 Hello everyone, wherever you are. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to another fireside chat. Today I'm joined with Nitin, who is the VP of product at Smartsheet. Nitin, thank you so much for joining me today. Hello, Alan. Thank you so much for your time and I'm excited to talk at this time. So we were chatting about this a little bit before we went online, but you are a long-serving member of the product school community. You are a veteran of the product school community. You've done chats for us. You've been an instructor. You've done it all. But I'd love to know more about your personal story in product management. How did you get started in product? Yeah, thank you so much, Alan. Calling me a veteran sounds me old, but I'm really young. I'm really young at heart. So yeah, I can tell you about my personal story. My educational background is I have my undergrad. I did my engineering in computer science and got my MBA, as well as enrolled into another master's degree. So I started off as a software developer, dev manager for many years of my life. I was almost a dev manager for six, seven years of my life. What I enjoyed the most was I'm an extrovert. I enjoyed a lot of this driving business results, conversations with customers, problem solving when I was a developer during my first two, three jobs. And these experiences or these skills really led me to moving into a formal role at Microsoft into a PM. And the best part about being a PM at Microsoft was the role was multifaceted. It had aspects of deep technology expertise. I was working on the operating system, the cloud systems at those point of time, defining user designs, understanding a very deep understanding of market economics, competitive landscape, customer needs. So I think that really helped me change my career from a software engineer, software dev manager into product management. So that's really the beginning of how I started my career in product management. And now you've climbed the ladder up to VP of product. What does it mean to you to be a VP of product? Because these titles, they fluctuate across companies, across industries. So in your mind, what does it mean to you to be a VP of product? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And it also, I think that the question is also relevant at what stage your company is, whether your company is a private company, which is not listed on any of the stock exchanges, your company, a public company. So a company at a small, if you're a VP at a small startup, your roles, responsibilities and the work you do is way different than what you would do as a VP when you are at a public company. So I think that is one big difference. But before I come to being what a VP really does, I want to give everyone a listener, people who are tuned in, an aspect of what product management is. Because I think it's very important to understand at a macro level what product management is. In my belief and a practitioner of product management for so many years, it is a mix of art. It's a mix of science, technology, insights, data, economics. All of this together is product management. There is just no one aspect of it. It's a combination of all this. And when I think about being a product manager, a VP of product management specifically, it's almost like you have to be strong in multiple aspects on a time axis, that you have to be forward thinking. That means you're really good at strategic thinking. You're a visionary. You can see the future. Second piece is you're great at execution. You are great at doing what is currently getting done in your company. And the third piece is learning from the past. Whatever has happened, whatever your teams have done, that are you learning from it to build a better team? So that is one aspect of what does it mean to be a product manager? A VP of product management is this axis of time that forward looking, current looking and learning from the past. And if I take it to another framework, big fan of frameworks, it is as a VP, you are responsible for multiple things in your core role. You're responsible for driving the vision. You're responsible for defining the strategy. What is going to support that vision? That for example, my vision is I want my company to make $5 billion in ARR. So that is the vision. What is the strategy behind in order to supplement that particular vision? Had a really strong sense of defining the design. It could be user design, customer design, all aspects of design, and the last particular pieces on execution. That how do you really help these particular things come up? So there is an axis, there is a portion of this time. There is this portion of these core skills. And at the end, this is a multi-dimensional role. It's not trivial. What you really want your VP or leader to do in your company is be a very strong collaborator, ability to see how your product fits in into not only your space, but also your peer space, as well as the overall strategy. And the last one is really helping the overall company as well as the industry evolve the existing product and capabilities. So I think that is a really good sense of what a vice president of product management does at a public company. And well, across the board, no matter what company you're in or what level you're at, one of the things we talk about a lot in product management is being obsessed with the problem and not with the solution. What are some of the problems that you're obsessed with at the moment? What problems are you the most passionate about? Yeah, I think that's a great question. If I have to articulate what are the problems I'm really excited about is number one is the first one is making people efficient, making people productive. That whether it is a B2B, B2C, any kind of segment there, I think this whole aspect of helping people save time and becoming more productive. The second piece is around making businesses more efficient. And the third aspect really is empowering people, that people are able to see data which is exposed through really transparent and scalable systems. These systems are inclusive. They don't have any kind of bias in those systems. Scalable have a deep sense of technology across domains and verticals. I think that is the first piece which I am super excited about and which help the human race become better. And this is my philosophy not only in terms of where I work but also what I do, Alan, is I advise companies, I'm on