Leading Product Management Consultant on what CPOs actually care about

Speaker A: Ready to move to the next level in your product career? I'm Shobhit from Intentional Product Manager. Join me as we discuss ways to help you stand out in your job search and your career so you can have more impact and make more money. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Intentional Product Manager podcast. I'm your host, Shobit Sug. Today I'm sitting down with Shardul Mehta. He's the $100 million plus non Silicon Valley product Jedi. And that tit is very well earned. Shahdol has spent about 30 years or so in product management across Fortune 1 hundreds like Capital One startups, healthcare, fintech, the Department of Defense where he was honored by the Secretary of Defense and most recently led launch of a gen AI medical coding product. Sounds pretty fancy. Targeting a, uh, $300 million ARR opportunity, he founded ProductCamp DC. I love ProductCamp, ran an improv comedy school and today runs the street smart product manager and newsletter and live show. And he's on a mission to help product managers gain the influence, respect and the impact that they deserve. Shahdul, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.

Speaker B: Thanks Shubit. It's wonderful, uh, to be here.

Speaker A: For folks who haven't come across your work yet, who is Shardul Mehta and what drives you in the product management world?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I've been recognized as a product management expert and a business growth specialist. I help, as you pointed out, I help product managers develop their careers and I help organizations in installing a scalable decision discipline that can next product choices to business and financial outcomes. And you, you already shared a bit of my background. I'll add that I've always been a builder and creative at heart. When I was a lad, my dad brought home an HP 85. Those of you who are way younger than me can Google that and look it up. Um, and I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. Uh, and I first learned to code in dbase, um, and then moved on to C C, Java, and so on. And as much as I love technology and compute, as most of us in pm, at least in the tech world do, I always wanted to do my own business. Uh, so instead of doing that though, I went to business school thinking that it would teach me everything I needed to know about doing business. And since then, my career has had two parallel and intertwined tracks. One in product management and the other in entrepreneurship and business ownership. And I guess on a personal note, I always like to share that I've been married for 27 and a half years. My wife and I met 32 and a half years ago, and we have two amazing kids, both of whom have grown up now into adulthood. Uh, another fun fact about me that people don't know is, uh, I was born in the US But I grew up half my life in India in Mumbai. M. What's now called Mumbai, of course. So, uh, some people get fooled by the accent.

Speaker A: Great to have you here. And I love your origin story. You know, you call yourself an accidental product manager. And I know you mentioned that you were seen by business people as too technical and by technical people as not technical enough, too verbose, not yet communicative enough. This is what you've shared with us. Tell us, what was that moment like, like, and what changed over time?

Speaker B: Yeah, it was really interesting. I was called too verbose to my face, uh, and also not communicative enough to my face. I was called detail oriented, yet not presenting the right level of detail, whatever the hell that meant. You know, I had, honestly, I had no idea back then how to navigate an organization, how to foster cross collaboration. I had no executive presence, zero leadership skills. But my reality was that I had a young family to support, and at the time, I was the primary breadwinner. And so I knew I had to make a change. I had to find a way to accelerate my career and really 10x my skillset. And along the way, I founded, uh, ProductCamp DC, as you mentioned, with a few others. And through that I met other product people, especially outside of Silicon Valley, um, the Silicon Valley bubble, and who had a lot of the same challenges. And at the same time, I was exposed to the world of entrepreneurship, startups, business ownership. I gained several mentors. I was very lucky. Product leaders, seasoned business managers, other entrepreneurs. And that's kind of when I had this epiphany where I realized that great product, first of all, I realized I'm doing this thing called product management. So, um, the other thing was I realized that great product management is not about really building or development methodology or using any particular tool or template or framework. Great product management happens best at the intersection of business management, leadership and an entrepreneurial attitude, as I see it. And I think that was the unlock for me after that is when my career started taking off.

Speaker A: That's a very important aspect that we'll dig into more about the business aspects of product management. You also mentioned ProductCamp DC, and you connected with people like Steve Johnson, Rich Mirunov, and you mentioned that you've had relationships with them that lasted over 20 years. So, like how have those mentors shaped how you think about your.

