possible. Therefore we have built the product to focus on 'Spoken' English. We're looking for a product manager to join our early thirteen-person team (4 product + 9 tech).

Josh Skills is a product of Josh Talks. You can find out more about Josh Talks here.

If you join us, you- ll be an early team member in helping shape:

- The direction and focus of our products

- Our engineering practices

- People that we hire

What stage is the product at?

Each day, on average, 55 minutes per user of active time is spent on the Josh Skills app - we want to grow this to 2.5 hours. Until today, over 1,40,000 unique users have purchased a course on the Josh Skills app.

What's next?

So far, we have optimized for engagement and retention. We want to now focus on growth. We have been noticing an innate behavior in users to discuss (read: show off) the product to their friends. We want to build around this behavior to accelerate it.

How does the product function?

A user finds out about the app from a friend or from the Josh Talks YouTube channels. Downloads it and purchases the English course. (There are many courses on the app but our major focus on the English course). They enter and find a chat with the teacher. In the chat the teacher sends 1 lesson to the user everyday. Each lesson consists of 4 sections:

1) Grammar - Where students are taught through a video and a quiz

2) Vocabulary Practice - Where each day a user is taught 5 new words

3) Reading Practice - Where the user is taught to read a passage and record it and

4) Speaking Practice - Where a user can speak to others through a phone call and practice English.

For each action users receive points and compete with other students.

What is different about us? What have we invented?

Teaching through a chat interface, gamification with real-life benefits, peer to peer speaking practice, a community around the app that emulates real-life 'college' experience like making friends or finding a life partner.

What will we be working on?

- Building growth engine

- AI tools for personalized content

- Building the gamification

- Building live

- Building social interaction products (Features to build meaningful connections among students)

- Building onboarding

How will Josh Skills make money?

- We charge users Rs.499 for the English course. We plan to target the 300Mn aspirational Indian youth that has the potential but is frustrated and unable to grow in their career.

What's the bigger goal here?

Josh Talks is on a mission to Unlock Human Potential. Over the next 2 decades we want to build products and services that help in bringing efficiency in nurturing of human talent. 5 years ago we started with giving the youth access to role models through Josh Talks. Today Josh Talks is one of the largest YouTube channels with over 10Mn subscribers across 10 languages. In the current stage, we are working to help people achieve their career goals. The first goal we have picked up is to help people speak in english without hesitation. Our next goal would be to help people get a job (a different team within Josh has already started building this product).

Will I be expected to behave in a certain manner? Are there any rules?

We are hiring you for you. And we expect you to be loud and boastful. As a guide there is a trend amongst people that have grown at Josh:

- They are downright stubborn ( )

- They take risks and don- t play it safe

- They challenge societal conforms

- They are hungry to learn

- They put our users first, always

- They look down upon mediocrity

- And most importantly, they choose to not just come to work but to leave their stamp on it, for the world to look at and follow.

Have you raised any money?

Yes- 1.8Mn$ to be precise. From MDIF, Girish Mathrubootham, Ritesh Malik and others.

How many people do you plan to hire?

We plan to grow the Josh Skills team to around ~20 total people (+7 more) through the first half of 2021- in which case, we may reevaluate. The next set of people are going to help us scale to thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of paying users as we progress to product-market-fit. We- ll be hiring mostly in engineering and product roles. The total Josh team today is 95 people full time.

What is work/life balance like at Josh?

Most of us usually start at 10 and end by 7. As a result of being an early-stage startup, we wouldn- t want to hide this reality to prospective candidates: raw hours actually make a big difference in the impact we can make right now. This wont always be the case but it is at present. So, often we find ourselves working later on in the evening, on rare occasions a weekend, but it's mostly driven by personal ambition. Although we don- t have any expectations of anyone to do so, we would like to bring on people who we have an ambition match with.

Are you open to bringing in interns?

Not at this time- unfortunately, we don- t have the bandwidth necessary to offer a stellar internship program. We need to invest every ounce of energy into making a great product first.