board of three companies right now. All the three companies, their mission is how do we become better? How do we become help businesses become better? How do we help people become better with productivity and things like that? So that is the first part on what I'm passionate about. And I think you had another question there which was around expertise, that how do you build expertise? Is that right? No, not quite yet but I'll get to that in a second. Yeah, so I'm super excited about. Yeah, awesome. So well, I'd love to chat about expertise a little bit. One of the things that I was wanting to ask you about is as you've stepped into a leadership role, that comes with not a different skill set to that of product management because all product managers are leaders in a way. But what additional skills have you had to develop or learn as you've moved sort of higher up the ladder? As you've moved into a position of authority, has that kind of changed the skills that you use in your day to day? Oh, that's a great question. And what I understand when you say position of authority, I think you mean someone like VP at a public company or someone, but yeah, I get it. On a day to day basis, a lot of things don't change. That you are still expected to make data-driven decisions. You're expected to be focused on your mission. You're expected to lead from the front with empathy, have very strong clarity. But what changes is the quantum of it and also the judgment call? That when you are relatively junior to your career, I think you make a lot of decisions with 100% of data. And as you step higher, the amount of data which is available to you may not be 100% available or may not be 100% accurate. And that's where the sense of judgment that for example right now, I'll give you a very specific example, crypto. Is crypto going to be the next big financial instrument or not? It's not very clear. There is no guideline. There are guidelines. Obviously, I shouldn't say there is no guideline. There are guidelines, but it's very ambiguous. It's very amorphous. And that's where as a leader, the ability to make decisions with very incomplete data is a super skill you need to build when you get into these leadership roles. The second thing is as I have gotten and risen up through the ranks, I have learned a lot of new different skills. My primary role was I was an engineering leader, a product leader. But specifically in the last four, five years, I have gained skills in semantics and syntax of merger and acquisitions, corporate development. So that is an area I had never worked in and I did a bunch of these big level acquisitions and also during my time at my current employer and my past employer. The second one is also that when you are working at a public company, there are certain rituals or certain things you do. Like for example, the quarterly earnings call that every three months, you get in front of the Wall Street, you share your numbers publicly saying, hey, this is how what our balance sheet looks like. I think the learning, the details of how the market works, how the analyst relations are, how do you prep for these quarterly earnings call is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who's getting into this level or this scale. And then other couple of examples are crafting the product strategy for the entire company, not just your particular area because you're just not looking at your own area. You're looking at how does this fit into the overall company strategy, product strategy, how does it really help me get to the one year, three or five year vision, how does it move the needle and also newer skills around marketing, product marketing, monetization, financial projections, go-to-market strategies, global expansion. And I think all these six, seven things which I've talked about, I have really gotten a lot of opportunities and experiences, thankful to all the employers where I've worked and also my own startup which I did during the last five years that these were skills I didn't have exposure to almost five, six years back. So I think these are the kind of skills and experiences I have gained especially coming into moving more into leadership level in the companies. And another really important aspect of leadership, it's not just the impact that you have on your company or on your product, it's also the immeasurable impact you have on the people who you're actually leading, the teams that you're influencing every day. What would you say are some of the marks of great leadership when it comes to being a mentor for the next generation? How can product leaders stand out as great leaders for the next generation? Oh, that's a great insightful question. Let me just think about what are the most essential ones. If I think the biggest one, the biggest one which comes to my mind is building a culture of trust and collaboration across the company and from top to bottom, bottom up, laterally, whatever direction you go, that is the biggest, biggest marks of great leadership. That it's almost, you are people together. Almost it's almost, there's a lot of camaraderie in the company with trying to get to a particular mission, having a culture of trust and collaboration. And when you have that, you can do magic. You can really do magic, that you can grow your sales, you can grow your revenue. There is nothing which is unsurmountable. And one of the biggest, biggest reasons companies fail is not because they don't have smart people, is because the culture is not conducive to get the best out of people. I think that's the biggest one in my mind. So the culture of trust and collaboration and accountability. So that is the number one, I would say. I will just kind of share as I'm thinking through this. The second one, I would say, is having a culture where you measure people by the impact they create, obviously the positive impact they create, the value they bring, and how they're able to influence others. I think that would be the second thing, which is very quantifiable. That you can really measure how people are influencing, how are they building impact, and how they actually create value. The third one, which again is a really big skill in my mind from leadership perspective, is being unflappable. You will always have crisis. You will always have failures. In those times, how you manage to keep your cool, how you lead from front with empathy, and not try to do a post-mortem at that point of time, but