Manik Gupta founded his first e-commerce company straight out of college. Since then he’s spent over 20 years in the tech industry, working at companies including HP and Google. Most recently, he served as Chief Product Officer at Uber.
Manik Gupta founded his first e-commerce company straight out of college. Since then he’s spent over 20 years in the tech industry, working at companies including HP and Google. Most recently, he served as Chief Product Officer at Uber.
He recently sat down with Product Faculty members for an exclusive AMA, where he shared his insights on what makes a great product manager, managing innovation, and how he sees the role evolving.
What makes a great product manager?
Over the years, Manik has been involved in hiring and developing many PMs. While the role has evolved, he picked up on three different qualities that separated the truly great from the average PM, regardless of whether they’re working in small or large companies.
Firstly, strong PMs have high levels of energy which fuels their curiosity. They’re naturally inquisitive about everything and have a strong desire to understand how things work. That includes how people work together, what problems their customers have, what the competition is doing, and so on. This is vital when it comes to getting people excited about a new product.
They will also have exemplary communication skills. This is especially vital in the current environment, where remote work is the new normal. While everyone can benefit from effective communication, it’s even more important for PMs, who need to frequently synthesize and explain complex ideas.
Finally, great PMs typically have a low ego, which encourages collaboration. They’re interested in amplifying everyone’s voices and bringing out the best in others, rather than standing on their soapbox and insisting on being in charge of every last detail. They genuinely have the company and customer’s best interests at heart and, as a result, are more likely to be successful.
Developing long-term thinking and identifying trends
No product is built in isolation, but rather has to take into account changing customer behaviors and competitor actions. PMs need to be aware of the big platforms—such as Apple, Google, and Facebook—and keep an eye on what they’re doing.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. These platforms are so big, with so much going on, that it can seem impossible to keep track of everything. However, by focusing on the relevant, individual facets (for example, the latest developments in iOS or Android), you can stay up to date.
With that platform awareness, Manik advocates looking out for waves. We had the web wave, then there was the app wave, followed by the social wave. Each of these waves had a huge impact, touching every corner of people’s lives in different ways. By keeping track of these big trends, then contextualizing them to your product, you’ll be in the best position to take advantage.
Understanding product growth
Even when a product is in line with current trends, that doesn’t guarantee growth. From the early stages of a product, PMs need to understand how to attract customers and then increase that adoption to make their product viral. While it may not be easy, we have more information available today on how to succeed. There are a lot of great playbooks out there, with industry experts and thought-leaders sharing their insights, frameworks, and processes. Take advantage of this knowledge and see what worked for them while avoiding their mistakes.
It’s not just numbers you need to worry about though. When it comes to growth there are certain inflection points. By the time you get to a million users, it’s easy to think you don’t need to worry about growth, but that would be a mistake.
For example, when you're going from one geography to another, you need to manage that change, taking care of localization and operating on someone else’s turf. Another inflection point is when you go from one product to a multi-product company, such as when Uber branched out with Uber Eats. Similarly, you might want to release a new feature set for an existing product.
In all these examples, you need to understand your growth levers and how you can leverage the large platforms to grow. A big part of that today is experimentation. With the tools and frameworks now available, experimentation has become democratized. PMs need to rely more on data science today to be more effective.
What companies can learn from Uber
Uber set up cross-functional teams, who were then given the autonomy and the resources needed to pursue their objectives.
Early on, this led to some duplication of effort. People would build their own tech stacks and create their own processes. Engineers would end up writing their own versions of code. Although this might seem inefficient, Uber wasn’t worried about that. Instead, they wanted teams that were free to innovate. While this can lead to problems at scale, this mindset enabled people in the early stages to run at the big problems, without having to wait six months for approval from some VP.
The company culture at Uber was also advantageous to growth; the people in charge were builders, those who had demonstrated the natural ability to be zero to one. These are the people who just love attacking a problem from scratch and building the first set of products. They may not be the ones who scale things but, initially, you need to find the people who are after the kernel of things. Having the right set of people who will go after the problem leads to rapid growth.
