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
1. Surround Yourself with A-Players
Surround yourself with the best people you can find, especially early in your career, to learn from them and create opportunities for growth.
2. Play the Long Game
Once you find A-plus people, stick with them to build shared trust and experience, as this will lead to multiple future collaborations and long-term success.
3. Cultivate Tech Optimism
Develop strong technology optimism and passion, focusing on projects that use technology to solve real human needs at scale, to guide your career choices and drive meaningful impact.
4. Manage Ambiguity & Motivate
Learn to manage ambiguity and maintain personal motivation during tough times, as a leader’s attitude is infectious and crucial for sustaining team morale.
5. Ground in Core Mission
During chaos, stay grounded by focusing on the core mission and the positive impact of your work to maintain motivation for yourself and your team.
6. Leverage Energizing Activities
Identify activities that energize you during difficult times and intentionally incorporate them into good times to leverage compounding positive effects on your well-being.
7. Create Small Team Wins
To motivate teams during challenging periods, intentionally create opportunities for small, quick wins to build confidence and demonstrate immediate value.
8. Prioritize A+ Design
Prioritize A+ design-led thinking and meticulous attention to detail in consumer products, as poor design significantly reduces chances of success and user pull.
9. Focus on Critical Journeys
Maintain strong focus and prioritization by building only one or two well-designed features that address critical user journeys to avoid confusing users and deliver core value.
10. Define & Instrument Metrics
Define, instrument, and codify clear metrics for all product stages to objectively measure success, guide decisions, and avoid confusion among stakeholders.
11. Foster High Ship Velocity
Foster a culture of high ship velocity and rapid experimentation, enabling engineers to quickly deploy code, observe results, and learn continuously to drive product development.
12. Build Strong, Empathetic Talent
Build a strong, empathetic talent pool across product, design, data, engineering, and marketing functions, as this underpins all other capabilities for consumer product success.
13. Assess Consumer Stack
Assess your team’s performance against the five “consumer stack” capabilities (design, focus, metrics, velocity, talent) using a report card, aiming for A-level execution over time to achieve meaningful results.
14. Ensure Company-Product Fit
Before pursuing product-market fit, ensure “company-product fit” by verifying if a new product aligns with the company’s unique strengths and portfolio; avoid projects that don’t fit.
15. Invest in Unique Strengths
Invest in products only if they leverage your company’s unique strengths, create distinct customer value, and can be executed better than competitors.
16. Clarify CEO-CPO Roles
Before hiring a CPO or VP of Product, CEOs must clearly define their own desired involvement in product strategy and execution to avoid role overlap and ensure the new leader has clear ownership.
17. Demonstrate Real Product Impact
To earn promotion, demonstrate real, end-to-end product impact by rallying teams behind a hypothesis, driving execution, and learning from both successes and failures.
18. Cultivate Clarity & Energy
Develop the ability to create clarity and positive energy within your team, as this “how” is crucial for career progression and avoiding becoming a time sink.
19. Build Strong Followership
Cultivate strong followership, where colleagues and team members actively choose to work with and for you, as this indicates readiness for senior roles.
20. Drive Product Trajectory Inflection
Drive a significant, causal inflection point in a product’s trajectory to create a major career inflection point, signaling readiness for greater responsibility.
21. Master Manager of Managers
Successfully transition from a first-line manager to a manager of managers by effectively structuring teams, delegating, and coaching your direct reports, as this is a key career inflection point.
22. Avoid Process Over Progress
Avoid prioritizing process over actual progress; ensure processes facilitate shipping and learning, rather than hindering them, especially early in your career.
23. Be an Enabler, Not Self-Centered
Do not be self-centered or believe the “PM is CEO” myth; instead, focus on enabling and making the entire team successful.
24. Humbly Admit Mistakes
Optimize for learning early in your career by humbly admitting and learning from mistakes; seek a company culture that supports this growth.
25. Build Globally from Day One
Build consumer products for a global audience from day one, as core user interface and expectations are largely universal, localizing only at the edges (language, pricing, legal).
26. Avoid Gut Feeling
Avoid relying solely on gut feeling for product direction, especially when raising money, as it’s an expensive way to discover mistakes.
27. Leverage Product Analytics
Use product analytics tools like Mixpanel to find product-market fit faster and transition from MVP to a successful company.
28. Use Coda for Operational Loops
Use Coda to create and share best practices (e.g., OKRs, planning, roadmaps) within an organization, leveraging its content loops for easy adaptation.
29. Share Product Building Insights
Share new patterns, techniques, tips, or best practices for building products or finding product-market fit with Manik Gupta to foster collective learning.