Bridging Data and Decision-Making: Bhavik Patel’s Take on Analytics

Welcome to No Hacks – the podcast where experimenters and optimizers share their secrets about CRO, experimentation, and mastering analytics to create impact! In this episode, we’re joined by Bhavik Patel, Director of Experimentation and Analytics at Lean Convert and founder of CRAP Talks, a renowned cross-discipline tech meetup. Bhavik brings years of experience leading analytics teams at companies like Hoppin, Moo, and Gusto, and today he dives deep into the art of measurement and its role in driving meaningful change.

Bhavik kicks things off by challenging the notion of measuring everything, advocating instead for purposeful tracking to focus on what truly matters. He explains the critical difference between product management and feature management, emphasizing how companies often lose sight of impact by failing to measure effectively. His mantra? “When you measure everything, you measure nothing.” This episode is a masterclass in aligning analytics with real business outcomes.

Throughout the conversation, Bhavik shares insights into building and scaling experimentation programs, the challenges of poor data quality, and the importance of connecting product metrics to revenue. He illustrates the transformative power of experimentation, both in business and in personal growth, offering relatable stories and actionable advice. From his experience launching CRAP Talks to helping organizations bridge the gap between teams, Bhavik reveals how measurement serves as the foundation for innovation and accountability.

The episode also explores Bhavik’s approach to applying analytics principles to personal life. He discusses how a simple metric tree helped him improve his health and build lasting habits, showcasing the value of measurement in achieving goals beyond work.

We wrap up with a fun rapid-fire segment, where Bhavik shares his favorite analytics tools, memorable A/B tests, and even a hilarious CRAP Talks moment. Tune in for an inspiring conversation filled with practical tips, personal stories, and fresh perspectives on making data-driven decisions that matter.

00:00 Welcome to No Hacks
01:18 Measuring with Purpose: Bhavik’s Philosophy
03:42 From Product Management to Feature Management
07:14 Connecting Metrics to Revenue: Why It Matters
12:30 Scaling Experimentation Programs and Avoiding Pitfalls
16:52 The Impact of Poor Data Quality
20:14 Lessons from CRAP Talks and Building Community
23:45 Applying Analytics to Personal Growth: Bhavik’s Story
28:40 Rapid Fire Questions
32:15 Career Advice for Aspiring Experimenters
35:20 Closing Thoughts: Measurement as a Path to Impact

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Sani: Welcome to no hacks. If you're new to the podcast, this is the place where experimenters and optimizers talk about experimentation and optimization, both at work and in real life situations.

And if you're not new to the podcast, share this episode with a friend. They will love you for it. Today, we're talking about data. Measurement and taking action on that data and measurement with a guest who's more than qualified to talk about it. Bav Patel is the director of experimentation and analytics at lean convert.

He's also the founder of CRAP Talks, a cross discipline tech meetup in London. In the past, Bav has led analytics and experimentation teams at major tech companies like Hoppin, Gusto, Moo, and Photobox. Bav, welcome back No Hacks. So good to have you.

[00:00:40] Bhav: Hi, Sani. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

[00:00:42] Sani: We talked right before experimentation elite in June.

We met there. It was such a great event. Before we start discussing measurement and data and everything else, I just want to say, Experimentation elite. The next one is in December in London. If you go to experimentation elite. com, you can get your ticket. If you 10 percent off.

So go there, register. It's a great event. I can guarantee you that. So Bev, we're talking about why it's important to measure everything in your life and at work and why you should not skip that part. When it comes to Experimentation and analytics. And I'm not going to let you answer.

You can't improve what you don't measure. Why is measurement so important? 

[00:01:25] Bhav: I think this is a, it comes down to fundamentals. And you said it yourself, you can't improve what you can't, you don't measure, right? But I will correct you on one thing you said the importance of measuring everything, right? It's not important to measure. I think it's important to measure the

[00:01:37] Sani: Great point.

[00:01:38] Bhav: So I just, I just want that, that to be clear to anyone who's listening. Because I think it's easy to go down the rabbit hole where you just say, Hey, let's track and tag everything. When you measure everything, you measure nothing effectively. It's about finding the things that matter. Let's say you make some changes to your website. Say you're a product team and you want to make some changes to your website. At some point, it's I think it's become easy for product teams to just launch features and just launch new products without ever being without being held accountable for the impact of those things.

You throw product Functions and product leaders and, like exact teams, they, they throw money into the product space, developing products, and I think this was fine during the pandemic where, and I hate the fact that we're still talking about the pandemic, but it's, I think it was, it became a pivotal moment where the lost, where product management stopped being product management, in my opinion, became feature management.

So when you're making

[00:02:28] Sani: Can I just stop here? Can you explain the difference between, because there's people who probably don't fully understand product and feature management, like how exactly are those not the same? 

[00:02:37] Bhav: Product management is the idea of building and releasing products into your, to your customer base, to your user base that add value to the user experience. And there is a value exchange. Customers give you money or they give you some time or they give you, they interact with your product and in return, they get some things out of it.

Not everything is going to have that value exchange in some instances, you're going to build things that, you've put money into, you've invested time into that have not resonated with the customer. Whereas feature management, it's a case of doing all of that, but without a care in the world of the, that value exchange.

And again, I think the reason I use a pandemic as an example is because during that time there was this digital transformation. I think it was probably the first major digital transformation we've had in 10 years. And I think the last one was probably like the launch of the iPhones and smartphones, but Since the pandemic, everything went online.

Companies that were typically, maybe more traditional businesses had to go online as well. And people were bored. They were sitting around and suddenly they were just on their devices a lot more, which meant that for product companies, for, e commerce companies, it was like they struck gold.

Anything they did, resonated well and there came a point where they weren't even measuring what they were doing which kind of brings me back to the crux of my point which is When you're not measuring what you're doing, you don't understand the impact of it, and you're just releasing, you move away from product management to feature management.

Product management is about solving problems. Feature management is just hey, let's just put as much as we can out there. 

[00:04:08] Sani: That's a great explanation. 

