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.
So that's number one.
And the second piece is, I want someone that's going to champion and be a change agent to do things that may be hard, but actually best for the long term interest of the product or company.
Even though those things are not going to be easy to execute on.
And I think if you have one without the other, ultimately, people are not going to see you as strategic.
Today, my guest is Annika Gupta.
Annika is Chief Product Officer at Rubrik, a lecturer on product management at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and on the board of Tenuity.
Previously, she was president GM and head of product at LiveRamp, where she spent 11 years and joined as one of their earliest employees, a bunch of former guests recommended Annika come on this podcast and you will soon see why.
In our conversation, Annika shares a ton of powerful advice on navigating difficult personalities, giving and hearing hard feedback, bringing humor and gratitude to every situation, managing your energy versus managing your time, super tactical tips for how to become more strategic and how to make better
decisions, and also how to break into product management for people that are trying to become product managers.
There's something in this episode for everyone and I am excited for you to learn from Annika.
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It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you, Annika Gupta.
Annika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me.
So I'm going to start with a question that I've started to ask.
Guests that come on the podcast that have had extraordinarily successful careers and also just consistently successful careers.
So here's the question.
What do you believe are one or two skills or mindsets or habits that you think most contributed to your success that you think might be helpful for other people to learn and build to help them have more successful careers?
So it's funny before we kick this off, you talked about the post -it that you have on your computer that says, have fun.
And my one mindset that I really have leaned into after someone actually gave me advice on this is to figure out how to have fun in my job, even in the most difficult of times.
And the reason why I say that is because when you're hit with really hard times, it's easy to operate from a mindset of scarcity and to look at everything as an unachievable hurdle to overcome.
And when I was able to switch my mindset and say, well, I'm actually going to figure out a way to have fun with this, it actually changed my entire approach for how to deal with super difficult situations.
And this advice specifically came up to me when I had a scenario where I had to essentially change out all of my direct reports in very short order.
And I figured that out.
It was a super daunting situation.
I didn't know how I was going to manage.
And at first, I felt so scared by what was ahead of me and how much change I was going to have to go through in a very short period of time.
But when I got this advice, I started to try to reframe my thinking and it actually really made it so that I was able to get through that hard time and open my mind up to so many more opportunities.
So now I try to embody that in every situation that I come up, come across where I'm faced with something super, super challenging.
I love this advice.
It's something that I've recently seen also in public speaking.
If you can just reframe your thinking from, I'm scared of this too.
This is going to be fun.
I'm going to have so much fun doing this.
It's going to be like this energy and anxiety and feeling is me feeling like it's going to be a lot of fun.
So spending a little more time here, how do you actually do this?
So in this case, you shared an example of you're basically you have to fire a bunch of people, not something you one can quickly think about how to have fun with that.
How did you do this?
Is it just in your mind, you're like, I'm going to have fun with this?
Or is there something tactically people can do to make something fun?
I think there are a couple of things I did, and I've continued to do one is figure out and really look at the situation and ask myself, what can I learn from this situation?
What can I get out of this?
That's a positive outcome, even though it is incredibly challenging to be facing it right now.
So that's one thing that I've done.
The second thing I think that has been really helpful is in going into meetings or other situations where I was trying to figure out how to collectively solve some big challenge, figuring out how to bring humor into the meeting and just starting it on a light note.
And that elevated my own mood and way I was approaching the meeting, but also adds a level of levity to the situation for other people as well, which I think as a leader is super important because it's not just about your own mindset, but how are you transferring that mindset to the people that you're
working with and the people that are working for you?
Got it. So part of it is just like, how do I add a little humor?
Part of it is just thinking, how do we make this fun?
It's part of this just like, this is not as important as a thing people make it out to be.
And we could just have a little fun with this thing.
It doesn't have to be like we're not curing cancer.
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
I think that helps reflecting on this too.
I feel like a lot of it comes down to the amount of emotional and mental energy I can bring to solving a problem.
And there's always so much going on in life, like personal life as well as professional life, trying to figure out how can I architect my day and time to maximize my energy and be able to bring my full self to work and to these difficult situations so that I can have that mindset to look at things more
broadly versus operating from a point of view.
And I think I have a lot of that in my mind as well.
I feel like I can be more simple things like making sure that I have lunch.
There was sometimes when things get so busy.
You're like, oh, I'm just going to grab a protein bar and I'm going to skip lunch.
But I found that that really decreases my energy or trying to do things that are really difficult late in the day, 5 to 6 p .m.
is my worst time of day.
And I know that about myself.
So I'm not going to schedule in my most difficult meeting or writing up a strategy deck or something for that period of time because I know that that's not going to be my best.
And it's actually going to make it more difficult for me to get the work done.
That is being able to manage my energy levels and figuring out how to schedule my time for my energy has really allowed me also to figure out how to have that abundant mindset in all situations.
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This is recently this episode we're recording shortly after Paul Graham put out his now classic, instant classic founder mode post.
And he has some really interesting takes on ways to think about founder mode both from product leader perspective, from a founder perspective.
So there's kind of two questions I want to ask, but just broadly, what's your take on founder mode?
Well, first of all, I think Paul Graham did an amazing thing by putting a name to something so many of us have seen in practice.
And while he didn't in his article say, this is exactly what this is, I think many, many people that I talked to were like, Oh yeah, I recognize this.
I recognize people that I've worked for that have done founder CEOs that have done founder mode great founders that have done founder mode poorly.
And it opened up a level of discussion that I think is really valuable for everyone to be having, whether you're a founder, or you're someone that works for a founder.
Okay, so I'm gonna ask two questions around this.
One is from the perspective of working for a founder and founder mode, others being a product leader in founder mode.
So first of all, imagine you've worked with a few founders that operate in founder mode.
As a CPO, as a product, that's often a difficult place to be between the founder and the team that are building thing.
What have you learned about how to effectively work as a product leader with a founder in founder mode?
