YouSaid · the spoken record

Manik Gupta

lines on the record: 71
first: 2022-07-14
most recent: 2022-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Lenny, thank you so much for asking all these questions and giving me the opportunity to share my learnings over the years. Thank you.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you can find me on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn. Those are the two places. I have not been very active on both those recently. I've not been active as a contributor, but I'm very active on those two platforms as a consumer. So if you have any questions, if you have any thoughts, would love to hear from you. So please send me a note. In terms of how listeners can be helpful, I just want to learn what's new and what's out there, right? I've had the privilege of being in these incredible companies. The reason why I'm still doing what I'm doing is because I still want to learn. And if there are better patterns out there that you're seeing, particularly around how to build products, would love to know if there are other ways people think about finding product market fit, because that's such an elusive thing that, you know, I just keep thinking a lot about. So if you have some techniques, some tips, some best practices that you have learned and it has worked for you, please, please, please reach out to me. I would love to learn that because it's so important for us to keep.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't prioritize it, but the technology isn't there. So I still kind of keep a close watch on that and see at what point are we going to get there? It's going to take years, but it's just such a different paradigm. It's like computers talking to computers, algorithms talking to algorithms. And then there's a human in the mix in terms of like serving the human at the end, but it's like the human is not initiating that much. It's just like kind of stuff is happening around it, right? So anyway, so that's one thing that is like unfinished business, if you will, right, in my mind, right? And hopefully as the technology comes together, that will happen.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow. Okay. This is a super interesting one. So I don't know if that's something that I could have built at Google Maps, but one of the things that's interesting is the self-driving technology has just not gotten there fast enough, right? And I feel like the best and brightest actually worked on it and are still working on it and it will get there. I'm a big believer. But of course, the timelines have shifted for various reasons because, you know, it is a really hard problem. It's actually really interesting to see what Cruz is doing right now, you know, in SF. They have started the pilots and so on. So I'm really happy to see some progress happening. I know Vimo has been doing a bunch of this already, but it would have been amazing. One of the things that we used to talk about all the time at Google on maps was how would we design a navigation product when people are in self-driving cars, right? And we had some really interesting ideas at that point, but we never got to it, not because”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's true, you know, that's a whole other conversation we can have at some point, but I have a lot of thoughts on that. But I'll just echo what you just said, which is that's the reason why it's so important for companies when they embark on new initiatives to be really, really thoughtful that is this the right area for us to get into because, or rather what are the conditions and the reasons why we are getting into something. We have to be super clear on that because if the starting conditions are not right, then you will just thrash the team, right? The team will keep working on something and people will never find the right internal fit. So that's super important.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, like, hey, this is how it has actually worked somewhere else being a specific example, trying it out, and see how that works. And the final thing I would say about it is the company is so grounded in trust. If there's one word that I would say about Microsoft is trust, right? They really care a lot about customers. Customers trust Microsoft a lot. I've been in some of the customer meetings myself, and I can totally hear what customers say. Like it's all about.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a while, right? And the company went through so many different things. And then over the last several years, especially under Satya's leadership, it has done so well, like incredibly well, right, in terms of how the company has changed the culture, the kind of products that they have in the market, the traction they have in the market. And I think I would describe Microsoft as both first and foremost, it's a very strong tech company, like the engineers here are incredible. Like, oh my God, like I am so privileged to work with some of the best engineers that I work with in my career. And at the same time, there's a lot of legacy, right? There are a lot of products that I've been around for a really long time, which is good and bad, right? The good part is that they have seen pretty much every pattern that is to see, right? And in fact, they came up with a lot of those patterns themselves. The bad part sometimes can be that change is hard, right? So how do you sort of convince people that we're going to go down a different path? So as a PM, a lot of it is around bringing outside in perspective, bringing clarity.