[00:04:09] Bhav: For that's, for me, that's really what the differences are. So when you think about measuring, again, I'll go back to your original question, In order, we came from this point from in product management marketing, any function really, where we were building things and we were launching them and there was never really any need to measure.

And there was a skill set that I believe was, we were starting to lose. I say we like product functions are starting to lose on that. And that was the ability to measure. There were many other things that we started losing prioritization estimation, all of those types of things, but measurement became a casualty of The pandemic, because when, whatever you throw against the wall sticks, or at least the perception of it sticking, why would you measure?

So now we're entering this world where, and we've seen across the board, we've had layoffs left and center tech companies have pulled back budgets. Vendors are finding it harder to renew contracts even agencies, cause people are pulling budgets. As a company who, if you're in a company which does experimentation product management, being able to measure and justify what you're doing should be the core of certainly like your role.

Yes, of course, you still do all of those other things, discovery and ideation and looking for, looking for innovative ways to improve customer experiences. But that has to all be underpinned. by some type of measurement strategy. Because if you're not measuring anything, then how do you know what you're doing is making a difference?

And you see it now, actually, like leadership teams are starting to scrutinize more over what you're doing. So if you can't justify the things you've built, the value of the features you've added, and effectively show a return on the investment that's been made in your function, It's going to be a really difficult conversation when, at the end of the year, when you're doing past like reviews, you're maybe even at risk of your job, like you can't demonstrate this value.

So for me, measurement is, it's just, yes, of course, it's important skillset to have as a product manager, but it's also important to understand how, what you've done has, and the impact it's had on your users, because that's really the that's really, for me, the only path forward.

[00:06:27] Sani: I'm not going to disagree with that.

[00:06:30] Bhav: I'd be surprised if anyone disagreed with that.

[00:06:32] Sani: That's my point. But let's say you are in the position where you're dealing with data and analytics within a company. And it's a difficult question to answer, but how do you know you're measuring the wrong things? If you're doing it wrong, like the assumption is you're not doing it on purpose.

How do you figure out that what you're doing is actually you're going in the wrong direction?

[00:06:53] Bhav: So this is, I think this is a skills, and this is, this comes down to some, that skills gap I was talking about. Because product teams have, even pre pandemic, if I'm being completely honest, product teams have never really had their their feet held against the fire, right? They really haven't had to justify return on the investment that has gone into product development.

Certainly as much as marketing. Marketing. Marketing. For, marketing gets a bad rep, but they are also scrutinized a lot more in terms of what they do. They have to constantly show ROI. They have to constantly work towards CPAs. They have to be constantly be showing that they're delivering growth.

[00:07:31] Sani: Why do you

[00:07:31] Bhav: it always

[00:07:32] Sani: why do you think that is the case with marketing versus product? 

[00:07:35] Bhav: To quantify. You put, you spend a hundred thousand on your marketing. How much do you get back or what was your cost per acquisition? And that's determined by what all those customers we acquired. What is the lifetime value of those customers? And then you work backwards and calculate some type of CPA.

And that becomes easier, but it's also still incomplete because. You're forgetting about the costs of the marketing team, right? Now with product, it's just the investment on the team. If you have, let's say you have one product pod in that pod, you have one designer, one product manager, one analyst, and three engineers, right?

And that cost, that pod costs you, let's say, I don't know, a hundred grand a month. You 12 months. And then you try to, at least you understand the cost of that, but they don't have any other expenditure like a marketing team does. So you're really just justifying the cost of the team. Now in marketing, okay, they've had their feet held up against the fire.

And when you look at things like ROI and CPA, it's always against the marketing spend and not the overall cost of the marketing function. So it's a little bit of an incomplete puzzle, but it's part of the way that I'm. 

[00:08:41] Sani: Is basically.

[00:08:41] Bhav: yeah, exactly. But it's always been there. So the reason why, it's easier to do for marketing is purely because of the fact that we spend one pound and we got two pounds back or three pounds back or whatever.

It's that ROI is easy to calculate

[00:08:55] Sani: And that doesn't include the salaries of the marketing team. Like you

[00:08:58] Bhav: No, exactly. But let's put that one, let's put that one to, to a side for the bit. But for product, it's not easy to do that direct conversion. And. I don't think product teams are well equipped to be able to answer that question. And this is where experimentation starts to really show value.

I know so many product teams who are against running experiments, or they just don't have the time, and, all sorts of excuses start to come up.

[00:09:22] Sani: I will not ask you to name names, but man, I want to know. No, we're not

[00:09:27] Bhav: it's, no, we can talk about this. It's, I don't think this it's a particular name type situation anyway. I think this is very much an organizational 

[00:09:33] Sani: No, that's what I mean. Organizations. Yep.

[00:09:37] Bhav: even I work for a CRO consultancy, and we have buy in for people who want to do CRO, but even, in some clients there is an extended team who, don't buy into the concept, which is always a little bit of an uphill battle.

It's great when you see that light bulb moment happen, but it's, there is always someone or some people who will disagree with running experiment because it's costly or it takes too long or they believe that whatever they're doing is the right thing to do anyway, which might be the case, but how do you so I think this is where, where that challenge comes from.

And if you consider product leadership teams, they've come from worlds where they have never really done experimentation themselves. So it becomes harder for them to enforce it on their teams. And I think, we're now entering a phase where more people are aware of the concept, but it's still in many cases, as far as I see, experimentation is still a nice to have.

Measurement is a nice to have, holding, Trying to understand the value of your product development is still seen as somewhat semi optional. And I don't think it need, it should be. Now, your question was, how do you know if you're measuring the wrong thing? And this becomes a skills gap because you have to connect product to revenue or new customer growth or something along those lines.

And again, this is why it's easy on marketing. You spend 100, 000 and you've got 200, 000 back nice and easy. With product, you have teams who are chipping away building, and they're potentially looking at some metrics. Maybe they're looking at the right ones, maybe they're looking at the wrong ones, but they don't really, most people, I say most people, I could be completely wrong, but many people probably don't understand the unit economics.

of their company and what I mean by, economics, it's it's really like a fancy way of just saying what is the metric tree that drives up from revenue? So if you think about the top of that tree, you have, it's probably going to be profit, but let's go down a layer. Maybe it's going to be revenue.

