Manik Gupta

Clear demonstrated impact from an end to end product cycle to me is probably one of the better indicators of readiness for someone to take on more. You basically want to give them more, because now they have a pattern of doing things properly.

Do people want to work with them? Do people at some point, as they go up and become more senior, do people want to work for them? Ultimately people make choices. And if you have a bunch of smart people and they're making smart choices and they're choosing this person to follow or to be with and work with them, there is a ton of value in that.

The PM is an enabler. Your job is to really make the team successful. The PM is the CEO of the product - that's one of the most incorrect things in the world.

Design for consumer products is such a critical part of how you build the right pull from consumers these days. Poorly designed products have no chance at this point. Your craftsmanship and the design capabilities have to be A plus.

Building consumer products is very hard. I think people think it's easy, because each of us is a consumer. We think of ourselves as a good user, we think of our friends as users, we think of our family as users. And we say, 'Well, if we just build it for ourselves and for our family and friends...' But man, it's hard. It takes a long time to get things right.

We had a choice to make between launching something which will take six months, versus launching something that we can launch in a very small-ish kind of way, but launch it in a month. And we chose the latter, because when we did that, I remember people were giving high five to each other, people were saying, 'Hey, you know what? This is great. We put something in front of customers.'

In order to motivate the team, one of the best tricks that I came up with, and I learned this from a bunch of other people also, is you just give a team a win. Winning really, really drives a lot of energy.

Surround yourself with the best people you can find. If you create enough opportunities, especially early on in your career, around hanging around people who are doing interesting things and they're doing things which really are different, or they're doing things in a different manner and it's exciting, the right things will happen.

Play the long game. Once you find someone like that, stick to them. As long as they want to hang out with you, but just stick to them. Because you will go on to do multiple things over your career with the same set of people. And the shared trust and experience that you build with A plus people is just going to go a long way.

There's a question before that question, which is how do you find company product fit? A company essentially is a portfolio of products, and every large company, medium-sized company also has a portfolio. Every company has unique strengths and weaknesses. How does that product, assuming it's successful... does it actually serve the right place in a company's product portfolio?

Build for the world from day one. Understand that there are going to be some nuances that you'll have to solve as you drive adoption in certain markets, but don't over index on building market specific solutions, because consumers have moved on from that kind of a model.

Play the long game. Once you find someone like that, stick to them. As long as they want to hang out with you, but just stick to them. Because you will go on to do multiple things over your career with the same set of people. And the shared trust and experience that you build with A plus people is just going to go a long way.