try to solve the problem and take people into confidence while that crisis is happening. I think that is really, again, a hallmark of a great leader, that being unflappable. And I'll give you one specific example, not trying to be political. I'm not a Republican or a Democrat. That's something like President Obama, that even if when the greatest crisis in the country were going on, but when you saw him on television or whenever you saw him in a public domain, he was unflappable, cool, and not really responding to the crisis because that gave a lot of confidence to the 330 million citizens in the country. And again, I'm not trying to make a political statement, but I'm just giving that as an example that how can you see someone who is unflappable in crisis. And then again, other things, you asked about marks of great leadership. How are you actually building your team? It's just not about your personal contributions, but how are you getting the best and the brightest of the talent to come and work for you and getting the best of them? How are you creating this? How are you creating a team with a diverse set of experiences, not only diversity in terms of the classic diversity, but diversity in terms of thought process, diversity in terms of leadership, diversity in terms of experiences, skill set, and how are you retaining those people? Because especially when you are at a leadership level, it's not just about the problem solving. It's also taking people along and creating a structure and a framework within which you solve the problems. And last other, last, last ones here would be also to think about how do you build quality? How are you in communication with your teams, with your press, with the analysts, Wall Street, everybody? I think that's a very important aspect of communication and ensuring accountability through scalable models, whether your team is a team of five, whether it's a team of 180, whether it's a team of 18,000 or 280,000, which may be in one country, one geography, five continents, it really doesn't matter. At the end, you have to build that kind of scalability in your team through this accountability and the kind of frameworks. Again, a long answer to your short question, I can go on on for hours, what I think great leadership should be, but these are the top characteristics which come to my mind as I think about them right now. A long answer, but all great stuff, so I think we're good. One of the things that I just picked up on in your answer there was about the importance of having diversity of thought in product teams and about how we should consciously be building teams that bring a different perspective, not just a room full of engineers who have become managers, because then they're all going to have that engineer's mindset. One of the things that we've actually had as sort of an ongoing conversation within the community the last couple of weeks is the act of hiring people into your team that don't come from specifically a product management background. Maybe they were in marketing previously or they were a UX designer. As a leader giving advice to other leaders, what should you look for in a candidate who maybe doesn't have product management experience but has other skills that they can bring to the table so that you can bulk out your team with that diverse perspective? Again, Alan, I'm so grateful to you for asking this question. I will, before I answer this question, I also want to give a context to the people who are listening in. I'm also a professor at University of Washington. I teach, been teaching there for many, many years. I've been teaching at private school and other areas, non-conventional schools. This matters to me a lot. Because what happens is when people are looking to fill a certain role, they have a certain fixed mindset that, hey, this is what I want. The way to look at it is that there are a lot of these skills you can teach people. I'll give you a very specific example before I get into what are the kind of skills you know, have you hired that I was actually teaching a cohort almost three, four years back. I had someone who was a US military veteran, a Marine actually, had just gotten like, had retired from the military after 10 years of service, had done deployments and was trying to get into product management. And you'll all be great to know I, unfortunately, cannot share his name, but he's a senior product manager at Gartner. And the reason, the way how he approached his career and while working with me was there are a lot of these leadership skills he had as part of his experience being a Marine. Leadership skills, ability to handle ambiguity. Just think about you're a person in the military, you are in a war zone and everything is ambiguous, right? So lot of that skill on people management, on time management, dealing with ambiguity, problem solving, it's just not product. They have solved this at a much bigger scale. So the ability for him to take those skills what he had and put that in context of product management was a great experience for him to sell his candidacy for another role. So the first thing I always tell people is it is not essential. You need to have a computer science degree to be a product management. Absolutely not. What you need is a skill where you can simplify experiences for users. You can explain why you're building a product. Who is it going to serve? What are the advantages of using the product? It is not about what particular, yes you might have an understanding of how to build it from a technology perspective but the what, the why and the when is the more important factor when you are defining product management. So again I'll get to answering your questions specifically on diversity is that don't just hire people from a computer science background and I have nothing against people from computer science background. I am from computer science background but when you think of product and that's the reason initially when I was talking about what product management is it's a mix of multiple things. It's an art and science. It is technology. It's economics. It is market dynamics. It's data and if you don't have people from those kind of backgrounds and a lot of times it's also that if you're not able to see the big picture you will not be a successful product manager. So that is very essential when you are building your own product teams or any kind of team that you are picking people with diverse set of