In some cases it could be new customers, like Netflix. I imagine they probably, there's a big aspect of them. That's probably around like new customers or active users or something like that. Whatever it is, revenue orders revenue orders or customers, whatever those things are, let's say revenue, for example, trying to go from revenue down to some product managers role, which could be around improving the customer service side of things, like how do we minimize the number of contact centers, right? It becomes a bit of a gap. Now, maybe that was a slightly easier one because contact centers have costs associated with them. You try to reduce those costs and improves your profit line, but By taking that revenue model and then breaking it down into revenue is just simply AOV times orders. Orders is just new customers or customers times conversion rate.

Customers are new customers plus existing customers. New customers are sign up registrations times, blah, blah, blah. And you go further and further and further down. You keep breaking this down and, conversion rate is Checkout started versus checkout completed and then checkout started becomes, product page visited and add to basket and then add to basket to checkout.

And you keep going further and further down until your entire business can be explained with some type of economic model. Now obviously the further down you go it becomes a little bit fuzzier. But if you can show that actually this is how this thing I'm doing here goes up the ladder into revenue, it becomes easier, it's easier to start justifying.

But people have to buy into this as well, right? I think let's look at, let's take a completely left wing example. Let's take a look at PR. I remember this one time I was working at Photobox and we were sat in a boardroom with the CEO the MD, the, and a bunch of people, and we had our kind of like monthly or quarterly review or whatever it was, and each team had gone through, product had done this, tech had done this, and marketing came along, and I was part of the marketing team at the time, acquisition, we went through X, Y, and Z, and then the PR team came along, and this, now The leadership team are very they're very bright people.

And the PR team who were working on something came along and they were like, Hey we did this YouTube campaign with some influencers. And we did this thing, we spent a hundred grand on it. And they got, 5, 000 views and 30 likes. And I'm sat there cringing, right? Because I'm like. Okay, what do you do with this?

And you could see this look on the CEO's face and it was just, and I was like, I remember this, like it's a look you never forget, right? It's okay, I just spent a hundred grand on this and you're telling me we got 30 likes and 5, 000 views on YouTube. If I was the PR team, I'd be like, holy shit, I would have think, I would have thought twice about this this campaign.

And, but it's an example of. you've spent money and you have no way to justify it, and no one really understands the value of those. For all I know, those likes could have been worth a ton, right? Those Facebook impressions, those YouTube impressions and views could have been a lot, but I have no way of connecting that dot together.

Looking at CEO's face, it's this is a vanity metric, which in this particular instance, it was. So I think with product teams, trying to understand when you're building your, when you're building products and features, is all the metrics you're looking at. Are they vanity metrics, or are they real metrics?

If they're real metrics, help people understand how they fit into the overall, unieconomic model. That's all I'll say on that, because I feel like I've talked a lot on it.

[00:14:57] Sani: This is what we did at the workshop in Birmingham. Experimentation Elite Workshop. Remember? Yeah. I love that. I love the pizzas and all that stuff. It was very eye-opening a great workshop by the way, BAV was running the workshop. If you have a chance to listen to BAV talk or run a workshop go into it. I think that 2010s, 2020s, like one day, this will be referred to as the early days of digital product management or like whatever, like this is the wild West. are some organizations that know what they're doing, have a good idea of what they're doing. No one has it all figured out, but I think most organizations just.

Seeing what works, what doesn't work. And we're not there yet, especially because connecting that dot from, Hey, I pushed the button here and then the order value changed in this way. There's so many steps in between. It's possible to measure it. I just don't think it happens very often. I don't think that proper measurement happens. Could be wrong. More about this than I do. 

[00:15:57] Bhav: I don't think that it's, I don't think that you're wrong. I think it's a case of what's encouraging is whilst people might not be aware of how to go from A to B, like I've just described in this very long winded explanation but thank you. The motivation to understand it is becoming more and more prevalent and I, I referred to some of my clients right now.

Yesterday, I had a really interesting call with the CPO of one of our clients, and He was trying to build a data strategy, an analytic strategy. And this is, this is not something I would expect a CPO to do. But the fact that he wanted to understand it and take ownership of it and build it, for me, was so encouraging.

Because we had a good hour and a half discussion. That's leading to now a weekly discussion of me helping him build the data and analytics strategy in the interim to help and, whilst they bring on a head of data or whatever. But he's going to take ownership of it and try to drive it internally, which for a CPO is an incredible thing to do because now.

He's going to have this view on data and he will filter it down to his product teams who will then be in a situation where, they've got it being coming from the top down and it will become part of the culture. So I think whilst people may not have the know how or the, the tools in their repertoire to be able to do what I do.

I think the appetite to do it is becoming more and more, and that for me is really encouraging.

[00:17:21] Sani: And I think as we get more young people getting into leadership roles, and I'm talking not 2025, I'm talking in the next 10, 20, 30 years, there will not be old folks running it the old way anymore. Like it will all be the new way. And then this will be the norm and the default and the only way to do things, unless there's something new and something better.

It's going to get better. It's getting better. And I think starting at the top, like with a CPO understanding and wanting to control it to have ownership of this, like that's probably the best way to trickle it down to the entire product team and organization. So you work a lot with scaling and.

Experimentation programs, making them more mature. This is just what your job is. What are some data related challenges that could prevent your experimentation program from reaching the full potential

[00:18:11] Bhav: Oh, where do I start? I think the core one, I'm going to just say the top one is purely around the availability and accuracy, effectively the quality of the data that you have. So if you think about the fact that experimentation is not a, You may do server side experimentation, but not everyone needs, not everyone opts into it.

And the way you measure the metrics are usually front end metrics, even if you have some back end stuff. It's largely going to be your front end metrics. And if you don't have good quality metrics going into an, experiment, you're not going to be able to measure the right things in the right way.

So there's two things to to really understand here. One, what metrics do you need? And having that defined pre experiment or pre experimentation program, whatever you want to call it is important because you need, you then know what it is you need to build. And two, you don't need to have all of them available right away.