Manik also learned a lot about how to be a better PM at Uber. When he was at Google, he didn't have to worry too much about distribution; he was working on Google Maps, a free product that was on every Android phone, with no connection to business outcomes. As a result, he got spoilt. At Uber, it was different. It was a paid service that needed to be distributed, with clearly defined business goals. As a result, Manik had to prioritize rapidly, a skill that he believes would’ve made him a better PM if he’d learned it earlier.
Achieving alignment in large companies
One of the big challenges companies face is making sure that all teams are pointing in the same direction, which only gets harder as organizations grow. Although no one likes it, once you get to a certain level it becomes necessary to plan the organization’s priorities. Without a plan, you can never identify and work on your top bets.
You need to plan for the top three bets and then allocate the necessary resources before you do anything else. Otherwise, everyone will either end up confused or setting their own priorities and doing their own thing. This requires a top-down approach, where you identify the priorities, allocate resources, then set up dashboards with clearly defined metrics that you can use to measure success.
Once you’re clear on your priorities, it's all about communication and repetition. Every opportunity you get, outline your priorities. You can’t assume that everyone has got the message, especially in large organizations. New people will be hired, others will change teams, and some will just need to be reminded.
Managing and measuring innovation
While most companies recognize the value of innovation, it can be difficult to innovate when you have work to do. Successful businesses need to balance their essential tasks with new ideas.
One of the frameworks Manik uses is the 70/20/10 rule. Implemented by Eric Schmidt at Google, the 70/20/10 framework means that you focus 70% of your resources on core business activities, those that are important in the short-term. 20% goes on related business activities, the type of tasks that will pay off further on. The remaining 10% should be spent on your wild bets. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re successful; the important thing is to adopt a mindset where you set aside resources for innovation.
This allows you to allocate portfolio priorities. Without that 70% spent on core activities, the bills won’t get paid. However, you still have room to innovate while making sure your priorities are addressed.
Having set aside time for innovation, the next step is to measure it. There’s no magical ‘innovation’ metric you can start tracking. Rather, you need to connect your innovation experiments with business outcome metrics. Plan in advance how you’re going to test new ideas in terms of how they’ll affect your business. Are you looking to win more market share? Improve NPS? Grow revenue? There’s no one single metric but, instead, they should be established for each specific project.
The evolution of the PM role and its future
There have been a couple of trends regarding the PM role that Manik has observed over the last few years. For example, the PM role and function is evolving into more of a GM role.
This isn’t completely new; Amazon has been doing this for years, with their two-pizza teams led by a single person. Now though, because of the advances in technology and innovation, almost all the big companies are thinking of themselves as product companies.
That means the role is expanding. Rather than just dealing with design and engineering departments, PMs now have to interact with teams throughout the business and take a more holistic view of product management. While many PMs are already doing that, there are still plenty of PMs who don’t do this at all.
Looking forward, Manik has observed that getting past gatekeepers and acquiring customers is getting harder. As a result, tomorrow’s PMs will need to develop better customer acquisition and retention skills.
2020 has meant more companies have been forced to move to more remote work. We don’t know yet if this shift will be permanent but, in Manik’s opinion, it’s highly likely that parts of it will stay. So, how do you build remote teams? How do you work in a remote environment? How can you increase productivity, both for yourself and your teams? As PMs, it is your responsibility to drive that in the new work environment.
Manik also believes PMs will need to adopt an experimentation mindset. It’s central to how products get built today, but it requires reliable data that you can trust. It doesn’t matter what framework you’re using; if it's garbage in, then it’s garbage out. PMs need reliable data pipelines in place so they can confidently make decisions based on the results.
In the past, customer service teams have been so far removed from product, but that’s changing. Going forward, a strong connection between customer service and product teams is vital. For example, leading indicators of why people are churning are really helpful for product teams. As a result, PMs should set up closed loops between the departments to quickly internalize this feedback and build stronger, more innovative products.
If you’d be interested in learning more, the Product Faculty course will give you an in-depth knowledge of product management, along with opportunities to practice and get feedback from industry experts. Learn more and sign up today.