So I think when a founder is in founder mode, what they are doing, and if they're doing it well, what they're doing is really deeply understanding the business, and then figuring out when to use their power as a founder, to either tweak things and send something in a slightly different direction, or fundamentally
innovate and completely change directions or completely innovate in a totally new area.
Now, I think the way to use that effectively as a head of product is to recognize that they have that power to figure out how to use that power to get the things done that you know are best for the company.
So I always think about like, I have all the people around me, whether they're people on my team, my peers, or my CEO, these are different resources I have to go get a initiative done or get work done in the company.
And as having a founder that can effectively operate in founder mode means that I can go and have a conversation with the CEO and say, hey, look, like we have this huge opportunity, and these are the things that aren't working.
And I need your help to help figure out how we can move the needle more substantially in the direction that we need to go.
And so activating that founder, that CEO to really be able to push the initiative that I think is best by making them an ally in doing so.
So I think that's one aspect.
The second aspect is, which often happens, it's very difficult for many people, and I've had this happen to me many times is when founders like, well, I have this idea.
And then you may or may not agree that that's the best direction to go in.
And how do you navigate that, that kind of situation.
So one is actually taking a step back and objectively saying, well, why are they pushing this?
Maybe it's the wrong mechanism to go actually get done a strategy that's quite important for the company.
So having a really deep understanding about why are they asking this?
What are they ultimately trying to get at?
And what is the objective that they're trying to get at?
And is this the right way to get at it?
And if the answer is no to that, then you can go have a conversation.
If you know what the objective is, you can go have a conversation with that founder and say, Hey, look, I know this is what you're trying to do.
But maybe instead of looking at option A here of how we go about tackling this, we should have explored these three other options instead.
And that can help you and help navigate that conversation.
Now, sometimes it's difficult to even get to that kind of understanding of the objective because someone might be just super set in their ways of, Hey, I'm going to go, I really want to go after this opportunity.
It's my pet project.
Then you have to decide as a head of product, do I really want to fight this?
Or do I just give in on this, let it go.
And also make sure that we get the stuff done that's most important to the company.
You have to make that judgment call as a head of product and decide what is really going to make or break the company?
What's the hill that I'm going to die on?
And is this something that I can shift or is this something that is not worth shifting?
Of course, it comes down to the personality.
I've been very fortunate that I've actually had very few of those situations where the founder has been like, Hey, I really want to go in this direction.
And I haven't agreed at least with what we're trying to go after regardless of the mechanism behind it.
I really love the point you made, especially about how the founder could be this lever to get things done when you identify something needs to change.
The best way to change that is just can have the founder go in there, tell everyone, Hey, we're going to do this thing differently.
It's such a positive spin on how to leverage founder mode or a founder actually has a lot of power to change that other people in the company don't.
Okay, so let's go from the other side.
I was talking to Nikhael Singhal who runs the skip, which is a community or part of about you.
And he said that you're a leader who excels in founder mode, that you operate in founder mode a lot.
And so as a product leader, what have you learned about just how to think in founder mode, operate in founder mode, leverage that approach to leading teams, leading product teams?
Yeah, I think it's often easy as a leader to say, I'm not going to roll up my sleeves and get into the details of the business or ask a lot of detailed questions about the business because you want to empower people and make them successful.
And what I found is that 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.
And then you can decide as a leader, what do you want to do with that information?
So there's a lot of information that I collect about what's happening in the organization, decisions that we're making that I don't do anything with at a point in time, that's my choice to make.
But I want the information because in understanding the depth and what is happening, I can decide where I actually think I need to go in deep and make either very significant course correction or a small course correction.
And then the way that I think about how do I bring my team along for that so they don't feel like I'm coming in and stomping all over the work that they're doing or trying to re adjudicate a decision is one is like, how do I get in there early?
So how do I ask one of the tactics I use is I asked people to present their strategies for things that I think we may need to do a course correction on and I have them come in and then I ask them questions and then I make suggestions.
And I'm able to do that in a forum where it doesn't feel like I'm coming in and rewriting the entire strategy, but I'm giving them there an opportunity to present their best thinking and then trying to figure out how do I take that and make that better and make them feel like I'm making it better versus
stomping all over and dismissing the work that they've done.
And I pick a strategic set of barriers.
So I think about what is most important for the business, what's going to kill the business if we don't get right and what are the biggest opportunities for the business that we need to go after regardless of how difficult it is for us to actually execute on that.
And by doing that, then at least I have clarity in my mind and I can provide clarity to the team about what is most important and rally the troops around making that stuff happen if that is what is essentially right.
And I'll have all the context because I've asked all the questions of like, why this is right for the business?
Why is this going to help us with increased margins or get better growth or get into a new persona if that's what we're trying to do as an overall organization?
So in that example, and I love this tactic, you have your team come in, you ask them, tell me what the strategy is for this thing you're working on.
What you've seen work is, instead of like, no, this is broken, this is wrong, this is going to work, your approach is ask questions and hope that they see the flaws or gaps.
Is that? Yeah, it's ask questions, but it's not always, you can't always lead someone somewhere with asking questions.
It's also sharing a hypothesis.
So I might have a particular hypothesis about the business where I might say something like, well, I was talking to security leaders and our customer advisory board recently, and I heard this piece of feedback.
And this is what it made me think about our strategy.
What do you think about that?
And then let them say like, okay, actually I see this, or maybe I have some follow up questions.
And it actually opens a whole discussion where I'm still able to provide my perspective and point of view, but not completely shut down the discussion.
Because what I always worry about as a leader is I'm going to come in and say something.
And because I'm one of the more senior people in the room, no one is going to say if they have a concern.
And the reality is I'm not always right, far from it, but I want to be able to seed an assumption and then have a discussion based on that, and then figure out what the right outcome is about what we should do next based on that discussion.
Speaking of strategy, you shared with me that when you get one point in your career, you got this feedback that you just weren't strategic enough.
And that comment led you to research and dig into what does it mean to be strategic, and also just to level up your strategic mindset and the way you think about strategy.
What did you end up with recognizing is being strategic?
What is that in your work in your research?
And then how did you actually get better at this at this work of being strategic?