Like I wouldn't not start experimenting until I have all my pieces in place. I would look at the first couple of experiments I'm going to run, understand what the core measurements are, get those put in place if they're not already. If they are, just make sure that they're relevant, they're accurate, they can be cut into as many pieces as you want, you can connect your experiment IDs to it.

And you're good to go. So I think for me that's the, like the starting way. And again, I use an example, a very recent one for one of our clients. And they had, they'd enabled click tracking on GA4, which I'd not seen before. And it was insane because I was auditing the Google Analytics, their Google Analytics instance.

And I was like seeing all these events come through. I didn't realize they had enabled this initially. Like I wasn't even clicking on a button, but it was 

[00:19:50] Sani: just any mouse click anywhere, basically.

[00:19:52] Bhav: Exactly. And it was all being tracked. And I was like, this is insane. But they were using that. And the amount of garbage effectively that was being collected in, in GA4 Was like, you couldn't even do anything with this data.

Because it was like, what the hell does any of this stuff mean? And, like the product teams, I think they were trying to make heads and tails of it. So I said to them, guys, just remove this tracking. Like first of all, turn off this click tracking. GA4 having click tracking is insane.

But if you use click tracking, just turn it off. And if there's one takeaway anyone has on this from this call is don't use the click tracking on GA4. Just

[00:20:24] Sani: They'll have more, they'll have more takeaways. Come on.

[00:20:26] Bhav: I'm sure. But if there's an, if there's one thing, it's disable the click tracking and track with purpose. I think that's the key thing, right?

Track with purpose. With this client, we turned it off, and we identified, like, all of the core metrics that they needed to be measuring. From those metrics, we identified events. What are the events I need to trigger to calculate those metrics? And then we identified what were the core metrics. We're not going to do everything.

The first two or three months of this process was just about getting their P0 metrics in place. They were a combination of front end metrics and back end metrics, server side metrics. We've just launched them, and that has unlocked so much for them to be able to experiment on and get meaningful data without it being like, Oh is this accurate?

Are these registrations correct? Are these orders correct? Rather, someone just clicking on checkout was firing all sorts of events. Now we have proper tracking in place, and it's already unlocked such, so much for them. Actually, just a side note, switching off click tracking that I said, it sped up their site speed by nearly 30%.

So just know it's slowing

[00:21:30] Sani: That's mind blowing that is yeah, that's the main takeaway. I take it back like disable click tracking no matter what we say after this It's not as important just the same go disable pause the episode disable click tracking and come back.

[00:21:43] Bhav: yeah, and the CEO was so happy. I'm so like, this was insane. Like I, I didn't even really, I was just, I, for me, I thought I was just doing my job. The CEO messaged me two days later, he's Bav We disabled it, as you suggested. The tech team are like going nuts. They're really excited because site speed has gone up 30%.

And he's he said to me, these are his words. We could have had our engineering team spend a year trying to improve site speed and we wouldn't have improved by 30%. And he sent me a bottle of 18 year old McAllen.

[00:22:11] Sani: Oh, wow

[00:22:12] Bhav: yeah, I was like, dude, I was like, you don't need to do this. Honestly, it's my job.

He's and he was so like thrilled that he's no, let me do it. I was like, all right, fine.

[00:22:20] Sani: That is To slow down your site by 30 percent because you're tracking something you should not be tracking in the first place and that you're not going to be doing anything with is the definition of insanity to me when it comes to tracking and analytics. And

[00:22:34] Bhav: But I don't, they don't, I don't think they, it wasn't a case of they were, I think they just thought, Oh, this would be a good thing to allow us to get some data 

[00:22:40] Sani: But what data, what are you going to do with the fact that someone tried to click somewhere where it's not clickable by mistake?

[00:22:47] Bhav: exactly. You have like heat mapping tools, like full story is a good tool to be able to understand like where people trying to click. You don't need GA also firing things like that. So it was it was anyways, it was eye opening for me. Cause I didn't realize that it had that much of an impact.

[00:22:59] Sani: It is. It the lesson here is the real lesson here is just before, because you can do something, doesn't mean you should like that, that's just a life lesson not a tracking and analytic lessons, but yeah that 30 percent is completely

[00:23:12] Bhav: sad is I was really gutted about this. I wish like they had even a couple of core conversion events set up in GA4 because I would have loved to have seen the impact on conversion.

[00:23:23] Sani: Oh,

[00:23:24] Bhav: But we couldn't do that because they were using click tracking to try and track everything. We now have those core metrics in place, which is great.

So I'm taking it as a moral victory even though 

[00:23:32] Sani: oh, you should, you got your McAllen. The real lesson here is when you're starting your measurement plan and your experimentation program, it's okay to start with just the core things, get, make sure those are done correctly and only then expand and start don't spend months setting things up because that will be lunacy and you're losing a lot of time you probably don't have.

Setting something up that maybe you will not even need. That's a good one. That's a really good one. And I, that's a good example of scaling experimentation program gone wrong. Like that's about as good as it gets. Let's talk about crap talks a little bit. I want, look, I know it's a funny name, but what was your second favorite name for this event?

You settled on crap talks, but there was, there had to be something else.

[00:24:19] Bhav: So actually, Crap Talks wasn't the first name, that was the second

[00:24:24] Sani: Okay. What was the first one?

[00:24:25] Bhav: So the first name was, if you've ever used Meetup. com, you, I followed the trend. Meetup. com tends to have lots of events that are labelled Product Tank Meetup London. Or Speakers Guild, blah blah blah,

[00:24:40] Sani: Yep.

[00:24:41] Bhav: and it's a very descriptive name.

So I followed too. I called mine Conversion Rate Optimization Analytics Product London.

[00:24:49] Sani: But you were not even aware of, you didn't even consider crap at that time.

[00:24:54] Bhav: No, not at all. So actually the name came up after the first event. So the first event was called Conversion Rate Optimization Analytics Product Meetup London. Something boring like that. And my friend who is now the CTO of Huel he was, he spoke at the first event and he was just like, Bab, you should drop the O in conversion optimisation, just call it crap.