Speaker B: Both of them have been doing this even longer than I have. Uh, Rich was really the first sort of product management mentor I really had. I can't remember how we met, but what I remember is he was always very generous with his advice and his time. Uh, I mean, I got to the point where, like, I would call him up on his personal number and say, rich, I've got this, you know, career issue or product management issue or leadership issue or whatever, some issue that I'm tackling with. And he would always give me some great advice. I was following his blog, and there's a lot of noise in, um, product management. You know, most of it, I think is not very useful or helpful, and I don't think it was back then. I was really looking for some good, grounded, actionable advice. His blog was one of them. And, um, I think I got lucky to get to know him. So. And we still have, I'm, you know, glad to say we still have a relationship where we stay in touch. And it's kind of similar with Steve Johnson as well. Um, Steve, um, you know, I didn't take Pragmatic. You know, he used to be at Pragmatic Marketing, and I never took the Pragmatic course, but I met him through Product Camp dc. So when we started product, I mean, I'd probably seen some of his presentations or something like that, I'm sure. But really, when we started ProductCamp DC, uh, I don't know, it was 20 years ago or 15 years ago, whatever it was. Uh, we had no idea what we were doing. Pragmatic, at least at the time. I don't know if they still do. At the time, they were sponsoring every product camp that was out there. And Steve came, uh, for the first several years and was a really good mentor to help us, kind of guide us on, hey, here's how you can go about, um, you know, doing a product camp. And through that, I just got to know him better. And even till today, I think they're two of the few guys who actually still talk a lot of sense, frankly, about what. What product management is, what its value is. And, um, you know, I think there's still the leading thinkers in the space.

Speaker A: Just for our listeners, what is Rich's number so that they can also call him. I'm kidding.

Speaker B: You know what? I'm not going to give that out. I'll leave that to, uh, Rich.

Speaker A: Okay, now let's talk about a major topic that I want to cover with you. The New product scoreboard is something that you mentioned a few times. So you've been having candid, off the record conversations with many, many CPOs, VP of products across different scales of companies. So let's dig into that. You experience expected these executives to be consumed by AI. Uh, and frankly speaking, everyone might expect that right now. Right, but that's not what came up. So tell us, what were you actually hearing from them?

Speaker B: It's really run the gamut in terms of industries and investment models. So the feedback was kind of surprising. We expect, we were just asking them, hey, what challenges are you facing currently? Expected to hear a lot about AI. Didn't hear about AI at all. It was acknowledged, but that wasn't what was keeping them up at night. And really these conversations have been some of the most enriching ones I've had in the last three to six months. So there's a shift that's taking place in product management. Most people think it's AI and that's really not not it. What I've been hearing from these product executives is that the game is changing. The charter used to be about shipping and improving product and frankly, product management was able to get away with that in the age of near zero or zero interest rates, unlimited access to capital growth at all costs. But now more and more product leaders are telling us that they're being held accountable for real business outcomes, growth, revenue margin, profit. They're being asked to actually sign up for a number and they're being judged on whether the organization actually believes in their ability to execute against those plans. Not the shipping plans, but in their investment plans. Right. Where are we making the bets? How good are we in the rigor of making those decisions? And then are we able to execute on that, to realize whatever the expected returns or gains are? So the issue that I'm hearing more and more is that a lot of product leaders, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, they were trained in what's called product craft, but not in the language, for starters, that executives boards use to allocate investment. And that mismatch creates this what I call a credibility gap. And it's getting more expensive. So the shift is in becoming more like portfolio owners, true business operators who are responsible for capital allocation. That's a real change that's really eye opening.