I got this feedback once in a performance review, and then I actually got it as well a few years ago when I was interviewing for head of product roles, and I thought I had made a lot of progress on it.
But when I reflected back, I think it actually all came back to the same themes, which was I think, 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. So that's number one.
And the second piece is, I want someone that's going to champion and be a change agent to do things that may be hard, but actually best for the long -term interest of the product or company, even though those things are not going to be easy to execute on.
And I think if you have one without the other, ultimately, people are not going to see you as strategic.
If you're really good at articulating the why, but you're only bringing small ideas to the table, then that's not strategic.
If you're championing big ideas, but you can't articulate the why behind them in a compelling and simple way, then you're not going to be seen as strategic either.
So that's the formula that I've come up with.
This is what it means.
And so I focused a lot on how do I make sure I do both of these things?
How do I champion a few things that are really big ideas that are going to help change the direction of the company?
And then how do I articulate that in a simple and compelling why?
That's such a cool, simple way of thinking about this.
Is there an example from your work that might illustrate some of this from a project you worked on or a product you would be built?
I could take some recent examples.
We've been doing a lot of strategic planning for where do we want to be as a company over the next three years.
And Rubrik operates in the cybersecurity space.
It's a very fast moving landscape.
There's a lot of places that we could go as a business.
And one of the ways that I've exhibited this and this is what I recommend to other people too, is sometimes it's really hard to come up with the compelling and simple why behind something.
And sometimes it's also really hard to come up with a really big idea out of thin air.
So these things can be very challenging.
The first step that I found is very useful, and I use this tactic every single day in meetings, is just summarization.
So hearing, bringing people together, lots of different voices into a room, and hearing what they have to say, and at various times in the conversation, summarizing what people are saying and summarizing what that means in terms of the direction that we could go in.
And then that's a checkpoint of saying, okay, this is how I've synthesized what is happening.
Is this correct, or do we actually need to do another turn because we don't all agree with where we're landing here?
And that summarization, even though I may not be adding a new idea into that, I found people actually view that as strategy.
They view the summarization, the effective summarization as strategy.
So I think that's one element.
And then what I've also found is that when I summarize what other people are saying, and especially multiple different stakeholders, then I can think about offline and not in the context of right in the meeting.
Sometimes I'm in the meeting too, is how do I make this idea one click better?
And it's not about how you do something radically, radically different, but taking ideas and then making it slightly better.
And when you think about that, especially from an outside end perspective of what are the customer problems we're trying to solve and how are we going to take this to market?
And don't worry about how difficult the technical implementation is going to be.
Then you start to get to these big ideas that can really be the change agent ideas.
So I've started doing this more and more, and I think especially in the past three to six months.
And I'm seeing a material difference in terms of the number of big ideas that we're going and pursuing overall as a company, and also the quality of the strategic thinking that I can bring to the table.
And it's been really exciting and rewarding.
There's so much you're sharing that resonates with other podcast episodes.
For example, this idea of just going one click better.
I had Roger Martin on the podcast wrote this book, Playing to Win, which is one of the more popular strategy books.
And he has the concept of betterment as a way to work on strategy.
A lot of people go like huge with a big strategy and vision.
His advice is just find the thing that is the biggest constraint and bottleneck to your business right now and just make it better.
And that's your next step.
And then just keep doing that.
And you'll end up in a much better place over time, even though it feels like you're just doing one little thing.
And so I love this idea of just going picking one thing and making it one click better.
There's going to be an episode that comes out right before this with Alex Kamarovski, and he has this concept of the adjacent possible.
And it's just like find the next thing that's possible and focus on that versus some big lofty thing.
So I'm just sharing a bunch of stuff.
It's not a question.
That totally resonates though.
Okay, okay, okay, great.
And then the summarization idea.
I love it. So tactical.
Basically, any PM can do this just in a meeting.
Just like, okay, let me just summarize to make sure everyone's on the same page.
Funny enough, this is the feedback I get on this podcast.
And I haven't been doing this in our conversation yet.
But I often try to summarize the person's point.
And everyone's like, Oh, I love that you do that.
That's so helpful. And so I totally see the power of that in my experience.
It also makes people feel heard.
And especially when you have a lot of diverse voices in the room that may not agree on all things, but have valid viewpoints, it helps bring people together.
And ultimately, the diverse perspectives are going to yield better insights and better decisions for the organizations you want that.
But some people shy away from that because it's scary because you have to deal with a lot of conflict.
And it's a way to move beyond the conflict and get to the heart of an issue, which in my mind, that's what the PM job is all about is getting to the very, very heart of a problem.
If someone wants to work on the skill of summarizing as kind of a tactic, can you give just like, like an example of how you would do that?
Are there like phrases to use their words or an example you could give just like, here's how it would look in a meeting.
Yeah. So often, if there's a lot of discussion going on, sometimes it can be a little hard to insert yourself, I still may insert myself and say, Hey, let me pause here for a second and try to capture what has been said.
This is what I've heard.
I've heard that we have, our customers are having these kinds of challenges.
We feel like this is the way that we want to solve these challenges, we have a right to win in this way.
And therefore, we're going to take this action.
Is everyone in agreement with that?
Or, or is there some dissent about whether, you know, that that's an accurate portrayal of where we've landed with this conversation?
And that's the way I'll frame it up.
And again, ending it on a question, so that you're not coming in and just being like, hey, this is what where we're at, but then inviting people to discuss and say, yes, or no, I agree with 90 % of that, but 10 % for 10 % off.
And that helps move the conversation forward, because sometimes you'll get stuck in these circular discussions that aren't moving forward, and you need to figure out a way to move it forward.
And then your experience as just doing that makes you look more strategic.
And yeah, gives people the impression you're thinking strategically.
Yeah, awesome. The other way you can do it is if you're in a room with someone, and you have a whiteboard is actually summarize on the whiteboard while people are talking, and then show your summarized framework or whatever on that.
