AMA: BILL Director Product Management, Advaita Nigudkar on Building 0-1 Products

Honestly, any revenue projection for a 0 to 1 product is an educated guess. The goal is to make it a structured, defensible one. Here is how I approach it: Start with the addressable problem, not the product. How many customers have this problem today? Of those, how many are likely to pay for a solution? That gives you a ceiling before you ever model a growth curve. Use proxies, not predictions. Look at comparable product launches, internally or externally. How did similar features or products r ...Read More

Validating a problem statement isn't a single activity, it's a combination of signals that together tell you whether the problem is real, widespread, and worth solving. Here's what we do at BILL: Customer interviews. This is the foundation. We go direct to users, listen for the language they use, the workarounds they've built, the frequency and intensity of the frustration. One interview is anecdote. Ten starts becoming signal. Product usage data. Where are users dropping off, slowing down, or n ...Read More

A few that we see repeatedly: Skipping problem validation. Teams jump to solutions before they have real conviction on the problem. Building fast on a shaky foundation just means failing faster. Building for the loudest customer, not the right customer. Early customers are vocal and that is valuable, but one power user's workflow is not a market. Define your ICP early and stay disciplined about whose problems you are actually solving. Waiting too long to ship. Perfectionism kills 0 to 1 products ...Read More

This is one of the most interesting tensions in product right now, and honestly there is no perfect formula. The way we think about it: current customer needs tell you where to play, and AI tells you how far you can go. If you only build for what customers are asking for today, you ship incrementally and get disrupted. If you only chase the technology, you build things nobody is ready to use yet. What grounds us is starting with the job to be done. What is the user fundamentally trying to accomp ...Read More

This quote is easy to agree with and hard to actually live out, especially in a larger company where there are brand standards, legal reviews, and a lot of stakeholders that need to sign off on the product/feature release. The way I like to manage that is by reframing what "embarrassed" means internally. It does not mean shipping something broken or half-baked. It means shipping something intentionally narrow, before you have solved every edge case, to the right set of users who understand what ...Read More

Inspiration depends on what we're building, but the worst thing we can do is only look at what competitors are doing. That's how you build a faster horse. At BILL, we pull from two places: Within the industry. Competitors tell you the baseline, what users already expect. Useful for parity, not differentiation. Outside the industry. This is where the interesting stuff lives. If we're designing a complex workflow, we look at how consumer apps handle the same cognitive load. If we're building notif ...Read More

Once the problem is validated, we use the Design for Delight (D4D) framework to drive solution brainstorming, three principles that work really well in sequence. Deep customer empathy first. Before any ideation, the team needs to internalize the job to be done — not the surface-level request, but the underlying goal and the emotional experience around it. At BILL, this means going beyond drop-off data and actually understanding the workarounds users have stitched together. That becomes the creat ...Read More

Honestly, don't overthink it. The best prototype is the one you can put in front of a user the fastest. At BILL, we default to Figma. It's fast, collaborative, and design and PM can iterate in real time without waiting on engineering. For most early-stage validation, a clickthrough prototype is all you need — string together the key screens, simulate the flow, and watch someone use it. A few things that make it work: Prototype the decision, not the product. Don't build every screen — build just ...Read More

Yes, PMF can absolutely be the goal early on. And in our experience, forcing a precise north star metric before you have real usage data often leads to optimizing for the wrong thing. That said, large organizations need something to rally around, so here is how I would think of it: Start with a directional metric, not a definitive one. Early on, pick something that signals you are moving in the right direction: activation rate, week 2 retention, time to first value. It does not have to be perfec ...Read More