Speaker A: And I love when somebody brings a counterintuitive point of view. It goes against what people are expecting. And I love the 3am problem issue. You know, what keeps your Boss up at 3am so you wrote something in your articles that really stuck with me. One CPO told you that my teams can explain what they built, they can't explain why it deserves continued investment. Back to what you were saying, that's a really important line. Tell me more. What do you think is behind that?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, what I'm hearing from these product executives is there's five challenges that I'm basically hearing. So first of all, product initiatives seem disconnected from company level goals. And what I mean by that is that it's not clear to the C suite or commercial leaders how product work is helping to drive the business forward. And that gets to the second challenge, which is around the product narratives that we tell because they lack explicit financial and commercial grounding. And how does we do a lot of product work? And I'm not saying people's roadmaps are useless and pointless, but that connection between how does the product work materially impact revenue margin, profitability, when you get down to it, Right? So that leads to the third challenge, which is product teams are struggling to communicate initiatives in that business language, the language that executives and commercial teams and boards and investors actually understand and want to hear. And so product executives are having to step in and pay this, uh, what I call a translation tax so that they can establish for themselves and for their product teams some form of credibility with the ELT and with, with the board. Uh, and so that's the fourth challenge. And then the fifth challenge is lack of coordination with go to market. So product plans, I mean just go on LinkedIn and you'll see this stuff, product plans that I see when people happen to share their product plans with me, uh, they have a ton of detail on features and development plans, but they're sparse or sometimes even completely lacking in commercialization plans. How are we going to actually get this to market? How are we going to coordinate with sales, marketing support? Right? What do we have a fundamental understanding of our go to market, our sales motion. And many times that is a missing link. So again, that's where product leaders and uh, product, like the head of product, right, the cpo, whoever has to really step in to translate that.

Speaker A: You mentioned there's that uh, gap. Is that purely a communication gap or is that a thinking gap where like, hey, this translation between product plans through business goals has not even been thought through.

Speaker B: We actually asked several of these product leaders this exact question. I asked, is it a comms gap, Is it a skills gap or is it a knowledge gap? And their response was, it is a skills and knowledge gap for the most part. Now this is not universal. I don't want to make a blanket statement, but that's the theme. So is it a communications gap? Yes, absolutely, it's a communications gap. But it starts with having the knowledge and the skills. So where product teams, and in some cases even the product leader is lacking the knowledge in terms of how to speak in uh, like Rich Mirnav, I know, has recently published a book, Money Stories. Rich, there's your free plug for your book. Um, so. But he's been talking about it for a long time. He came on my show and uh, last year and he talked about money stories. That's what it's about, that's what they care about. As product people, we get really wrapped up in our product craft, our roadmap, agile frameworks. We get wrapped up in the lingo, product mindset, being product led, product thinking, product sense, all this sort of stuff. And when it comes to the executive teams, the board, the commercial, they don't care. Going and lecturing them that hey, we need to become product led instead of tech led or sales led, like that's just not going to win the day, right? That's not how businesses think. So product teams do a bunch of work, they propose priorities and then frankly describe them in terms that make no sense to these people. Right? So they, they, they. I, uh, talked to a CPO who said he did an audit, he has team do an audit of all the product work that they did in the last year and they found 75% of it had no tangible business value or they couldn't describe the value in clear terms. So you know that's, that's pretty stark, right? Or there's another one I spoke with, this was in December. So they had their board meeting and they were presenting and there was some big number $16 million that they spent on their product stuff. And a board member literally asked them point blank. So that's what did we get for all that spend? And by the way, this is a billion dollar valuation company and this board member is just asking a simple question on a $16 million investment, right? So, and they were like. And by the way was, here's the fun fact. It was for a piece of the business that the CPO does not directly control. But guess who got the question right? So they had to scramble over the next couple of weeks and come back with an answer. So this is what I mean by like the game is changing. There is this rigor and there is this translation tax and it's affecting the credibility of product teams. And I believe it's going to trickle down, uh, from the head of product, the product executive, down to individual product managers over time.

Speaker A: Another thing you wrote that got a lot of reaction, positive or negative, we'll find out which is that product owner is not product management. Tell me more. What nerd did that hit?