So that's kind of a good way to do it too, if you're having a hard time interrupting the flow of discussion, or you don't feel as comfortable thinking on your feet, and interrupting and then framing your your point of view, you can do that in Zoom, you can also use a chat, I've done that very effectively
and said, I'm not going to interrupt the flow of conversation.
I'm just going to summarize in Zoom chat.
This is what I've heard.
And this is what I think we're saying in this conversation.
And then sometimes that'll get invited back into the broader conversation that's happening live on the Zoom itself.
That's a much lower stakes away of doing it.
And I'm picturing all the PMs listening to this are going to start doing this.
And there's going to be all these summaries now in Zoom chats.
And then Zoom AI will start just doing it all for you.
It doesn't have to think again.
And then PMs are over and they have a new place to sell.
Okay, so then just to close the loop on becoming more strategic, your advice is when someone's like, hey, you're not strategic enough, you need to be more strategic, your insights is the two things to work on is one, be clear on the whys behind the ideas that you're working on.
And be very crystal clear, people may not be understanding why you're working on the things you want to work on the things you're pitching.
And then two is actually be the person that makes these things happen, not just put a doc out there.
If you're not actually achieving them, people are going to think you're not strategic.
Yep. Awesome. Okay.
I want to talk about decision making.
You have a really interesting perspective on how to become a better decision maker in relation to being kind of a historian, which I love this concept.
Talk about that insight.
Yeah. So I was at my previous company for 11 years.
So I kind of ended up becoming the historian.
And when I joined Rubrik about three years ago, I came into an organization that had a lot of history that I just didn't know about.
So one of the things that I decided to do when I joined the company was to really understand what happened in the past, like what were the products that we launched that weren't successful?
Why weren't they successful?
What was the perspective on the history of how we've decided to develop the things that we've had, we did and why, what was the perception of different people in the organization.
And I tried to construct this past knowledge of what had happened and what were the decisions that were made and why were those decisions made, whether they were good or bad, didn't matter so that I could better understand how to make decisions going forward and to learn from the mistakes that I didn't
personally live through.
And I think that's the part that's really important about being a historian.
You can always be a historian.
It doesn't have to be just when you join a company, but even today I'll hear about projects from many years ago that people will bring up and I'll be like, tell me about this project.
Why, like what happened with it?
How did we decide to do this and just really learn and be curious about it?
Because that gives me more context into, well, what is it that we did poorly and how can we do that better?
And also what is the baggage that people have around trying to do something similar again?
Because people always come with their baggage of, Oh, this hasn't worked before.
So why is it going to work now?
And as a product leader, you're obviously putting in place a lot of thoughts and ideas around, this is what I want to go achieve.
And these are the initiatives.
And some people are going to come and say, well, we've tried that before, especially been an organization that's been around for a while.
I've been that guy.
We've done this so many times.
Why are we, like I said, it didn't work.
What are we thinking about this again?
So, okay, so the advice is here, if you're new to a company, especially go through a bunch of, just like study the past decisions that were made and share them out as a part of that.
And then as a side effect, it'll help you make better decisions because you'll have this history about what the company has done.
I love that. Along the same lines of decision making, I asked your former colleague Rachel Wollon, what to ask you.
And she said that your parting advice when she left to join a different company was it's not about making the right decision, it's about making the decision.
And that's like the things she remembered about you most, that parting advice, talk about why that is so important and your insight there.
It's very easy to get into analysis paralysis before making a decision and say, well, if I just had this one more data point, if I just knew this, then I could make a decision.
But the reality is, is that you were always operating off of imprecise information as a product leader.
And what I found is that once you commit to a decision, you actually learn more post committing to that decision about what's going to work and not going to work.
And you move out of the hypothetical.
And as long as your decision is like 70 % right, you can iterate on that 2030 % in either direction.
But if you don't commit, then you don't actually get any new information that is high fidelity and high quality.
So I'm big believer in making decisions.
I know you've had a few guests talk about speed is super important in organizations.
Well, I think making decisions quickly and then being able to iterate on them is a form of that is just make a decision, don't make it uninformed, but have a strong hypothesis.
And then just keep testing whether that hypothesis is accurate or not.
And you'll shift here and there, you might build something that you have to throw away 20 % of the work on, but that's okay.
It's better than making no decision at all, because you won't get any new information if you don't make any decision at all.
As a PM that might be listening to this feeling like, okay, yeah, that sounds great.
But then I make a bad decision.
And then my, and then Anika is gonna be like, you messed up here, you got the wrong, you've shipped the wrong thing here, it didn't work.
How do you how do you create a culture where people don't feel that and aren't afraid of making bad decisions and making decisions with 70 % of the information?
I think part of it comes down to making sure there's a strong hypothesis that everyone understands when you're making the decision or it might not just be one hypothesis, it might be a series of hypotheses and assumptions that we're making that are informing the decision.
So it might be a hypothesis that this segment of customers is going to be willing to pay for this product, because it's solving an urgent and important enough need for them that they're going to go do it.
And this is the evidence we have to find it, but this is also the stuff we don't know.
And then along the way, we learn whether that hypothesis is true or not.
And so at the end of the day, if something didn't work out, we can go back to the original hypothesis and say, well, this is what we learned in this process that our hypothesis was actually not true.
And we learned all of this after the fact.
And I think the way to make a culture of risk taking and people willing to make these bets and go out on a limb is to reward the learning versus the outcome.
And that's what I try to focus on is if we're constantly learning, it is okay if we make bad decisions, but we learn from them and we get better for next time.
And even in making this bad decision, we learn something about our customers or our business that we otherwise wouldn't have learned that we can use in some in another context.
I love first of all, I love that this comes back to your strategic lesson of just if you have a strong why behind something that's incredibly powerful.
And people will be confident that you're thinking strategically.
Two, I was just at a talk with Zuck when he was giving his big interview at the Chase Center, acquired podcast at this whole event.
And his main thing that he talked about that Facebook that he values most in the culture of Facebook is learning faster than anyone else.
Shipping stuff that isn't perfect, but just so that you can get one more turn and learn something faster than someone else.