And I was like, Huh, I like that. So I did. Ollie, if you're listening, here's a shout out to you. Thanks for that moment of genius. Ollie does this really well. He comes up like fascinating, like ways to brand yourself. Anyway, so he'd, he came up with it and it stuck. And unfortunately now I can't ever change it because I'm too it's

[00:25:38] Sani: Why would you want to change it? Like why people know this brand. Why would you

[00:25:43] Bhav: Okay. I will tell you because it's as fun as it is. Sometimes it's hard. Okay. If you've the event. I don't really care for things like sponsorships and things like that, but it does help, right? Sponsors are, I don't call them sponsors. I call them partners. Like we've had long term partners and that's great.

But I once reached out to Google to sponsor this event. And a friend of mine was working at Google. He's Bob, we'd love, I'd love to see if we can get Google to sponsor it. And their PR team or whoever's just flat out said, no, we can't sponsor an event called crap.

[00:26:10] Sani: That's fair.

[00:26:11] Bhav: So it's one of those ones where, and if you think about, again, the maturity of you know when you think about something like product tank or mind the product or measure camp all of these they have cool names but they're also very pc and they're

[00:26:25] Sani: they are? They're like, chat GPT names. Let's be honest. 

[00:26:29] Bhav: Around pre church

[00:26:29] Sani: GPT, but this is what chat GPT would draw it at you. Chat GPT will not give you crap talks.

[00:26:35] Bhav: No that I agree, it won't give you crap talks, but it does restrict it from becoming a very

[00:26:41] Sani: I see what you mean.

[00:26:43] Bhav: aggro, like I could never really take this and make it like, like Measure Camp is my favourite event outside of crap talks, right? And Measure Camp, you have Measure Camp London, Berlin, USA, Canada, it's literally gone everywhere in the world and it's a very different event.

It's an unconference, but I could never take crap talks. outside of London because crap is a very English word. Largely, it's largely a very English word, right? So if I ever wanted to rebrand it and say I wanted to run an event, allow people to create their own versions of it, it becomes really hard because it's like, it doesn't describe what it is, right?

Like product tank is in the name, measure camp to some extent is in the name. And so unless you know what the acronym stands for. It's, it becomes a hard one. So I've shot myself in the foot here which is why now I don't even consider it a meetup. I just call it a cult.

[00:27:34] Sani: A cult. So you're a cult. You're a cult. Wait. Are you a cult leader?

[00:27:39] Bhav: I am a cult leader. I, we have a 

[00:27:40] Sani: Why are we talking about analytics? 

[00:27:42] Bhav: We have a very like strong fan base of people who've been coming to crap talks for a long time our retention people You know some of the guys compete for most attended events

[00:27:53] Sani: Oh, wow. But you mentioned like this cannot grow up as an event because of the name. Should it if you have a following like that, if you have people coming and competing, who's going to be like, why would it grow up? Sure.

[00:28:06] Bhav: You're asking me existential questions here now, I

[00:28:10] Sani: to cult existential questions like that. It's that kind of podcast now, just kidding, just messing with you.

But yeah, look, I like the name. I really there's so many events that are dead obvious in what they are and. There's no element of humor or funny in the name 

[00:28:28] Bhav: But I agree

[00:28:30] Sani: I think it's nice to have something that has it. And once you hear crap talks, yeah, whatever your language is, if you understand, if you know what it's about and it's conversion rate analytics product, yeah, it's crap talks.

I want to go see that, there's an appeal.

[00:28:45] Bhav: There is, yeah, but it's, and I definitely think if you've been to one or if you've heard about it, if you know what the acronym stands for, there is, it's definitely the right meet up for the people in this space that we're talking about product analytics and conversion. And where it does differ itself is the fact that it's, it's not siloed to one discipline.

The event is so cross functional and I recently did a post on building bridges. So if you think about teams as islands, like you have your product island, you have your data island, you have your finance island, your marketing island, and you have people who own those islands.

I don't consider myself the owner of an island. I consider myself the owner of the bridge. I like to build the bridges that connect these functions together. And Crap Talks is, it's in many ways, just a manifestation of that. I really wanted a cross discipline meetup community where people can learn from each other and their skills and their roles.

And each, there's always like a stakeholder relationship in, in, in any organization. Why not bring those people together to learn about from each other? And if anyone's ever been like, oh I track everything. I know we're going to talk about measurements in life at the moment, but I measure every single crap talks events with a post event survey.

And. our average rating is like 90 plus percent. And I'm talking like this is over. I started, okay, I only started collecting feedback like five years ago, but five years worth of

[00:30:08] Sani: like only five years. Come

[00:30:10] Bhav: only five years ago. But since I started collecting, I've had this stream of data. I've been collecting for five years.

That is always like, how would you rate this event? Blah, blah, blah, typical NPS type survey. And it's always 90 plus percent rating.

[00:30:25] Sani: But that is absolutely amazing. I look, I will be at one and when you decide to expand, you know where I am.

[00:30:33] Bhav: You could run your own one, Sani. We're talking about it growing. Oh, okay. Okay.

[00:30:38] Sani: But anyway, when was the first one? This is my last question. When was the first event?

[00:30:43] Bhav: Oh my goodness, I don't know. It was 8 January, I know that for a fact, because in November I decided that I wanted to start my own meetup community. I was, I'd just come off the, I'd just come from a really crap event. In this sense, bad event, not like my event.

[00:30:56] Sani: I don't know what you mean.

[00:30:57] Bhav: And I was so frustrated I decided to start my own event and I went and looked at what are the best platforms and meetup jumped up created a meetup page end of November so I think like 29th of November I created it and I looked at like how what they recommend and how you set up an event they're like just pick a day in the future and then figure out the details so I did I created an event launched so I created the meetup community put my first event into like end of January giving myself a two month buffer had nothing organized.

[00:31:25] Sani: you have any people, speakers, nothing, right?

[00:31:27] Bhav: nothing. I just did it. And then I went and solved the problem. I put my deadline in place and then I solved the problem.

[00:31:34] Sani: That you created for yourself.

[00:31:36] Bhav: yeah. And then I, yeah, I created for myself and then I spoke to one of our vendors, Qubit told them what I was doing and I was good friends with our account managers.