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really in your face all the time. Like when there were weekly news letters sent out, it was all about growth, it was all about business, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So it was very operational in business. So as a PM over there, it was a lot about managing a bunch more stakeholders with the operations teams, the marketing teams, the policy teams, you know, and so on, and kind of how do you sort of work with them to deploy your product into each of these markets. And of course, then large chunk of your work was still working with the engineering team. So it was different in that sense. And I think at Uber, the other thing was it was also much more of a real-time business, right? I mean, Google is also real-time, like Google Maps was real-time. Billions of users were using it, but Uber was like every day, you know, there was something going on in the market and you had to kind of keep on that hustle in terms of like how do you sort of make sure that your sync competitive, your product is working well, there are no outages, you know, all of that kind of stuff was really important. And then finally on Microsoft, I mean, Microsoft has been around for”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do right? So that was the Google kind of model. By the way, one thing I should say about Google before I go to Google as a PM, at least all the way up to the time even when I became a director, I never had to think about business models, man. Like never, right? It was fascinating, right? You were in this sort of weird state where you could just build and have the consumer traction and all of that, but you never thought about P&L, you know, never thought about revenue and so on. And then I landed at Uber, which was very different. Uber was very operations, very business driven, very P&L. In fact, one of the most incredible things that Uber did was they had a dashboard, which every employee in the company could look at. And it had like last week's revenue, last week's number of trips that we did, and you could slice and dice it and all of that. I think that changed over time as we became a public company and so on. But the point was that it”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google search distribution to really get your product out there, right? That was it, right? Like on the maps team, our innovation was pretty much around crowdsourcing everyone's location signals for traffic. Huge, huge accomplishment, right? We had the best traffic models in the world. And then being able to do this crazy route optimization for driving directions, right? And then on top of that, we have the search stack, which came from Google Search anyway, right? So that you can search for any address, any business and so on. So anyway, so as a PM, it was partnering very closely with engineers and like really amplifying the engineer's ideas and so on. And I think at that point also, a lot of Google PMs are very technical, very, very technical because that was just part of the course. It was expected that you will be able to at least have engineering discussions, a large part of what I did as a PM at Google, especially initially initially initially was getting into the technical details with my engineers and really geeking out on what we can.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's actually really interesting. I mean, all the three companies are so different. So Google, the DNA, the core DNA of the company was very much engineering, right? And in fact, there used to be a framework which was around technology insights drive innovation. So it was always about what is the best tech we can come up with, which is going to indeed drive innovation and sort of have a longish view so that the market will get there, right? So that was the Google philosophy always, right? And as a PM, your job at Google, and it might have changed in the last six, seven years that I've not been there, but at least when I was there from 2008 to 2015, especially working in Google Maps, it was all about how do you take good long-term bets, ground it in strong technical insights, and then use the power of”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should not work in that company. What's the point? You should really be optimizing for learning and learning from other people. And people should be saying, yeah, don't worry. It's okay. You made the mistake. Learn from it. Don't make the mistake again. That's fine. But that's the kind of culture you want to choose for yourself, right? So those are the three kind of pitfalls that I see people get into, especially early on in the career.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like becoming really too self-centered, right? It's all about me, not the team. I'm the PM. You know, there's this myth that keeps going around. The PM is the CEO of the product. That's like one of the most incorrect things in the world, right? The PM is an enabler, right? As I said earlier, it's a leveraged job. So your job is to really make the team successful. Of course, you have to have, you know, the product thinking and the roadmap and all of that. But sometimes this can go to their head and people become too self-centered. That's a red flag, right? And then the third one would be just not admitting your mistakes or learning from them, right? Early in career, the only thing you should optimize for is learning. Sure, you'll make a lot of mistakes. You know, you don't know much yet. You have just sort of come into this journey and you should be humble and you should be learning and you should be saying, oops, I screwed up over here. And that's okay. That's fine. And by the way, if you work in a company where that is not accepted.