So that super resonates, that's Facebook's culture.
Is there an example, something you worked on where you were that you where you did that where you kind of shipped something that you weren't fully confident in and you learn faster?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot because anytime you're shipping products, there's so many different things that could go right and wrong.
There's a situation where we created a really amazing high value product, and we decided not to monetize it.
And then we realized after the fact, we should have monetized it.
So we're trying to figure out how to package some new capabilities to monetize this thing that we know has a lot of value without taking away what we've already given to existing customers.
So that was something we learned along the way that we originally didn't think, oh, we should monetize this, but then we realized there was actually an avenue to do that after the fact.
There's been other things where we've developed a set of capabilities thinking that it will solve for this new personas problems, but then we misunderstood how easy it was going to be to go sell to that new persona within our own organization.
I've made that mistake many times and so now what I've taken from that is really know how you're going to sell something and who's going to do the selling before you actually go build out the product.
Because if you don't have that right focus, you may build out the best product, and yet it's going to get zero adoption because no one in your organization is ready to sell it.
So there's tons of stuff like that where it's been, okay, yeah, we've learned something from this and it's not all throwaway, it just means that we've got to do something differently for this product and we need to do something differently for our organization going forward.
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I want to come back to something Rachel also shared with me when asked her what questions to ask you.
And by the way, first of all, she spent like a lot of time raving about how amazing you are first.
That was the first set of conversations.
And then she came up with a bunch of questions to ask you.
And so her other question was about how good you are at navigating very difficult personalities.
She showed this quote that she constantly saw you interact with and bring together several leaders who had much higher egos and very disparate points of view who were not informed or thoughtful or as gracious as you were.
And she also said you have a very low ego.
And so she wanted me just to ask you for what you've learned about how to navigate very difficult personalities and help people align when that is not neatly what they want to do.
I try to embody the mindset of feeling like and believing that I can work with anyone.
And I think what I do when I hit a difficult personality and difficult personalities come in all shapes and sizes and forms is I really try to understand what drives that person.
What really, what is it that they really care about?
Hopefully it's they care about something deeply about the company and making the company successful.
Sometimes it's they care about their own personal career, how they're showing up, what people view of them.
That's fine. I just need to understand what it is that they really care about.
And then if I need something from them, what is it that I can do to motivate them to find what I need from them, important and trying to make that match of like they have this desire, kind of like building a product, they have this desire, and how am I going to get them to care about the thing that I'm
going to care that I want to care about?
The other thing I do is like instead of feeling like anger or frustration with the person, and instead trying to shift that to a mindset of feeling gratitude and a positive emotion about them is I look at them and I ask myself, what can I learn?
And maybe I don't want to adopt their personality or to operate the way that they are operating, but everyone has something that they can teach you, whether it's their communication style or where they're able to marshal people together, the way they come up with visionary ideas, whatever it may be,
try to study that person and be curious about them, learn from them, and then fake them for that and feel the generosity genuinely about what I got from this situation.
It's easier to do sometimes than others, but I think it comes back to that abundant mindset.
If you can approach it with an abundant mindset, then you can really consciously do this.
And when you actually learn something, you will feel the gratitude when you recognize that you are able to get something from that.
I love that this connects with your other original piece of advice of just turning something into, this is going to be fun.
Let's make this fun.
And in this case, it's like, make it great.
What can I learn from this person even though they're really annoying, means frustrating, and don't want anything done?
And then your other point of understanding what they want and using that as a way to pull them in your direction.
How do you figure out what they want?
Do you have any tricks for just like, here's how I learned what this person's motivations are and goals are?
Talk to other people that have worked with them before and have done so successfully.
So that might be people that work for them, because if you work for a person like that, you have to figure out, and you're successful working for that person, you probably understand what makes them tick.
So that's one or talk to people that are peers, anything like that to try to understand and build this view of a person that helps me empathize with them and also helps me understand what they may be wanting to get out of a situation and why.
I love that. That's, yeah, they don't have to be involved in that.
You just ask other people, what is this person's motivations?
And then ideas, connect what they want with the thing you're trying to achieve.
Beautiful. I really love this idea of when you're frustrated by someone just like reframing it to like, I'm grateful, I'm going to learn something from this person in our interaction, even though they're making life hard for me.
I really love that.
Another skill, I hear you're really strong at, and this comes from another one of your colleagues, Hema Mohan, shared that you're world class at giving feedback, giving hard feedback and receiving hard feedback.
And so I want to just ask you, what have you learned about how to do this?
It's very hard to give hard feedback.
That's why it's called hard feedback.
So either, from either direction, what have you learned about receiving hard feedback or giving hard feedback where someone actually hears you and doesn't get defensive?
The answer is so much.
I learned so much from it.
So maybe I'll start with receiving feedback.
So on the receiving feedback side, I think it's very natural to feel upset, defensive, all the negative emotions when you first see a piece of negative feedback, whether it's you're reading it in an employee survey or you're receiving it in a one -on -one from a direct report or from a manager or from a peer.
And I try to let myself just feel the things that I'm going to feel.
And sometimes that's an emotional feeling.
Sometimes that means I want to step out of the room or depends on who I'm talking to, but let myself feel the things that I'm going to feel.
And then once that's passed, whether that's a few hours or a few days, don't react.
Don't try to say, oh, I don't believe this.
Listen. And then ask myself, like, okay, well, where is this feedback coming from?
Why am I getting this feedback?
And try to be super curious about it.
And that might be going back to the person that gave me the feedback and asking, again, maybe asking someone that's a peer somewhere in the organization that might have more context and flavor to what the feedback really is.
Just trying to learn.
And then I can decide, do I think this is valid or not?
Is this something I should do something about or not?
Actually, all feedback I think is valid.
People's feelings are valid, but it doesn't mean that you need to do something about all of those things.
And so that has going through that process and letting myself ride the emotional wave and not judging myself for that, but then not reacting and letting myself then figure out and come back curious.
And I think when you come back curious, people then want to give you more feedback because they know that you're listening and that you're hearing what they say.