We had a really good relationship, and they were like, Bab, why don't you come and hold it in our office in in, in, in London? Oh, goodness, where is it? I forgot which area it was but near Trafalgar Square, and they had a really nice kitchen area where they held out all hands, and it was a nice small intimate space as well.

It wasn't like some massive hall. And so I was like, great, check. They were like, you'll have to provide your own drinks. I was like, okay, cool. So I went to the pub on I went to Tesco on the night of and bought like 20, a box of 30 crate of beer or something like that and some soft drinks. Took that with me.

I found a couple of speakers, Ollie being one of them. So Ollie was I was like, Ollie, I need to, I'm looking for some speakers. He's I'll come talk. I was like, cool. So we had two, three speakers that night. And then I think about 13 people, 10, 10 to 13 people showed up. And, yeah, and we had a great discussion.

Everyone's we should do this again. So I was like, okay. So next time, 20 people turned up.

[00:32:38] Sani: Lesson number two for today. If you want to do something, just go and do it. Just start and figure it out. That's the way to live.

[00:32:45] Bhav: I think there has been like an innate motivation to do it. So over the years I've had many people ask me, But I want to start my own meetup.

Like I want to do what I could do what you've done and build a crap talk. I spent time with them on calls and I've talked them through how I would do it and recommend some recommendations and told them about some pitfalls, but ultimately I just said, let's just build it, put it in the diary and figure out the details afterwards.

99 percent of them, of these calls I've had never manifested into an event because I think there was a lack of underlying motivation to do it. 

[00:33:15] Sani: This is why I have my podcast. My motivation is to connect to the most amazing people in the field and just put a product out there that people will learn from, appreciate. In February, it's going to be four years since the first episode of this podcast, like never got paid never had a sponsor.

This is just me spending my time doing something I love. And that's my motivation. If you don't have it, that internal thing. That's not the thing to do, like podcast, meetup, none of that stuff.

[00:33:43] Bhav: I think people also in your life, for example, that's a great story and you're absolutely right. You wanted to do something. There was some underlying motivation to it. You're passionate about it, but you also recognize that's a lot of effort and consistency. And I think people, when they're thinking about starting something like, and it doesn't even just have to be like a meetup, right?

Let's say starting a podcast or deciding you want to write, write content. People think it's a very easy oh, I'm going to do a cut, do this all the time. It's no, it's consistency. And it's a process that you just have to follow, chip away at.

There are months when I'm just like, I'm so tired. I don't have time to run an event, but I carve out that time, put it into the calendar. and solve it afterwards. I'm like, you know what, if I don't get into a calendar, it's never going to happen. So I just writing is a big one. People, again, so many people said to me, hey, but I want to write more content, right?

I want to have more of a web presence on LinkedIn. I'm like, great. You just need to do it, right? There isn't a magic formula to any of these things. It's about consistency and it's more than like motivation will get you started, right? Consistency is what will keep you

[00:34:45] Sani: Oh, for sure. But without the motivation, like you're not even going to get to that stage where you need consistency. If you have motivation to do it once, to see what it feels like, eh, maybe try a hobby or like whatever, but things like this, especially like you built a community around CrabDocs.

It's a very. Live it's a big community that people appreciate this event. They love it. So getting to that in how many is it 10 years, like more than five years, I know since you've been measuring eight

[00:35:15] Bhav: or eight years. Yeah.

[00:35:16] Sani: Yeah. But that's what, when you talk to someone who wants to do something similar, like you need to tell them yeah, you're going to have something cool in 20, 32, if their face changes, when you tell them that they don't want to do it.

Like they just want the

[00:35:30] Bhav: good point. That's a really

[00:35:32] Sani: yeah, that's long term consistency that will beat anything else. 

[00:35:36] Bhav: Should I tell you one, the one question I get asked more, and I've realized, just think about it, the one question I get asked more than anything is, Bob, how'd you find the time to do so much? I genuinely don't know. Because with Crap Talks, with writing, with the podcast that I do, plus my work,

[00:35:51] Sani: yeah,

[00:35:54] Bhav: and I have two kids, and like a family, and stuff like that, it's, I just, I remind myself that what I do for a living, is incredible.

Like I love it. And if I didn't enjoy it, I would never. So if I make the time to do it, 

[00:36:08] Sani: That's a wonderful way to look at it because And anything that takes consistency if you don't enjoy the process like or at least appreciate the process Forget about it. Like it's not happening. You need to appreciate it The day to day and then hope that someday it leads to something big or whatever.

But if you're not doing it just for the process, if you're not ready to do it just for the process without ever getting a result, find something else that you will appreciate the process for. That's my takeaway.

[00:36:38] Bhav: and just another fun story in terms of how long some of these things take. I've now been writing blog posts for, I want to say about four years, three or four years. I, there was a year, a few years back where I decided I wanted to write more content. And I just published a blog post like a month, a few weeks ago called analyzing tech layoffs.

This is the first blog post in four years that's gone

[00:36:58] Sani: That went, yeah, that was everywhere. Yep.

[00:37:02] Bhav: Yeah. And and someone reached out to me saying, Oh, I want to write this straight off. And I said to him, I was like, it's taking me like if you're writing for the sake of writing, great. But if you're writing because you want to. to go viral. It took four years for even one of my posts to hit the, to hit the highs that it did.

And I'm talking like it was viewed like 30, 000 times read like 50 and 15, 000 of it was like full reads of it as well. And that's only one, what I read on, saw on Medium. I also published on Substack and my LinkedIn. So it was probably like shared and read nearly 40, 000 times. I estimate,

[00:37:35] Sani: But I was after four years of writing and to go back to this podcast, the name no hacks is that it's literally that there's no shortcut. You need to show up and do the work day after day, month, year, whatever. And then like in 2032, you might be like a big social media star or whatever. 

[00:37:54] Bhav: If, if you had said this to me eight years ago, I might have been like, oh, I don't know if I want to do it. But I don't know, right? It's because I never started off with a goal in mind. I wanted to do something that was passionate. I saw a massive gap that I wanted to fill. And my life is largely filled with things like I see something and I want to build something around it.