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see that all the time. So there's a few of the things that I have picked up. And by the way, I was guilty of doing this too early on and I learned the hard way. The first one I would talk about is you are early in your career and everyone kind of expects you to just manage things and kind of manage the process and all of that to make sure that trains are running on time and all of that, which by the way is really important for an early in career PM to understand that that's actually a big part of your job let's not over glamorize a PM like a large part of being a PM initially is just basically doing whatever the team needs you to do But I think one of the pitfalls of that is if you start putting process over progress, that's a problem. What I mean by that is”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. Maybe I'm a little bit more traditionalist on this point. I know there are other schools of thought on this, which I respect, which is there are a lot of times where people are like, well, oftentimes the best PMs are PMs who are ICPMs, right? And they have this crazy, incredible, unbounded energy and they don't want to waste their time on management and whatnot and do that. Because a large part of a PM's job, by the way, is managing via influence, right? PMs typically don't have large organizations. In fact, one of the most leveraged teams in almost every company, right? Because you talk about PM edge ratios, PM design ratios, they are never one issue one or one issue five or one issue six. Like sometimes can be one issue 10. Google used to be one issue 8 to 1 issue 10, right? So I personally see that transition. If somebody is making that transition successfully and they're getting good scores out of it and delivering the product and the output of the team is significant, I definitely see that as a good filter criteria for someone whom we can bet on.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Add that inflection point where they're ready to take on more. So both product inflection in terms of real output and this sort of management prowess inflection in terms of being able to effectively lead going from one step to another, a manager to becoming a manager of managers. I think those are the two places where I feel like if I see somebody doing well, I know they are ready to kind of put more onto them.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they become a manager and then you become a manager of managers, and then you become more senior. I mean, that's kind of the organizational sort of trajectory that happens. And one inflection point that I've seen is when you go from being a manager, a first line manager, to becoming a manager of managers, and if you're able to navigate that with very strong effectiveness, then you know, you know, if you're their manager or if you're their leader, you know, okay, this person has got their act together, right? Because managing ICs is so different from managing managers because then you now need to create a structure. You need to be able to determine how much you delegate, how do you coach, how do you coach your managers to do the right thing, right? So if you see somebody making that transition effectively and have to give them some time, but if you see that and you know that they are actually doing it and again, a lot of followership, a lot of other things are happening, good things are happening, then you know they are.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really successfully changed the dynamic or the trajectory rather of a particular product. That's a huge inflection point, right? And that doesn't happen very often, to be fair. But when it happens, you know it, right? You know as a leader this person worked on this and they actually let this change and now we are playing a different game, right? We are playing a bigger game, we are playing a different game, you know, all of that kind of stuff. In other words, what I'm saying is the inflection point for a career is correlated strongly with the inflection point in the product, right? And if you can connect those that cause and effect, if there's causality and not just correlation, if there's causality in that, adding that absolutely means that, hey, you've got a winner and you really want to bet on them and give them a lot more to do because they have the ability to do it. So that's one. The second is oftentimes as people go up in their career, they start managing teams, right?”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've gone through a few inflection points myself and almost always they've happened because something in the organization changed so I got a shot right so there was always that like luck factor going back to the first question that we discussed right but generally speaking I think the inflection points happen in two places one is when someone has”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To follow or to be with, and kind of work with them and reach out to them. And you keep hearing things about, hey, so-and-so wants to work with this person because this person is amazing. There's a ton of value in that, right? So those are the three things that if I were to really boil it down, not looking at a certain level, I think I always look for those attributes.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PMs who don't create clarity It's such a time sink, right? And the team struggles so much. I'm sure all of us, when we think about back in the day, maybe we were in that position at some point, but we also worked with folks who were always confused and didn't really summarize or didn't really follow up or didn't really create that level of clarity in terms of what we need to do and so on and how broken that felt, right? So people who can create the clarity and then have the energy around them to get things done, I think that's the how, in my opinion, which is really important for determining somebody's career trajectory. And then the last thing I would say is followership. Really important for PMs, right? Like, do people want to work with them? Do people at some point as they go up and become more senior? Do people want to work for them? Ultimately, people make choices. And if you have a bunch of smart people and they're making smart choices and they're choosing this person.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An ideal example is someone who had a strong product hypothesis, they rallied a bunch of people around them. They may not have come with the hypothesis. That's fine. Like somebody else could have come up with it. It doesn't matter, but they believed in it. They rallied the team behind it. They drove towards it and created impact, right? And the impact not necessarily always has to be positive. It could also be a lot of stuff that we learned, but we learned from it and then we moved on and we did the next rev. By the time we did the next rev, we were smarter about it. So clear demonstrated impact from an end-to-end product cycle is to me is like the probably one of the better indicators of readiness for someone to take on more. And you basically want to give them more because now they have a pattern of doing things properly, right? So that's one. On the how, I just love people who are able to create both energy and create clarity. Like PMs, think of the flip side.