Speaker B: You know, honestly Shobhit, I'm not really sure but I know that anytime you post anything on Product owner or Agile, people just get triggered for some reason. I'm not really sure why. Um, my basic point was that, and I've said this many times, it wasn't unique to that post, I've said it many times that just implementing Agile doesn't mean you have product management. It's a software development methodology and it works. And it doesn't work. I don't think it's a silver bullet. Um, I know a lot of people want to get into product management and it's hard, uh, I don't want to trivialize it. It's hard to get in. And so they become a, they take some product owner course certification and they think, voila, you know, we're in product management. And I know this is going to sound harsh and I might trigger some members of your audience, but it's not, that's not product management. I mean, if you really want to kind of. Let's get down to first principles. When I learned product management decades ago, it was a business discipline. And what I really, it's really the four Ps of marketing. And if anyone is familiar with the four Ps of marketing, product, price, place, promotion, that's really what it is. It's just that in tech then we adopted it and then it became overly focused on technology and delivery. And then Agile, I think, just poured kerosene on that fire and we just sort of accepted it. And suddenly the next thing you know, everyone was sort of like, well, there's different flavors of product management and product being a product owner as part of being a product, being part of product management. And I'm sorry, but it's, it's not. I'm not saying it's not an important job. I'm not saying if you're doing the job you should feel bad or that's not. But it's not product management. Every implementation of that role I've seen, it's a delivery rule. It's like a glorified. First of all, there's no ownership. You're not own owning anything. From a business perspective, you're maybe owning the delivery or the backlog. That's what it often becomes you're just managing the backlog which um, fun fact, AI is going to now streamline and make a lot easier. Right? So it's not really product management because you're missing the whole part. I've met product owners who don't spend any time with customers. So right there. Second of all, they have no understanding of the business. There's nothing involved in the go to market side of it either. So there's huge elements of the core part of the product management job, the product manager job, that's most product owners are not doing. And so then how is it like I'd love for somebody to explain to me how is that product management at the end of the day, again, not saying it's not an important job and if you're doing it, awesome, maybe you're the best in the world at it. But it's, it's just not product management to me.

Speaker A: Okay, now let's do a reverse translation. So you know, you've been Talking about what CPOs need, what VPs need in terms of that relationship with the business outcome. Many of our listeners are individual PM, senior PMs, maybe new directors. And you said that this effect trickles down. So let's talk about what means for them. So if product leadership is now accountable for revenue and margin, how does that change what's expected of the product manager who's working on part of a product or a product and what shifts for them?