So the advice is feel it.
Don't block it off and be like, no, no, no, no, no, this isn't real.
So fully let your body go through the roller coaster of feeling the negative feedback.
Sometimes the feedback is just like, no, this isn't actually a thing.
Do you have any just heuristic of, I should actually pay attention to this deeply or just like, let me wait for more data points.
Yeah, I think in product, you receive feedback all the time for your organization or for yourself, and you can't make everyone happy.
Everyone wants a different thing from product.
So I think this comes up quite often, where there's a lot of feedback for the organization or for you as a leader, and you have to decide what to focus on and what not to focus on.
I always try to anchor on, well, what is best for the company and what does the company need for me and for my team at this point in time.
And there's stuff that is a must have on that list.
And there's stuff that's nice to have.
And sometimes, you know, there's just too many must haves to go deal with the nice to haves.
And you have to just be like, well, you know, I know this is a problem, or I know we could be 10 % better in this.
But it actually doesn't matter as much as fixing these things that are really, really important, and are really what's going to help my organization deliver what it needs to for the company and for the business overall.
In terms of receiving hard feedback, so you shared one example, or I shared an example where someone said you weren't strategic enough.
Is there another example of receiving hard feedback that you got?
You're like, that sucks either earlier in your career or more recently, anything else come to mind?
I mean, all the time.
So there's always hard stuff.
You know, it's like, well, people will give feedback of, oh, I feel like we're not moving fast enough on our roadmap and priorities.
We need to be doing more.
Why aren't we moving fast?
Or never heard that one.
Never heard that one before.
Or disparaging the direction that we're taking a certain product because they don't agree with it because a competitor is doing something else.
But we've decided for our reason that we're not going to go follow that path.
There's always something that people have negative feedback about.
And sometimes I'm like, okay, this is an eye roll.
I understand where they're coming from.
I understand why they're giving me this feedback.
But I also don't agree that we should change directions because of it.
So I don't know. Some of the things cut deeper than others.
But I think people are making personal statements about my team or they're feeling like, hey, the product team isn't listening to feedback.
Or the product team has a bad culture.
Or like, Annika isn't listening, things like that cut deep and are a lot more...
I know physiologically they make me kind of seize up a little bit.
But again, then I try to feel the things I'm going to feel and try to understand why are they saying that.
Why do they really feel that?
And what does that mean behaviorally that I have to do differently, or my team has to do differently, or maybe just two people on my team need to do differently and someone is extrapolating this out to be a much bigger problem than what it actually is.
Awesome. Okay, and then we're going to shift to what you've learned by giving hard feedback so that someone actually listens and then just put up a shield and like, it's not real.
So I think in giving feedback, you can never fully control how someone else is going to respond to that feedback.
All you can control is what you do, your body language and what you say.
And what I have found is that if I can convey, and I will say this very directly to people, 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.
And you do all of that setup and you don't just hope that they understand that you actually explicitly say that and you show that in your body language, then it makes the other person much more receptive to hearing whatever you have to say.
And then I think the other piece is that you should not, you've got to be direct, like the worst feedback is the kind of passive, aggressive feedback versus saying directly, this is what you're doing, or this is how you're being perceived in the organization.
And here are the three things that you can do to make it to change the way you're being perceived or to change the outcomes of what you're driving or become more strategic or whatever it is that I'm trying to give feedback on.
And I try, I do a lot of prep before I give someone a lot of feedback.
I really think about like, how can I frame this in a way that's going to resonate with them that doesn't come across as attacking them, but helps them understand why what they're doing isn't working or is being perceived poorly and try to give them examples.
And even examples that I've personally had to go through myself of how I've approached those situations and let them ask questions and brainstorm with them be part of the solution versus saying, here's all this feedback.
Now you go figure out what to do with it.
This reminds me of radical candor, basically make people feel like care deeply about them, but be very direct about what they can be doing better.
Are there like phrases or ways you kind of set up the conversation you talk, you mentioned a few of just like, I want to help you become the best version of who you could be and when you're capable of, is there any phrases you find helpful that you come back to often of just like a way to start the conversation?
Yeah, I think what I started with is like, I care a lot about you.
You have a lot of potential.
I can see you doing these kinds of things.
I can see you getting to where you want to go in your career.
Sometimes I even start the conversation by asking them, what do you want to do?
Where do you want to get go in your career?
And that will help me frame up which of these things are important because honestly, you know, if someone wants to be eventually like a CPO, the feedback I'm going to give to them is very different than if they're like, Hey, you know, like I don't really want to manage people ever.
I just want to be the best I see I can ever be.
I'm not going to give them the same feedback.
And so having that conversation upfront also allows them even before I jump into the feedback to give them their perspective of what they want.
And then I can tailor the conversation more to what they're looking for.
And I think that has really helped as well.
Make sure that I focus on the things that are going to really matter during the feedback conversations.
I also try to frame things as this is how you're being perceived, then you are doing X because I think even though it's hard to hear, Oh, Hey, this person doesn't perceive you in the way that you may think, then we can talk about, well, what are ways that we can change the perception.
I also think it's important because sometimes people are like, well, if you say, Hey, like I don't think you're X.
And then they're like, well, yes, I am.
And if you're saying, Hey, well, this is how other people perceive you, including me, but maybe this is not what you are intending.
And you actually say that you're giving them the benefit of the doubt of like, actually what they're being, what they want to do, what they're, how they're trying to show up is different than how people are perceiving them.
And you can have a better conversation then around, well, what can you do to change that perception?
You mentioned, uh, I see product managers and this is a good segue to your, you know, your big deal, fancy chief product officer person.
A lot of people listening to this podcast are early career PMs or trying to get into product.
Uh, I want to ask a couple questions along these lines.
One is about getting into products.
So interestingly, you got into product the same way I got into product, which is you used to be an engineer, and then you moved into product within a company, which is one of the, maybe one of the simplest ways to get into product potentially for people that are trying to break into product management.
What advice do you often give them of how they could go about doing it?
I know there's never the silver bullet, but what's your advice?