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big fan of looking at both the what and the how, right? So, what did they accomplish and how did they accomplish? Because they are a package. And if you just look at one versus the other, then I think you end up making a mistake usually. So on the what, I think the what is usually more objective and what I look for, and again, it depends on the level of the person. So don't try to calibrate someone based on the early in their career, you have to sort of think through that, that they're in a learning phase, that they're more senior, then you have to, of course, collect with them differently. But ultimately, if I were to boil it down on the what, it's really about real demonstrated impact.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually a, I never thought about it that way, any. I think that's a really good point. You're totally right. Obviously, if you're a bigger company, then you're looking for OVP product or if you're a super big company, then you're looking for CPU. But you're right. The first product hire that you make as a founder, you pretty much have the same conversations to ensure that they're clear swim lanes and accountability for that group.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“product and then the other thing is it's really about are you trying to optimize for process are you optimizing for strategy are you optimizing for team building and attraction i think that's a really big one sometimes you have to get the right level of leader to attract more talent to the team because people say oh this person is working there now i want to go work in their organization right how do you think about engineering and data science and design how do you think about gm and operations so you know there are a bunch of all these things in terms of the design that you need to do before you decide whether vp product cpo is somebody you want to get and what kind of person you want to get and i think that's where the intersection of the work between this especially for a tech company the ceo or cpo have to be and even the cto i would throw in the mix that has to be very clearly articulated otherwise it creates a lot of confusion so those are some of the things at least you know that i observe from different patterns and different companies that i worked with and also guided and advised those are”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a very cross functional on steroids kind of job, right? In that sense, in terms of the CEO CPO heading, the important thing, again, is, and this is actually advice I've given to CEOs of some companies as well, when they first start looking for a VPO product or a CPO. And this is almost like a questionnaire that I give them. Things like, you know, first question I ask the CEO is, what do you want to do? That's the most important question, right? Because a lot of times the CEO has either been the technical founder or they have been the product founder. They can be a sales founder too. All that is fine. But like, what do you want to spend your time on? Because if you are going to get a CPO or a VPO product and then still want to like own the product roadmap and own the execution, then don't do that because what is that person going to do? So that's the first sort of question that I tend to sort of, you know, clarify between a CEO and who's looking for a CPO or a VP.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're in a product like if you're a CPO in particular, and even the CTO and a head of engineering, execution matters a lot, right? You know, the operational excellence, because things are so complex. I mean, look at, we are in a situation where a lot of people are working remotely. There are all these sort of different tool sets. There are all these different technologies that are coming up. You have different kind of competitors. So execution is super important. And if people don't understand that that's a big part of their job when they get to the senior level, I think they're mistaken, right? So the execution is another one. And the third is for CPO, especially for a tech company, because you are really driving the product roadmap, it's a very leveraged job, meaning you have to really work with all your other peers, whether the marketing person or the salesperson or the business unit person and so on and just make sure that you're really even deeply connected in terms of what is really needed so that your product roadmap is how things are going to actually come to life, right?”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's definitely an interesting one as well. I mean, if you think about it just based on my experience, what are the CPO really do, right? Like what is their job description? I think it's useful to kind of think through that. And generally speaking, and again, we can always talk in generalizations because that's how you should think because every company is unique. But generally you would say the CPU is responsible for driving the product vision for the company, right? And that product vision cannot be divorced from the company vision. Oftentimes this is actually what also creates conflict within the leadership team where the product vision is, you know, people are coming up with these grandiose plans like, oh, we'll do this, we'll do that. But then it's not really grounded in the reality of where the company is, right? So anyways, it's around product vision and making sure it's coherent with the company vision. And then the second big part of a CPO job is execution of the roadmap on the priorities. And people sometimes think that, hey, I get to a C-level position. I don't have to worry about execution. Absolutely not.