Speaker B: You know, they need to act as fiduciaries, right? Uh, who can prove the return on capital that's being invested in their product development efforts. You know, they need to act as stewards of, of the capital being invested in the R and D. So if it's happening at the top, it's going to come down. Because at the end of the day, every product manager now needs to prove not just in terms of customer outcomes, but the business outcomes. Why are you proposing the product plans that you are proposing? Why are you proposing these priorities? It's not good enough to have some spreadsheet scorecard and implement some prioritization framework, right? You have to fundamentally understand the business model, at least behind your product, understand what the company goals are, uh, in terms of the financial goals or the other strategic goals and directly or indirectly tie to those. In fact, the interesting thing, Shobhit, is that I started talking about this years ago, even before I started doing uh, these recent discussions I've been having that I talked about, uh, with product leaders. It's just that the interesting thing is that I think Something has shifted. Uh, I think part of it could be because we're no longer in the world of zero interest rate, uh, and free capital. So if you take a step back and look at the macro trends, right, because of that, shift boards, investors, they're just applying more rigor and discipline to, hey, how are we investing our capital? And you have to be able to defend. Excuse me, sorry. And you have to be able to defend those initiatives. And those are the questions being asked by the product, like chief, uh, of products, VPs. VPs of products. So you can imagine at some point, like, look, uh, if I'm in that role, either I keep playing, paying this translation tax, or I've got to teach my folks how to do it. Now, if I keep doing it, and you know, maybe I want to do that because, hey, it's going to make me look good, that's fair. But you know, honestly, as a leader, I think you're going to do a disservice to your product teams and you're going to put more of a burden on yourself if you're an individual pm. I mean, I just look back on my career and I look back on the PMs who are successful. Even before I started talking about this and before I started like interviewing all these heads of product and learning about this shift, I was talking about the fact that you have to connect your work to business outcomes that matter. That's the way I've always, um, operated as a product manager. That's one of the benefits I had by having some of those early mentors, whether it was Rich or Steve, or even just, um, in different jobs that I've had or my personal network. I was lucky enough to have a couple of CFOs who are kind. They were good mentors. They asked me some sharp, pointed questions. And it's not about becoming a financial analyst. Uh, I have no personal goals of becoming a cfo. If one of your listeners, if that's their goal to become a cfo, that's awesome. More power to them. But as long as you want to remain in product management, uh, that cfo, he gave me some terrific advice. He asked me some really difficult, tough questions which just made me sharper. And so I think, like, that's the way it's going to trickle down. I have an article where I think it's called Justify, uh youy Existence. And all I did was I said, look, take, take your own salary, you know, your comp, add some overhead and a 25, 28%. How many folks are on Your engineering team, then you've got five people. Ten people, whatever, right? Even if you don't know their salaries, you can Google it. Average salary. Just do the quick back of the envelope math. Boom, right there, you know, and this is just engineering. So you know the cost of your development team now, what is the return you're producing on that? Because believe me, your CFO is wondering that. And that is exactly the question that comes up every year in budgeting. Why are we spending all this money and what are we spending it for and what are we getting for it? Different, you know, you got 10 squads. Do we still need 10 squads? Why do we have 10 squads? Why do we need to add two more? What more are we going to get by? You know, I've been asked point blank, so you and the CTO are proposing to add three more squads to get these initiatives done. So are you signing up to get that $10 million more in revenue, like, point blank? I was. I was asked. Now, I wasn't. I didn't have to formally sign up for the number, but I was asked that question and an answer is expected. So I get on like these calls with product managers and oftentimes I'll ask them the simple question, do you know how much your team costs? And they have no clue. And I'm like, okay, well, why don't you just go back and calculate that? And you could calculate a number for, let's say you're running the typical two week sprints or whatever, you can calculate the cost of each sprint and so you can say, well, why wouldn't that be? I'm not saying it's the only factor, but why wouldn't it not be a factor in determining your prioritization in what should go in the next sprint or your next release or your next quarterly roadmap?

Speaker A: To your point, it does not have to be complicated. Like, you could do back of the napkin math. And if it makes sense, that can make for a very compelling case. You don't have to be a spreadsheets person and do a whole bunch of financial analysis for it.

Speaker B: Exactly. At the end of the day, we will always have a finite amount of capacity. From a development perspective, there will always be a finite amount of capacity. I had one CFO who told me I was making this big budget proposal, and I remember he said, you know, Shardul, even if we got $100 million tomorrow, we'll just have a new constraint. So you still haven't told me how you plan to spend the existing resources that you already have wisely. Right, so, so, so it's really about trade offs, opportunity costs. If we're going to do a thing, we can't do another thing. And it's really about, yeah, you don't have to crack open a massive spreadsheet for every single feature. Uh, and you certainly like if you have a backlog of 300 items, doing that for all 300 is, is pointless. It's just more about order of magnitude. So knowing our strategy and goals, is this a four digit opportunity, five digit opportunity, six digit opportunity, seven digit opportunity. And we're kind of comparing and contrasting. Right. Where is the biggest bang for the buck based upon our goals, our strategy, all that.