Crap Talks is an example of that. I. I built Quozel around a gap I saw in the lack of product analytics consultancy and that did fairly good. And so I built Keynote, Keynote is a good, another good, Keynote is this fun little side project I built four years ago. It's a platform to connect people.

Speakers to organizers. So if you check it out, k e y n o a t dot com, excuse me, you can see that there's 300 speaker profiles of people in the tech industry. And I just, I don't promote it, but it's there. I think I need to check it over, make sure it's still working, but I really struggled to find speakers.

And if you know anything about craft talks, I have this policy where I don't invite people to speak twice. So I'm always looking for fresh voices. And it's hard to do when people haven't identified themselves as speakers. Whereas Keynote is this thing. It's okay let's go and build a platform.

So I

[00:39:06] Sani: Very cool. Again, how do you find the time? This is something that people have asked me as well. The answer is if you want it, you'll find time. Sorry, there's no magic answer. This is it. If you want to do something, the time exists. Like it's your job to find it. I have a few rapid fire questions, and then we'll talk about experimentation and measurement in real life.

I want 10 seconds per answer here.

[00:39:29] Bhav: Oh God.

[00:39:30] Sani: Oh yeah. What is your analytics tool? You cannot live without.

[00:39:36] Bhav: Google Sheets.

[00:39:37] Sani: Wow. Now what I expected to hear, but I love it. What is the funniest AB test you've ever run?

[00:39:46] Bhav: Pricing test. We increased prices. So we reduced prices thinking it would be the right thing to do. We learned actually increasing prices was better. It wasn't funny. It was, I learned

[00:39:56] Sani: It's funny now. It's funny now.

[00:39:59] Bhav: Yeah, it's funny

[00:39:59] Sani: What's the most memorable crap talks moment.

[00:40:03] Bhav: That's not fair, there's too many.

[00:40:07] Sani: I need one.

[00:40:08] Bhav: Okay, there is one. So there was this one time where the speaker was talking about a topic, and someone asked a question. about that topic and it was regarding the platform in the audience were the people who built that platform so we ended up in a situation where the speaker was talking about platform knowing no not realizing that the builders of that platform were in the audience someone asked a question about that platform and we ended up in this three way discussion between

[00:40:33] Sani: the Spider Man meme.

[00:40:35] Bhav: It is the Spider Man meme, but it wasn't like, but it was just, it was so organic.

It just happened it just happened to be that the guys who built it were in the audience. Someone had asked a question and the speaker was talking about it. It was it was incredible. That was for me, the, like a moment where I'm like, Oh my God, this is the power of community.

[00:40:49] Sani: That's amazing. I love that. Under 10 seconds. All of them. Very good. Most of my guests are not capable of answering your question under 10 seconds. So I you're good. You're good. You're good at this final segment for today. Like measure. This is your mantra. This is what you want to main takeaway from this episode to be. How do you apply that to your life outside of work? 

[00:41:14] Bhav: back in January I wrote a post. I was trying to Okay, just some background. Since I had my second board, I put on a lot of weight. And, in January this year, I was like, Okay, I'm going to turn 40 this year. I want to try and do something about it. I thought about, I started thinking about how,

what the patterns are in my life. And I built a metric tree, if you will, around what drives me. my habits and at the top obviously was weight and I've broken down what is weight. Weight is just exercise and food and then I realized okay food is me and I basically you can check it on it's one of the pin posts on my LinkedIn profile and I built this metric tree and I realized that actually I had this habit of eating a lot after eight o'clock like in the evenings just I'm an evening snacker but I also learned that I'm quite lazy so when I brush my teeth I don't want to eat so I, I realized this thing.

So I was like, if I brush my teeth at eight o'clock, I won't have anything to eat after that. So I did this for a month, right? Where I was like, okay, my goal was my Northstar metric was brushed by eight. Literally that was it brushed by eight. And then I created this like kind of fasting model. So I was like, as long as I stop eating by eight o'clock now, this was going really well, this is the, this is where trial and error comes in.

This was going really well. For a month I did this solidly. I think I missed just one day when we had, we were at a birthday party and I cut, I dropped a few pounds, which was, it was going great. And then I had to go on a work trip for a week. And in that work trip, I tried really hard, but it was just impossible because we were meeting together and like my, all my colleagues were there and I don't want to be, I don't want to be a bore.

And then when I got back mentally and psychologically, I had broken that streak. And then I do a lot of coaching, and then for the next three months I didn't do the Brush by 8. So actually, if you go to my places, whilst it's still pinned there, I'd broken it and it was because like now at this point This was a psychological problem because I was like I broke my streak and I was just demoralized.

I was like shit I you know, I've undone all of this hard work and I didn't realize that I For me streaks were and I see this a lot. I'll do things and if I do it consistently, it's okay But the second the streak breaks I have a problem. So I have a coach through work she's like a qualified therapist as well.

But So she was able to help me identify this pattern that I have that I'm someone who's motivated by streaks and I needed to break out of that but I hadn't realized that. She was like, Bav, you've completely missed the fact that you spent 30 days doing this thing and because you broke it and that's when I realized for me a conversion rate wasn't right.

She was like, instead Bav move to a model where you're looking at something that's closer to weekly active users. So it's like now visualize a jar and in that jar you put every time you go to the gym or do something you put a marble in and so even if you stop that your jar is still getting full filled up so i was like okay this is true i need to stop anyway so i had this moment of realization blah blah blah and i also but i also realized i actually really like eating after eight o'clock right like it's my downtime so i'm gonna sit down turn on the tv sometimes and just eat right so i was like how do i change this model so then i needed to find a way to exercise more because i mentioned like my weight is made makeup of how active i am versus what i eat i also know fasting works really well for me but trying to do it seven days in a row is just impossible

[00:44:48] Sani: Right.

[00:44:49] Bhav: so working so i decided i signed up to a boxing club And I was like, I like I used to, I did a lot of martial arts when I was growing up.