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were to sort of push me on this, I would say that's probably the direction we will go, right? I think it's interesting to also think about CTO. If you look at the CTO roles versus SVP of engineering or a VP of engineering, I think it's an interesting debate too, right? Like what's happening with CTO roles. If a company is organized purely functionally, I think there's absolutely the right call. But as companies are changing and thinking about how they drive more accountability and more business units and so on, I just feel it probably will become more GM oriented. That does not mean that the VP product is going to go away or the VP engineering is going to go away. Adding those roles will still stay, right? But like the C-level title, reporting into the CEO, but just running that one function, if I look at over time, maybe that role is a lot less prevalent than what we have right now.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel like I'm a second class citizen in this kind of model where this person doesn't know anything about whatever my function and so on. So it's harder. But I do feel that for optimization around decision making around having a single threaded leadership and accountability, I feel like that's handed in direction where the product leadership role itself is going more and more, at least based on my experience.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the CPU role is evolving or ahead of product role is also evolving. And I think a lot of it is morphing more into the GM model, right, where you're running not just product management, but also perhaps PM and engineering and design to a certain extent and data science too, right? So you're essentially becoming the overall technical product leader at the company. And the reason why I feel that is happening is because it's all about accountability, right? It's about who has the single threaded leadership model where this person can make all the decisions when it comes to trade-offs and running the roadmaps and all of that kind of stuff. It's not ideal, by the way, in all cases because what that means is for somebody to be doing that, that person has to be really, really good at all those other functions too so that everyone who's in the organization respects that people.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my mind, it is probably not as big as what people think it is because, like I said, because of the way the companies are organized, I think the interesting thing here is I am just seeing personally, you know, having been a CPO myself and also talking to a lot of people in my network and just observing.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that the percentage for CPO in particular, like you're having a C title and being a CPO, I think that percentage is still relatively small. And this is just my sense. I haven't done the numbers to kind of give you a more accurate kind of picture here. But I think my sense is a little bit smaller because I think a large part of it depends on how companies are organized. So companies can be organized functionally. Companies can be organized through business units. And oftentimes these days it's a mix of both, right? Like if you look at any company, they'll have some C-level functional executives, but underneath them, they'll have GMs. And the organization design is just such an evolving field always, right? And as I say, companies will go one, they'll swing up in one way and they'll say, oh, over time, it's not working. Then they'll swing up pendulum the other way and then they'll keep kind of going back and forth. So I think the percentage for CPO in particular.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to operationalize this myself right now in my current job. And I have used some version of this. I mean, this is not something I just came up with. It's something that has been in my mind for a while. I've used it in some shape or form. But during my break, especially before I joined Microsoft, I think this sort of came together for me as something a little bit more tangible that I can use than I started applying it. So I think it's been pretty interesting to see.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These five categories and five capabilities, you should really have a report card and say, okay, how do I rate these? Like if I want to look at my own team, what do I think about design thinking? What do I think about strong focus and prioritization? Are we doing an A job? Are we doing a B job? Are we doing a C job or D job? And I would argue that if you get to an A job over time because not everybody will be at A on day one, but if you get that over time, I think you will start seeing results, which are very meaningful. So that's how I've been thinking about the consumer stack.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are really not doing anything well, right? You've got to be learning. You've got to be learning good things, bad things. Doesn't matter. You've got to be learning, right? So having the experimentation velocity, having a building culture where engineers are able to check in code, see the results, and then quickly come into another release and stuff like that. I think that's really important for a consumer product, right? And finally, underpinning all of this is just having strong talent, like assess your talent, right? Your product talent, your design talent, your data talent, your engineering talent, your marketing talent, all these functions, you just have to have a talented pool of people who like to build stuff, right? And they are the people who understand and have the empathy for consumers, right? So to me, I think these five kind of capabilities and as a leader or product leader or an engineering leader or anyone who's basically responsible for running products in small company, big company, medium-sized company, it doesn't matter if you're in the consumer space. My thinking here is that if you look at”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To choose the right things, right? And how will you measure success? How will you convince yourself, your team, and broad stakeholders that this