Speaker A: I want to add something to this because sometimes there's a misconception that oh, this is important for startups, but you know, companies like Google and Meta who have all these resources, you don't need to answer those questions. And I can tell you, you get asked the exact same questions because same people who are on your team could be on another team, could be doing something else and adding margin there and adding revenue there. And so you have to justify your existence and your roadmap no matter where you are. So it just works across the board.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know you were at Google, so you would certainly know better, better than me. I've never worked at like Meta or Google or Amazon or Apple or any of those, so. Which is why you never see me talk about them because I don't, I don't talk about things I don't know. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's not unique to start. In fact, in a way I want to be careful. I don't want to oversimplify this. In a way, the equation in a startup is somewhat more simple. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's simple because generally speaking you're either, you know, you want to get to that magical product market fit or if you've gotten to product market fit, right. It's about growth. Like look, we got to sign up logo clients or you know, we got to get to the hockey stick. Um, it used to be, in fact, even in the short term, your VC investors might be willing to sacrifice profitability in the short term for the sake of just revenue growth. That may be changing a little bit now. It actually gets harder once you're kind of getting to scale when you're trying to get to scale or you've achieved scale when you have a more complex portfolio, you really have to be more robust in how you're Making those investment bets. Certainly if you're in private equity, this is one of the big eye openers for folks who shift and work and work in private equity. That is where like, you know, private equity is like, it's pretty ruthless. They will just beat you down on like revenue, ebitda, uh, they're not interested for the most part in innovation and all this, you know, create, you know, growth and all this sort of stuff. They want to drive the numbers and the metrics and the ratios and they've got a handful. And what are you doing to, to do that? I know I'm painting private equity in a little bit of a bad, bad light. That's not what I mean. But it is different. Again, it's not unique. Private equity, it can happen universally quite frankly, as you pointed out. But um, yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the biggest differences I found with also in startups generally you have smaller teams, right? Like, you know, I might be the head of product with two PMs or maybe five PMs, it's a lot easier to communicate, to align, um, to shift priorities. Even though it might be chaotic week to week, but you know, it's, you can be more nimble. Try doing that once you get to 50 million, 100 million, 250 million, half a billion, very different game and scale, very hard decisions that you're having to make at that point.

Speaker A: I'm going to bring us to another couple of areas that you've talked about, especially like the transition from senior PM to director. So you wrote a piece called why Product Directors Fail and it was about the creator to operator shift. You described a director who'd been a top performing senior pm, got promoted and was drowning within months. And I've seen this a few times as well. What's the fundamental trap there?

Speaker B: Yeah, what I talk about is that they basically try to be act as super PMs, right? And it's a very common trap. I've been guilty of it as well. So basically you gain some experience as a product manager, you get some wins under your belt, maybe you get an upgrade in title, right? Senior pm, principal pm, group pm, whatever, right? And you start thinking, hey, I'm an awesome product manager, I deserve to get promoted to director, right? And then right there is the mistake because it is a fundamental lack of understanding of what the role is. Uh, the thing is that a director of PM is a totally different job. You are not a super pm. But what happens with a lot of new directors? And again, I've been Guilty of this is that the first thing they do is they get involved in all the details. They feel the need to weigh in on all the decisions and in a worst case scenario they start trying to impose their way of being a product manager onto their PMs. And I get it, because you were the best PM, so you got promoted, so I should tell the other PMs how to do product management. And that's like the worst thing you can do because the thing that got you here is not what is not going to get you there. The thing that got you here is not going to get you there. As an individual contributor, you're driving execution. You're leading decisions. Your success is what you deliver. At the end of the day, as a director, you are now building the system that produces good decisions. Your focus is on building the machine or the operating system that can produce good decisions more consistently. So that means your success is based on how well that machinery works. Your success is based on what the team delivers. So your job is about creating leverage to basically turn time, talent and processes into sustainable results. So it's a completely different equation, a, uh, different role. It is a massive, it is a step up. And so if you are a, if one of, if any of your listeners are a senior PM or principal PM or whatever, right, and they're thinking, I gotta, I wanna become a director. Learn what that job is about first. See if within your company you can grow into that role. Right? And by the way, if a product leader who is looking to promote from within, and I'm always encouraging, and I have promoted from within, you know, my senior PMs to directors, it is incumbent upon you to identify those, those people and then nurture and grow them and also give them honest feedback if they're ready or not. I have lost senior PMs. They quit. They left because they were frustrated that they weren't getting promoted to director. But honestly, like, they were not ready at the time. Could they have gotten there in a year or two? Absolutely. I was prepared to help them, but, you know, they couldn't wait. They, they left. But, you know, I sleep well at night because, like, I just didn't think that they were ready. And I've had others who, you know, they grew into the role and they got promoted at the right point. You know, the thing about promotion is that you kind of, you get the title when you've already done the job. That's just. I know it frustrates people. It frustrated me. It's just the way it works when I Wanted to also go from director to vp. I kind of had to already be doing the VP job before I got the title formally. That's just the way it works.