My kids do martial arts now. And I really liked it. So I was like, I wanted to find something that was a little bit like, but it wasn't about belts. It was just about, I go to, and so I discovered this group near where I live. Shout out to you face fitness. And it's like really Rocky Balboa style warehouse unit.

Yeah, and you go in and there's, it's it really smells of like gym sweat and things like that. But it's not like a fancy fitness class with all of the, it's literally scaffolding with punch bags around it. It's a father and son run gym. They're both the dad's an ex boxer. The son is a, an amateur boxer and they're really nice guys.

And I, he talked to me and this was actually the power of Facebook advertising. I was getting retargeted a lot. by this ad and so I finally clicked through I was like and I read through and I watched like some of his videos and it's not even like he actually has a 20, 000 person followers on instagram and he does a podcast on youtube and I spoke to him, he called me, so I messaged him saying, Hey, is this FaZe Fitness?

I'm like 39 years old. I'm like, I have high blood pressure, blah, blah, blah. And he was like, Hey, she's Hey, Bob, let's have a call. We had a call. And he talked to me about actually, about he's Asian as well. I'm Asian. And he's a lot of Asians have like really bad lifestyles because of the type of food we eat growing up.

There's a lot of like fats and it's high in carbs and things like that. And it's, he didn't talk to me about. selling he talked to me about the challenges i face as an asian person and then he talked to me about his group and how actually it's made up of quite a lot of middle aged men they have a whatsapp group and it's not just boxing they support each other they motivate each other in whatsapp and they come along so he's look come along for a session i went along i you know it was hard i was very overweight i still am to a certain extent by the end i was like gagging for air and i'd leave i think i went outside and i'd throw up a little bit But I enjoyed it.

And so then I went back, and then I went back, and I went back. And I've been now doing boxing twice a week for four months.

[00:46:43] Sani: I love that.

[00:46:44] Bhav: And then I, then I remember the fasting side of things. I was like, okay, I can't, I don't want to fast every day, and I can't now because I have boxing, so I have to make sure I have some some food.

So what if I just do two days a week fasting? So this is what I worked out with my coach with my work mentor coach. She looked, I'll just do it like a couple of days, and that way if you miss it one day, you can do it another day. So in this way your jars are still getting filled up. So sorry, I know I'm dragging on this

[00:47:07] Sani: No, this is amazing. I love the, especially the jar concept. I'll add something, but I'll let you finish the story first. 

[00:47:12] Bhav: But anyway, and so now I turned 40 at the end of this month. So I'm three weeks away. I had a goal to lose 10 kilos. I passed that goal just yesterday. And, but it was about consistency. So for me, I realized that I am a consistent person, but I'm also, I also look at Quick wins and not quick wins, what's the word?

Immediate gratitude. Like I'm looking like, like I try and I try to do things like that sometimes as well. And so when I broke my streak, I felt like I was starting from zero.

[00:47:44] Sani: Two things I'll add, number one is, I think it's called the Jerry Seinfeld rule. You can break a streak, but never skip two days in a row. That's his rule for writing jokes, when he was a young comedian. If he skips one day, it's fine, but make sure it's not two days. I think that was, I think it was Seinfeld. I'm almost sure. The second one, I don't know if you read the book can't hurt me by David Goggins. It's an amazing book. People will call it exercise and hustle porn, like glorifying suffering. It's not that it's about the mental struggles and internal struggles.

He has a whole section about the thing he calls cookie jar. Every time you do something. That's going to help you move further in your life, work, whatever it is, just mentally put a cookie in that jar. And

[00:48:32] Bhav: This is

[00:48:32] Sani: that's exactly the marble thing. Yes. So when you break a streak, it's not gone, it's there. And it's literally there for you for when you break a streak to remind yourself that you're not that one day or one moment of weakness.

You're all of that stuff that you built up over the

[00:48:48] Bhav: Yeah, and this was a huge realization for me, because I've done this in the past, if I break a streak it's really hard for me to recover, but now I don't, I stopped looking at it as but this is the problem because I was looking at percentage of days which I fasted and I brushed by eight, so the concept was right, my metric, my measurement model was correct, but I hadn't baked in room for failure,

[00:49:06] Sani: Yep. But it all started with the metric tree. It all started with that analytical mind. It is, this is what we're talking about. How, what you do at work in that mindset translates to life and helps you. And if you didn't start with the metric, again, what we did at the workshop in Birmingham, which was amazing and made me realize a lot of new things, you wouldn't be able to reach that.

I'll ask you one final question. You do our programming, actually two questions. Why did you choose R over Python? That's my question. R is the most messed up syntax I've ever seen and I've written a lot of languages. For me, it just never made sense. Not bad mounting R, but it's so complicated.

[00:49:47] Bhav: Did I fill this in somewhere? Because

[00:49:48] Sani: Yes, you did.

Yes, you

[00:49:49] Bhav: Did I? So I wouldn't say I do R programming. I would say I can hold my own.

[00:49:54] Sani: Okay. 

[00:49:55] Bhav: And the reason I did it is because it was a the barrier to entry for R, for me at the time, felt lower than the barrier of entry to Python.

[00:50:03] Sani: Okay. That

[00:50:04] Bhav: And it was just, I, and I had a specific thing I wanted to do. And I found a way to do it in R. Most of the things I do the reason I'm good at SQL is because, not because I did some SQL courses, is because I had a problem, and then I found the solution. Just like Crap Talks. I had a

[00:50:19] Sani: But that's the way if you're learning, if you're not going to be a senior engineer or something, then you need the basics and the structure. But if you want to learn about programming a little bit, like solving your own problems, just pick a problem to solve, but you need to have a problem first. 

I have one final question to ask every guest at the end of the episode. But before I do that, I want to thank the audience. I want to remind you about Experimentation Elite. It's in December in London. You can use the code NoHacks10 at ExperimentationElite.

com to get your ticket. Thank you for listening. Please consider rating and reviewing, but share this with a friend, share this with someone who will find it useful. There was a lot of great talk with Bab today. It was, in my opinion, it was an amazing episode. Bab, last question for you. What is the one message or phrase you have for yourself six months from now?

[00:51:05] Bhav: Stay consistent.