“Why does this small product change take so much time? Why is tech so slow? It’s frustrating.” If you’re a PM, you’ve probably heard this complaint many many times. Especially when you work in a company that is not product or tech-first. During those moments, you have two choices in how you
After reading my previous post, a budding product leader pinged me, “Venkat if I have to follow your advice, I would have to start spending more than 50% of my time on stakeholder management”. This was her reaction to my last post on a framework for stakeholder management (article link in the
Why this post? While transitioning from an individual contributor to a leadership role, your perspective would change from “How do I make an impact?”, “how do I leverage others’ expertise to make an outsized impact?”. So, at leadership levels, the importance of stakeholders increases multifold. Given this importance, a leader needs to
Aarti joined Bell Technologies, a fast-growing startup as a Group PM to lead customer experience. In her role, she had to deal with Karan, a tough stakeholder. Karan used to challenge Aarti by constantly questioning her approach, priorities, and decisions. Aarti initially took everything at face value and kept answering his questions,
Bhavna, the Director of products, is having a tough time with Kishore, her engineering counterpart. Whenever a project or a feature is lined up, the first thing you hear Kishore say is ‘No, we can’t take up this feature’. Kishore is a veteran engineering manager with Enterprise products background. He often tries
Ravi joins Blee-blee as VP, Products. Blee-blee is a publicly-traded company and a market leader in one of the SaaS spaces. Ravi was hired to drive a product-driven culture in a traditionally sales-driven company. On the day of joining, the CEO recommended to Ravi – “Spend time understanding the journey the company
Pravir was hired by the CEO of Duck-duck Technologies to lead new initiatives. Duck-duck is a leader in the food-delivery space with a good product-market fit but still not fully profitable. The CEO and the board saw opportunities beyond food delivery. They wanted to make big bets on adjacent spaces. The startup
This is post/article-1 under the topic “Stakeholder Management” under the series “Growth to CPO” Gautam is elated as he has been nominated for promotion to Director of Products. He is very confident that his promotion would go through because he has achieved his goals for the year On the day of promotion
This is the first post under the topic ‘Stakeholder management in the Product Leadership series Monica joined Bling-bling as its first product manager. Bling-bling was a promising tech startup in the consumer product space. At the time of joining, she didn’t know that this was going to be a rocketship ride. In