Speaker A: That's a very important point. And, um, important for people to keep in mind because I hear all the time that, oh, they essentially promoted me but never gave m me the title, never gave me the compensation. Sometimes it's true, but sometimes it's just, oh, that's coming. They just want to make sure you can perform at that level.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, it has to be fair, right? You should not string along the employee, you should not string along the person. If they deserve it, then create a path. You know, be honest. Don't like just string them along. And then in that case, like, if you really do deserve it, then yeah, maybe it's time to look elsewhere. Right? So that's absolutely fair enough. But you got to make sure, like learn about the job, make sure you're prepared for it. Because otherwise you, you will drown. And the story that I shared, here's what ended up happening. And you could say it's fair or unfair. The company should not have promoted him. When they did, they did. He started drowning within six months. Guess what happened? He was let go. The people who made the decision, were they let go? No, but he was let go. Now maybe that's unfair, but, uh, you know, you see that all the time. It's just, this is what happens.

Speaker A: Let's talk more about product managers in Korea. So you mentioned you've done a lot of free mentorship calls with PNs all over the world when they're maybe a little earlier in their career, you know, PM to senior PM for a band and they get on a call with you, what are some of the common things that they're struggling with?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, it really runs the gamut. Shobhit. I would say the biggest thing is, um, you know, what they're really looking for is trying to find signal from noise. You know, really no fault. It's really no fault of their own. Early career PMs especially are. It's easy to get distracted by all the myths and misconceptions or what some tech bro has posted on LinkedIn or some, some 20 something year old tech founder is saying in a podcast. Right. And unfortunately also many of them do suffer from poor leaders, mentors and bosses who just frankly give them rank bad advice. So this can manifest in a lot of challenges in terms of everything from like their resumes to job hunting to Understanding what their role really is about and navigating their careers. So I mean I'd say like, if I had to boil it down, two of the biggest things they often miss are understanding the business and developing a commercial mindset they've learned. Look at most product trainings, certifications, it's all about the product craft. It's all about how do you manage the backlog, write user stories, do the journey mapping, do a B testing, right? All this sort of stuff. Or maybe they got well versed in scrum or whatever it might be. Uh, maybe they've learned some customer discovery tactics. Okay, maybe, maybe not. What they've not been taught is how do you understand the business, how do you develop a commercial mindset? Maybe they were taught the business model canvas and that's it. Right? But you know, like I would ask them like, hey, have you ever been on a sales call? No. I said, well maybe get on some sales call. Do you understand how your sales model works? Do you understand like in an enterprise situation, do you understand how the sales team gets comped? No. Well, you might want to learn that because maybe the reason why none of your features are successful is because your sales team doesn't care about selling them. Because they have no incentive. They're, they're incentivized to sell all the old features. Just a thought, right? So, so you know, really they just don't know how to connect their product work to actual business results. And this manifests in their resumes, in interviews, performance reviews, in their day to day job, in their one on ones with, when they have their one on ones with their with, with their manager. I know this is something you've, you talk a lot about in terms of the work that you do for product managers, which is one of the things I love about what you talk about. You know, connecting like you, you'll, I'm sure you've probably even seen at this point way more resumes than even I have, right? But you see a resume, you're like, wow, this, this product manager is super competent. Here's a product manager, product leader, super competent. They really know their stuff. They just, they're just not connecting it to the things that employers, that businesses actually care about. That's where they often need, need the help. Sometimes it is a, like I talked about earlier, skills are a knowledge gap. Sometimes it's just a communication gap.

Speaker A: I mentioned that 3am M problem. That's sort of what we use when we coach PMs about finding the next job which is can you draw that Line that connection between what is the 3m m problem your hiring manager is having and where have you solved those problems before? If you can do that, like you're a category of one. Like very few people actually do that. And this is probably like even more advanced than in your current role. This is not thinking about the kind of challenge that you're hiring manage.