is actually working or not working, right? So having the right metrics is important. But, you know, it's incredible how many times people have the metrics, but they don't instrument them, right? And they'll have all these debates because the product is on instrumented properly and everybody will talk about the same metric, but they'll have different nuances in terms of like, oh, what does it really mean? What is a daily active user? Okay, daily means, okay, I understand it's on a daily basis. What is active? And there'll be debates about what is active. Paker definition, instrumented, codified, no confusion, right? So that's number three. Number four is more on the engineering side, which is how do you get to a very high ship velocity and the ability to experiment and learn fast. At a broader level, especially during the initial phases, if you're not learning”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're solving problem X, any feature that you build in the product, firstly, your product should have very few features in the beginning. But even if it has those features, it should be well designed and it should have the focus and prioritization so that you're only getting things for the critical journey so that the user can use it and not get confused. So that's the second one. Most PMs totally understand that. That's their job description to focus and prioritize. I feel like a lot of times the PMs do get very confused and distracted because the number of ideas that people have is so large that they want to just throw everything into the product and that doesn't work. So you have to keep a very high bar for focus and prioritization. That's capability number two. Number three is having the right metrics and instrumentation. So this talks to the data aspect of the culture, which is if you don't have the metric with regards to what you're optimizing for at the initial stage of the product, middle stage of the product, later stage of the product, you're just not going to.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design capabilities have to be A, right? And if you don't have that, then you should really invest in that. And this is not just about having the best designers. Of course, you should, right? It's just the thinking, it's the attention to detail. It's the attention to how things are kind of pixel to pixel moving from one screen to another screen and so on. You really have to sweat it out and really be clear in terms of how it's adding value to a consumer. And that is, I think, a core capability in these days to build a consumer product. So that's like number one. Number two is strong focus and prioritization. You can apply strong focus and prioritization to anything in life, but I think it's even more important for consumer products because oftentimes people, when they think about solving a problem, they think about coming up at 20 features at the same time. It's not needed. You don't need 20 features to solve a problem. You just need one or two features which work really well. You know, this whole concept of critical user journeys, right? Like how do you make sure”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there are like five things that I would talk about, which I call the consumer stack, which is essentially a set of capabilities that companies need to have a good chance of success at building a consumer product. Remember, nobody can give a playbook to build a successful consumer product. That does not exist because as we were discussing earlier, it's so fickle and so many things have to go right for you to build a successful consumer product, but at least you have a set of capabilities so you set yourself up the best. So the first one I would say is around design-led thinking to delight users. Going back to your days at Airbnb, Lenny, I'm sure this is something that resonates with you. Design for consumer products is such a critical part of how you build the right pull from consumers these days, poorly designed products have no chance at this point, right? So your craftsmanship and the”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. One of the things that I'm doing at Microsoft right now is while I'm working on a lot of the consumer communication products, the other thing that I'm really helping the company think about is how do we get more at scale consumer products built at Microsoft, right? And part of this is just distilling some of the learnings that I've had.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to think through specific examples, but companies do this all the time where they do these line extensions, where they'll say, well, we have a lot of fraction in a particular segment. And why don't we just go to an adjacent segment if we just add two more features, suddenly this will be appealing to an adjacent segment. So our classic example would be you're doing something for, I don't know, small and medium businesses and you say, well, now I just have to add two more features and now I'm going to go upmarket and I'll compete in the enterprise, right? Or it could be the other way around too, right? So you have something in the enterprise business and you want to suddenly go down market to SMB. And in my view, it's hard because, again, the capabilities that you need, the thinking that you need is something you have to really be clear about. And this is not to say that it will not fit in the company's portfolio. It's just that when you're making a choice like that, make sure you set it up well to succeed.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding it out, and if lets the things don't go well, that's okay, people will step in to help. A lot of that will happen because people innately get it that this is like the right product to go after from a company product fit perspective. So that's something that I've been thinking a lot about and also executing as we move forward.