About this article
Hi! My name is Thang, I’m the author of this site. In the past few years, I have been working in fast-paced product development environments, building solutions for different sectors as a product manager. Taking a look back, one of the first companies that laid the foundation of my PM experiences was at Kilo.vn, a pretty cool startup that once challenged one of the most intricate industries in Vietnam, wholesaling. And here is my story at Kilo.
What is Kilo?
Back in the day, and even till this time, the importing process, from the wholesalers to the retailers, has been dominated by traditional ways of work. Most of the processes are done verbally, from the price negotiation, to shipping, and the payments are collected on delivery. There are a lot of holes in the daily operation of this flow. For the small wholesalers, it’s a matter of loss during the payment collection processes, stock-in and stock-out tracking, while retailers lack of support, like loans or price comparisons. On the other hand, brands are just mostly blind in this process, as there’s no data, leading to an improper understanding of the market.
Kilo was founded in 2023 by Kartick Narayan, one of the renowned names in the E-commerce industry in Vietnam, who once led teams in Amazon, Coupang, and one of my first companies, Tiki. Kilo’s vision is to transform the lives of millions of retailers and wholesalers in Vietnam.
The first steps
Joining in 2022, I was proud, and still am, to be one of the first members of a talented team with experts from all over the world, Vietnam, US, and Japan. As being not only one of the first members of the product management team, but also the company, it’s understandable that you are expected to wear a lot of hats.
That being said, before diving into any product requirements, for the first 2-3 months, most of my work revolves around doing research. From market benchmarking, to hundreds of calls and visits to our target customers. We tried to define critical and notable painpoints of the market before create a solution for it.
After a lot of rounds of review, the product team has finally come to the decision to build the first MVPs for wholesalers and retailers. What are the differences? Kilo is a platform that focuses on the best prices and selections, while making sure that the product is easy to use even for moms and dads.
Highlight experiences
At Kilo, we have a strict rule of thumb before letting any feature into production, that is to provide a clear business case for it. That means we have to collect pieces of evidence that the feature is worth development, customer narratives, user data, or market benchmarks. This rule helped us to create buy-ins with the development team as product managers.
That is the foundation for me to participate in the process of building products and features such as E-payment method integration, Loyalty program, Notification services, Advertising CMS, Promotion mechanics, Taxonomy grouping and cleaning, etc. My proudest contribution is when I was able to launch the first iteration of our retailer mobile app and seeing its user volume grow by thousands of users.
Those days not only taught me how to develop product and business cases, but also lessons of teamwork, and problem-solving that I still use today.
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