I definitely think doing it within the same company is a lot easier than trying to switch companies and switch jobs at the same time.
Because when you're in within a company, you've already built credibility, hopefully.
And if you haven't, then go crush it at your job.
So you build the credibility, then you can start to raise your hand, interact with the product team, take on projects and do things that allow you to get some experience and build a relationship with a leader on the product team who then may be willing to take a chance on you to put you into a product
role, even if you don't have the experience.
And especially when you're in within the same company, you bring other things to the table.
Let's say you're working in customer support.
Well, you have a huge amount of knowledge about what are the big problems that people are calling up the support team or opening tickets on the support team for.
And that is valuable knowledge for being a product manager.
If you're coming from the sales side, you're coming with a knowledge of how to sell the product, what really resonates, how do you do the objection handling?
And that can be a valuable perspective.
If you come from the engineering side, will you understand how the product is built?
And you understand that, you know, technical nuances of that, well, that can also be a valuable way to enter into the product team.
And that way, even though you don't have the direct product experience, you're still bringing something to the table, where you are going to have to get trained on core product management, but you're not going to be have to be totally trained on the business or the technology.
So is the advice, basically get a job in any function, not necessarily any function, but join a company, however you can essentially and then push to try to get into the product team.
Yeah, I think 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 word from there.
Ideally, there's something within the company, there's like some program, I imagine that does this sort of thing, some companies have something structured, some are just kind of ad hoc.
Is there anything there, you just like, like, should you talk about this in your interview, just like, hey, I really love to become product manager someday.
Do you have anything along those lines that would help me get into that or not?
Or she do not? Well, I think it depends.
So for instance, when I joined live ramp, which was my previous company as a software engineer, I actually did say in the interview process, I want to become a product manager.
I think at that point, it was still early in my career, I didn't know for sure.
But I said that now that was a 20 person startup.
So it was worth saying it because they didn't really have a product team.
And I wanted to put it out there that that was something I was interested in growing into.
If you're joining a 5000 person company, your hiring manager is probably not going to receive it well, if you're like, Hey, I'm interviewing for product marketing.
But really, what I want to do is go into product.
So it just kind of depends on the company and the stage, you have to play that, you have to play that wisely.
But I think once you're in a company, then finding a way to make a relationship with the product leader, or if you're in a startup that is really small, and they don't have product management, well, then you have the opportunity to take on projects, for sure that are product management related, because no one
is doing that work, really taking initiative to do that so that you can find an inroad into product management.
Kind of along these lines, you have a really unique perspective on new PMs, because you teach product management at Stanford, you've been doing that for a while.
I just want to ask, you work with a lot of people that are new to product thinking about getting to product, then get into product, what do you find are the things that new PMs are people getting into product most misunderstand about the role of PM or most surprised by when they become product managers?
When we interviewed students, as we were designing the class about what they wanted to learn, what was most surprising to me was that students would say, Well, can you teach me how to use Figma?
Can you teach me the tools that product managers are going to have to use?
What was surprising me about that was, I don't think it's the tools that you need to learn to be successful.
I think what you need to learn to be successful is how to take very ambiguous situations and consistently drive more and more clarity over time.
So it was interesting to see this mismatch between what people said they wanted to learn and what I felt they actually needed to learn.
Now, having taught this class for a few years now, I think talking to students who have then left and become product managers, they've seen a lot of this in practice now.
And I think they understand that, but there is this mismatch of people who haven't been in product management saying they want to go and thinking that they need to learn some tools or process versus the mindset and the skills required to clarify ambiguity.
Along those lines, I actually saw you somewhere in a talk or maybe something you wrote, talk about how creating this class and creating the curriculum helped you crystallize your own thinking on product and helped you crystallize the mental models of becoming a product manager.
Is there anything that you recall from that time of like, here's something that's really helped me understand about this function and this skill as you're putting together the class?
Yeah, I know any time you're teaching something, you have to figure out a way to synthesize it for another audience.
And so many of us have learned product management, just figuring it out on the job.
I don't know if there's a particular framework that I would say came out of that, but what I found very interesting was seeing the questions that people asked in the class, and then feeling like, oh, I understand how to answer this question, I can provide an example for it.
And that was super interesting to me because I didn't expect that coming out of the conversation.
Yes, like there's frameworks we developed to talk about ideation and product discovery and all of that, but I think those are fairly flexible frameworks.
What was most enlightening was being able to crystallize the answers to some of these questions, whether it was about like, how do you interact as a PM effectively with engineering?
Or how do you feel like what happens if the data shows you that it doesn't matter which direction you pick, like there's two both ways, how do you actually go about making those decisions?
It was very interesting being able to then have those conversations with students and bring in the real life examples.
And I found in some situations that actually go back to my own team and share the same answer that I came up with in class.
I was like, oh, this is actually a valuable thing to share with my team back at my company.
It reminds me of the recent chat I had with Alex Komorowski, where he talked about how oftentimes talking with people helps them uncover new insights that he had in his head.
And then he writes them down as soon as he says something that's really clever in any way.
He's like, okay, I'm going to remember that now.
Coming back to how to become a PM.
So you see all these people getting and taking this class, want to become product managers.
I know they're like Stanford students and they have people more likely hire Stanford people.
But I guess in terms of how they end up becoming PMs, if you were to look at the pie chart of the people that end up getting a PM job, what's the biggest chunk?
Is it they join at some other function and then move into product?
Did they just join as a junior PM somewhere?
How are people actually getting into the PM role in that class?
Yeah. I think very few are directly going to an established company and becoming a PM directly.
So I would say a big chunk of them, some of them are, but many of those then had PM experience to begin with or had engineering experience and then went to a technical company into a PM role.
The vast majority of them are joining product adjacent roles, or they're going to small startups where they might be doing product management, might be the first product manager, they might be doing product management plus plus chief of staff, something like that, where they get to put their hands in product
management. But it's a super small company.
So I think those have been the two most successful paths to get into product.
Awesome. That's a really interesting lens into how people actually get into this role.