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or not. And if it doesn't, don't do it. Like, why waste time, right? And oftentimes companies would be like, I want to do this because some other company is doing it. That is not a good reason, right? You should only invest in products or projects for that matter because you can play to your strengths and you can create some unique consumer customer value. And by the way, you can do it better than anybody else out there, right? So that's what I mean by company product fit. Like take that first step and understand, does this even resonate and is it part of the portfolio? Does it make sense? Because if you can answer that question with enough conviction, then your road to the next step on finding product market fit becomes much easier because you don't have distractions then. Everybody gets it. Everybody gets this is a strategic effort. You have the right sponsorship at the right levels in the company and you're executing towards it.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think there's a question before that question, which is how do you find company product fit? What I define as company product fit, which is a company essentially is a portfolio of products, right? And every large company, medium-sized company, also has a portfolio, right? They'll have like 10, 20, in some cases, hundreds of products in the portfolio. And every company has unique strengths and weaknesses. This is pretty tried, but it's obvious, right? I would encourage a lot of folks when they start embarking on their journey where they're trying to really build out products and so on, is to ask that question, how does that product, if assuming it's successful, right? If it is not successful, it doesn't matter anyway. But if it's assuming it's successful, does it actually serve the right place in a company's product portfolio?”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So I've been noodling a lot on this, especially since I took on my role at Microsoft as well. And prior to that, even at Google, this was always an interesting discussion. So let's say you are building a new product or leading a new project, if you will, at a larger company. In fact, this also applies to medium-sized companies. I wouldn't say for startups, but medium-sized companies. And usually the narrative in the room when you're discussing this with your team and with your leadership team would be, okay, we got to go find product market fit, right? Absolutely. We have to do a bunch of stuff, as we just talked about, consumer products take time, all of that stuff.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very similar. So you look at global products like even like Facebook or Google Search or Maps or Twitter or TikTok and so on, all of them have kind of a similar pattern or similar app for the entire world. And they keep on innovating or localizing at the edges. So that's the other counterintuitive thing that people should know about consumer products that build for the world from day one, understand that there are going to be some nuances that you'll have to solve as your drive adoption in certain markets, but don't over index on building market specific solutions because consumers have kind of moved on from that kind of a model. So those are the two, you know, in terms of product building, counterintuitive trends, at least I have picked up over the years.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The global patterns that you see in consumer products in terms of the user interface, the kind of the core things that people do or expect, at this point, a lot of that is pretty universal. So there's always this debate where people would say, well, you need to have one product for the US, another different type of product for Asia, another different type of product for Africa. I think we are past that point, right? So that's, again, another counterintuitive thing where people spend a little too much, and I've seen this in many companies. People spend too much time debating that, oh, the users in market X are different. Well, yes, they are different, but they use the product the same way, right? So that's the part which I think, and I'm not making an argument against localization. Of course, you need localizations around language, pricing. There are some legal requirements, all of that stuff. Like obviously you have to do that, otherwise you don't even have a right to exist in that market. But by and large, the patterns are...”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building a successful consumer product, you have to be able to reach out to a vast kind of heterogeneous set of users who have different needs, who have different perspectives. The go-to market is always very interesting because you can't force people to use your product. People have to choose you, right? You don't choose them, right? So that's the part where like how do you drive virality? How do you drive that real love for a consumer product? And it has to create like real value. And the other thing about time is that in order for you to find product market fit and then sort of scale from there, you just have to try a lot of different things.”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Setting and so on. And I find that to be one of the most wonderful things ever. And I think folks like you have obviously played a big part because you have global subscribers and you share some of the best practices. But just generally, that's actually a really good thing for the world that people have so much access to clarity of thinking and the best people are actually putting themselves out there, which is great. In terms of the counterintuitive stuff, I think two things. One is building consumer products is very hard, right? Any people think it's easy because each of us is a consumer, right? We think of ourselves as a good user. We think of our friends as users. We think of our family as users. And we say, well, if you just build it for ourselves and for our family and friends, and by the way, a lot of great consumer products started that way. So I'm not saying don't do that. But man, it's hard, right? It takes a long time to get things right because you're essentially trying to get so many things right when you're”
2022-07-14 · Lenny's Podcast · Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source