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October 17, 2024 • 1hr 8min
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
In this episode, Lenny interviews Annika Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik and lecturer on product management at Stanford University. Annika shares insights from her extensive product leadership experience, including her time as President and Head of Product at LiveRamp. The conversation covers a wide range of topics relevant to product managers at all levels, from mindset and strategy to giving feedback and breaking into the field.
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more | Anneka Gupta (Chief Product Officer at Rubrik)
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Key Takeaways
- Mindset is crucial for success - Approaching situations with a positive, abundant mindset allows you to achieve more than you thought possible
- Summarization is a key PM skill - Being able to effectively synthesize and summarize information, discussions, and strategies is highly valuable
- Being strategic means articulating the "why" and driving change - Strategy involves clearly communicating the reasoning behind decisions and championing important but difficult changes
- Make decisions with ~70% confidence - Don't wait for perfect information; commit to decisions when you have enough data and iterate from there
- Navigate difficult personalities by understanding motivations - Try to uncover what drives challenging people and align their motivations with your goals
- Give feedback with care and directness - Show you care about the person's success, be clear about the feedback, and offer specific suggestions for improvement
- Breaking into product often requires starting in an adjacent role - Many PMs transition from engineering, sales, support or other functions within a company before moving to product
Introduction
In this episode, Lenny interviews Annika Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik and lecturer on product management at Stanford University. Annika shares insights from her extensive product leadership experience, including her time as President and Head of Product at LiveRamp. The conversation covers a wide range of topics relevant to product managers at all levels, from mindset and strategy to giving feedback and breaking into the field.
Topics Discussed
Mindset for Success (1:52)
Annika emphasizes the importance of mindset in achieving success, particularly finding ways to have fun even in challenging situations:
- Reframe difficult situations as opportunities for learning and growth
- Bring humor and levity to meetings to elevate mood and approach
- Manage energy levels throughout the day to maximize effectiveness
"When I was able to switch my mindset and say, well, I'm actually gonna figure out a way to have fun with this, it actually changed my entire approach for how to deal with super difficult situations."
Founder Mode (9:06)
Annika discusses how to effectively work with founders operating in "founder mode" and how product leaders can leverage a similar mindset:
- Recognize the founder's power to drive change and innovation
- Activate the founder as an ally to push important initiatives
- Understand the underlying objectives behind founder requests
- As a product leader, dive deep into business details to identify areas for course correction
"Understanding the details of the business and asking questions and understanding to the utmost extent you can, what's working, what's not, what are the financial goals of the business? Are we on track to get there? How are we making decisions? Getting into that level of depth is super important."
Becoming More Strategic (18:27)
Annika shares her insights on what it means to be strategic and how to develop strategic thinking:
- Articulate a compelling "why" behind decisions and direction
- Champion important but difficult changes for long-term success
- Practice effective summarization of discussions and strategies
- Make ideas "one click better" by iterating on existing concepts
"When people say, I want someone that's strategic, what they're really saying is I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product."
Decision Making (27:54)
Annika discusses the importance of making decisions quickly and learning from them:
- Commit to decisions with ~70% confidence
- Learn more by executing than by prolonged analysis
- Iterate based on new information gained after committing
- Reward learning over outcomes to encourage risk-taking
"Once you commit to a decision, you actually learn more post committing to that decision about what's gonna work and not gonna work, and you move out of the hypothetical."
Navigating Difficult Personalities (37:19)
Annika shares strategies for working with challenging personalities:
- Understand what drives the person - their motivations and goals
- Align their motivations with what you need from them
- Approach with curiosity and look for learning opportunities
- Feel gratitude for what you can learn from the interaction
"I really try to understand what drives that person, really, what is it that they really care about? Hopefully they care about something deeply about the company and making the company successful."
Giving and Receiving Feedback (41:38)
Annika offers advice on effectively giving and receiving difficult feedback:
- When receiving feedback:
- Allow yourself to feel initial emotions
- Don't react immediately
- Approach with curiosity to understand the feedback
- Decide what actions to take based on validity and importance
- When giving feedback:
- Express care for the person's success
- Be direct about the issue
- Provide specific examples and actionable suggestions
- Frame feedback in terms of perception and impact
"I care so much about you, and I'm giving you this feedback because I want you to be successful and I want you to be able to reach the pinnacle of what I know you can accomplish."
Breaking into Product Management (51:01)
Annika shares insights on how people typically transition into product management roles:
- Start in a product-adjacent role within a company (e.g. engineering, sales, support)
- Build credibility in your current role
- Volunteer for product-related projects
- Develop relationships with product leaders
- Consider joining small startups where roles may be more fluid
"Join a product adjacent function, which honestly, pretty much every function is product adjacent. Because what function does product not engage with, but as closely product adjacent as possible? And then, yeah, find your way, way into the product from there."
Advice for Aspiring Product Managers (54:56)
Based on her experience teaching product management at Stanford, Annika offers advice for those new to the field:
- Focus on skills over tools - learning to navigate ambiguity is more important than mastering specific software
- Practice synthesizing information and articulating clear strategies
- Develop the ability to clarify ambiguous situations over time
"What you need to learn to be successful is how to take very ambiguous situations and consistently drive more and more clarity over time."
Leveraging AI Tools in Product Management (59:39)
Annika discusses how her team is using AI to improve their product management processes:
- Summarizing user research calls for easier reference and analysis
- Tagging and organizing insights from customer conversations
- Using tools like Dovetail to connect with Zoom calls and provide summaries
"We're doing all these calls all the time. We're getting a ton of rich insights. Some of those rich insights are related to the specific project that we were doing this call for and some of them aren't. And now we have that summarized and tagged in a way where we can look up, you can look up any sort of thing that you want around the calls that we've done."
The Power of a Positive Mindset (1:01:27)
Annika emphasizes the importance of cultivating a positive mindset:
- Journal to process thoughts and emotions
- Explore the "why" behind negative feelings
- Practice self-reflection and cognitive behavioral techniques
- Approach situations with an abundant mindset
"The mindset that you bring to your work is actually the most important thing over anything else that you can do. And if you are approaching every situation as much as possible with a positive mindset, you can do more than you could ever possibly hope to achieve."
Conclusion
Annika Gupta's insights offer valuable guidance for product managers at all stages of their careers. Her emphasis on mindset, strategic thinking, effective communication, and continuous learning provides a framework for success in the dynamic field of product management. By focusing on these core principles and developing key skills like summarization, decision-making, and navigating interpersonal dynamics, product managers can drive meaningful change and achieve significant impact in their organizations.