Potentially final question, but we'll see where it goes.
I have this recurring segment on this podcast called AI Corner, where I try to get a sense of just how people are finding AI tools useful in their work and their life.
So let me just ask you, is there anything you've found useful in some AI tool in how you work?
Like something you found that helps you work more productively, more efficiently, either you or people on your team?
One way that we're using AI today is summarizing our user research calls.
So that has been really valuable because 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, and it'll find you the call, it'll find you the context, it'll find you the transcript and summarize exactly what we've learned from that call.
So we're starting to use that more and more, it's very powerful capability.
I definitely think that that kind of summarization of information for PMs is a big unlock for organizations.
And I think we're still in the very, very early days of AI making a meaningful difference to the way that PMs do their work.
Is there a specific tool that you love to help you with that, that you may want to give a shout out to, or is it something you guys built?
Yeah, we use Dovetail and it's been fantastic, connects into all of the Zoom calls and everything, does a great job with summarization, with search, everything.
Awesome. I love it when someone recommends a very awesome sponsor of the podcast.
Dovetail is an ongoing and excellent sponsor, so I'm really happy to hear that.
Amazing. Annika, is there anything else that you thought you wanted to share or that you want to leave listeners with that you think might be helpful before we get to a very exciting lightning round?
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.
I'm going to pull on this thread because this is such a powerful point and I think it's easy to just hear that.
It's hard to learn to do it.
Do you have any advice on just how to build that mindset?
Connects to many of the things you said.
How can this be fun?
How can I be grateful to this person that's annoying me and the things they might teach me?
Is there just anything you've done that has helped you build this mindset?
Journaling is very powerful.
So actually growing up, I journaled every single day of my life from when I was 13 to when I was 23.
And while I cringe to go back to read any of those, I think what it helped me do and build a practice around that I still do today is when I have a lot of thoughts going through my head, especially negative thoughts, just putting them all down on a piece of paper, writing them on my phone and trying
to explore why. Why am I feeling this way?
Why am I getting triggered?
What is it about the situation that's making me feel so strongly?
And when I put it down on paper, then it takes this thing that's abstract and things that I'm ruminating on and actually makes it possible for me to break it down and understand, well, okay, this is something I may feel, but the why behind it is a little irrational.
So let me let this go.
I realize that this is an irrational way to think about this.
Whereas other things I start to uncover, well, what is it about the situation?
And what is it that I need to do differently?
What's within my control?
And what does it maybe I need to go talk to someone about and say, hey, I need you to do this differently to be able to make myself feel better and make the situation better.
It's interesting. This is another thread that's been coming up a bunch on the podcast recently that when something is bothering you or something is hard, the more you actually listen to that part of yourself and like dive into it and explore it and give it a space to share and talk, the less power it
gets and the more space is created for the stuff you actually want to take space.
It's not what you would expect because usually it's like, no, shut up.
Everything's fine. But the more you actually hear that out, the easier things get.
So I love that you shared that.
It's like doing cognitive behavioral therapy on yourself.
That's how I think of it.
I've never actually done cognitive behavioral therapy, but I've read a lot about it.
And sometimes when I go through this, I'm asking myself the same questions that I think are asked in those settings.
Love that. All right, Monica, is there anything else that you wanted to share or leave listeners with?
I think that's all I could think of.
Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.
Are you ready? I'm ready.
All right. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.
Such a great book. Great.
Again, about mindset of how to approach hard things.
Second is I'm a huge fantasy sci -fi fan, so I love Brandon Sanderson's books.
I highly recommend those to people as well.
All I know about him is I saw videos of him after COVID where he just said I wrote five new books during COVID.
I was like, what is going on?
He is someone that is at the top of his craft and I admire people so much.
They're truly the elite in what they do and he is truly the elite in what he does.
And he writes a lot about writing.
He podcasts a lot about writing.
It's pretty impressive.
And he writes fantasy books?
Is that right? He writes fantasy.
Yep. Okay, cool. Feels like a lot of books to read though.
I'm just like, oh my God, books.
Okay, great. Next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?
Again, on the fantasy sci -fi track, I really like Fallout, which is a dystopian show based on a post -apocalyptic, post nuclear war world.
It's very entertaining.
Yeah, it's just like very quirky and fun.
Yes. And unexpected.
Awesome. Do you have a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love?
My eight foot iPhone charger.
So I have a cord that's very long that allows me to move around the house and do stuff while my phone is charging because my phone is always running out of batteries.
So I highly recommend getting a super long charging cord.
I've got one of those and I know exactly what you mean.
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life?
I think it comes back to dealing with lots of different types of people.
I really try to remind myself that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.
And I think that helps not only think about how you interact with other people, but also combat imposter syndrome because you have something to bring to the table and teach as well as anyone else, no matter what your age is, no matter what your background and leaning into that and realizing that people
can learn from you and you can learn from others in every single situation.
Final question. I heard that you're a big fan of Isaac Asimov.
Do you have a favorite Asimov book, one that you think if someone were to explore his cannon, they might want to start with?
I really like the foundation series, so starting with that is really good.
It's a very different style of writing, so you kind of have to stick with it, but it's good, I promise.
And I will build on that and say don't watch the show because the show is so different from the book series.
I don't know if you've seen it.
Yes, I have. And it's not nearly as good.
Yeah. Okay, I was just like, what is going on?
This is not the story.
Yes, it's very different.
What are they doing?
Amazing. Annika, this has been amazing.
We covered so much ground.
I feel like this is going to help a lot of people.
Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they want to follow up on things, maybe ask you questions or just check out the stuff you're up to, and how can listeners be useful to you?
So you can find me on LinkedIn, follow me, DM me, would love to connect.
And the way you can help me is we're actually redesigning our Stanford class right now for PMs.
And I would love to hear from you if you don't have any PM experience.
What is it that you wish a class could teach you?
And that would be super helpful for me as we're redesigning this class.
Thanks. Amazing. And the way they could share that is DM you on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Yes. Easy. Amazing.
Annika, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely my pleasure.
Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
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