experiences diverse set of schools of thought how to build product whether it's B2B is completely different than B2C. So I think the more diversity you have the more beefier and deeper experiences you will build in the product and at the end your team should represent your customers. Our customers are don't you know they are not the same right. They have different aspirations different line of thinking different schools of thought and your team should represent that as well. So I think that is a very simple analogy that your team should kind of represent your customers. Your customers are worldwide they are from everywhere in the world. Your team should reflect that because at the end product managers are also the representatives of the customers in the teams in the company. So that's that's how I see it. Again long answer long winded answer to your short question but as you can see I'm really passionate about this area. So yeah. I love the long winded answer so you're safe. I can imagine the the marine you mentioned I imagine being unflappable was probably one of his major skills as he moved into product leadership. Someone comes to him saying oh my god V1 has a bug and he goes this is nothing compared to what I've seen. Like we've got this don't worry. So another of the things I wanted to ask you is that product people in general love learning big lifelong learners all of us. What are some of the things that you're learning about at the moment or some of the things that are on your list of things you want to learn about. Oh wow. Yeah actually that's also one of the things I would like to share that that's a great question that the learning should never stop just because you did your undergrad or your master's doesn't mean the learning has to stop. And the people who are super successful in life I have seen are always always learning and it doesn't always have to be related to what you're doing for work but I think if you're intellectually curious and you have a mindset that you want to learn think a lot of these experiences help you build what you want to. What I am I learning these days there are two three things I am trying to learn and become good at. The number one is area I think I had done a talk also about this with product school plugin for product school. So there is a talk I had done almost two years back about reducing bias in AI and reducing bias in product. I think this particular piece of explainable AI that where your algorithms are explainable or not explainable and how do they factor you know algorithms and experiences I think that is that is one area I'm super curious about I read a lot of papers from the university and like research on that what is happening in the explainable AI part of the world. The second piece which I'm learning is on more on the business side of things that how do you have build a flywheel which helps you build a multi-billion dollar ARR business and helps you sustain and become beefier because as you see if you have a run rate of millions of dollars three digit millions of dollars or one digit or two digit billions of dollars in ARR building that over a period of time on a sustained basis and quarter to quarter is a very hard and in one sense unsurmountable at times. So ability to do that constantly I think that is you know that's the second thing I'm learning and what I also do is I read a lot I read books I read blogs I listen to a lot of podcasts so I think that's that's how I gather all this information and one of the things I can share with the team very quickly people listening in is I don't watch a lot of TV I've cut down my on my television time a lot in the I'm not saying you should not you know binge watch you should absolutely but television was something I thought was taking so much of my time once I cut down television it really helped me evolve as a person and learn so if you can try to read more and cut down on TV Excellent advice there so I'm conscious that we're running out of time and the events team will smack me on the wrist but I am going to sneak in just one last question what's some advice that you would love to go back in time and give your younger self as you were embarking on a career in product Yeah that's a great question again great finish it's a marathon it's not a sprint so pace yourself well you have a career of 30 40 years so don't get intimidated by failure so that is the first one it's a marathon not a small sprint and play the infinite game that when I think there's a book I can recommend it's infinite finite play I don't remember the exact name but I think that's a brilliant book that play the infinite play where you are playing constantly not really worrying about the short term results but playing in the game so that you you're there to learn and explore be patient with yourself success is never overnight it takes years and years I'm still trying to be successful I have been in the industry for 18 years now and I'm still trying to find my path so it's okay so you don't you're not defined by a timeline and things so be patient with yourself and the last one is success is a lousy teacher failure will teach you more as compared to success so be comfortable with failure I actually just had done a post on my LinkedIn around a year like a month back on that and I really believe in that that failure will teach you much more things as compared to success so that's my four you know things to myself if I can do that travel back in time and tell myself absolutely I especially love the point about failure being a great teacher every time I screw something up I think to myself well this is a good time this is a good thing that I'll be able to talk about in future interviews when they ask me so when was the time that you learned from failure and like I'm logging it I know I'll have it I'll have it ready so that's all the time we have unfortunately Nitin thank you so much for joining me it's been an absolute pleasure to chat with you today thank you so much Alan and my shout out to folks at Product School Alan, Carlos, Alejandra everyone who I work with you guys are doing so much for the community and I really appreciate what you are doing and a lot of us who are with Product School think it's an amazing amazing platform for people to come in and learn so my best wishes to the whole team and all of you are listening in well thank you so much Nitin and I didn't even tell him to say that he said it by himself is that amazing