Speaker B: I wrote an article. I'm blanking on the title. I write a lot. I wrote about, I think, managing up or something like that. And I wrote that, look, if for those who are interested in career advancement and development, if you're happy where you are, fine. There is always an element of making your boss's job easier. I know your boss has responsibilities for sure. And when I was in, when I got into people management leadership roles, you know, I was a acutely aware of how do I make the lives of my people easier, empower them, all that stuff. But look, there's an element of making your boss's job easier. And it's true universally. I got some replies saying, oh, you're just talking like politics and talking about kissing the ring and all. And I'm like, well, I mean, a little bit.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: At the end of the day, the person who has the biggest impact in your career advancement, like it or not, at least within the company you're at, uh, is your boss. It just is. So I'm not saying you gotta kiss ass. And certainly if you're working for a boss who expects you to do that, that's terrible, that's a toxic boss. But in general, just understanding, hey, what keeps my boss up at night? What are the things that he and she, what is on his or her agenda? What are their goals? How are they held accountable? Are there things that I can do to help them connect my product work to those things? You know, it's just, it's just being savvy about your career management.

Speaker A: Honestly, I think that reframing, uh, of, uh, politics is very critical because most people very quickly create that negative association. It's just managing relationships. It's just managing people being people. Okay, now as we wrap up, let's have some quick fun questions to wrap things up. Let's talk about one thing that even I love and I've done a lot, which is improv. So you've done improv, I think for seven years, performed, taught ra school called Loudoun Improv Comedy.

Speaker B: I live in Loudoun County, Virginia, so it was offering improv classes within Loudoun, uh, county.

Speaker A: What's the biggest lesson that you learned from improv that made you a better product leader.

Speaker B: Okay, I'm going to say basically learning the power of yes and got your back were game changing for me.

Speaker A: One product which you think is just absolutely amazing.

Speaker B: I mean I enjoy using Gmail. It's simple, it's straightforward, they don't add a lot of useless bells and whistles. The interface is familiar and I just find it, it a heck of a lot easier to use than Outlook. I've used it for I don't know how long Gmail has been out, but decades or whatever it's been. But uh, yeah, I like it.

Speaker A: It's.

Speaker B: It's simple and straightforward, does the job for me.

Speaker A: I don't know what's something you believe about product management that many people will disagree with.

Speaker B: A product manager is not a builder role. It is a business discipline. Product management is responsible for driving the business growth of the product. It does that through continuous and sustainable delivery of profitable customer value. Everything else is a means to an end and those means may change over time. There are a lot of AI tools, for example today, but the end remains the same. It is a business discipline. It is about driving the successful business growth of the product.

Speaker A: Shaital this has been a phenomenal conversation before. I thank you. Where can people find you and follow your work?

Speaker B: Pretty simple. You mentioned I have my newsletter and my weekly show that I do on, on most Thursdays. So if you go to streetsmartproductmanager.com, my website, you can sign up uh, both my newsletter and to get updates when the next episodes are out. And then of course you can find me on LinkedIn. I think it's just my name, Shardul Mehta and uh, I generally post daily at 8am Eastern so I'm a pretty frequent poster. But you can follow me on LinkedIn and those are probably the easiest ways to find me.

Speaker A: Amazing. And if you're watching this show on YouTube or you're on Spotify or whatever like in the show notes, we'll be sure to include all these links so you can easily access them. Sharvat, thank you so much for appearing. This was amazing conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned a lot and would love to continue chatting anytime.

Speaker B: Absolutely. I loved it too. Shohit, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: And for everyone, if this episode hit home for you, just do us a favor and share it with a product manager who needs to hear it. Maybe somebody who's looking to become a product director or somebody who needs to make that translation that Shardul mentioned. Thanks for listening to the Intentional Product Manager podcast and see you next time. Hey, be sure to check out our website@ intentionalproductmanager.com to see how you can level up in your career.