Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

July 14, 2022

AI Summary

5 min read

Manik Gupta shares lessons from leading product at Google Maps, Uber, and Microsoft, emphasizing principles for career progression, building consumer apps, and structuring product teams.

Career patterns and challenges

Gupta attributes success to two patterns: surrounding oneself with top talent and maintaining technology optimism to pursue projects solving real human needs at scale, like mapping India despite poor addressing systems via crowdsourced data. Early challenges, including pivoting his dotcom startup through bust and Uber's 2017-18 chaos, taught managing ambiguity, staying motivated, and delivering quick wins—like shipping small features in a month—to build team energy.

Building consumer products

Consumer apps are harder than expected, requiring extensive iteration to reach heterogeneous users without forced adoption, relying on virality and value. Global UI patterns are largely universal, with localization limited to language, pricing, and legal needs; over-customizing per market wastes time. Before product-market fit, assess company-product fit: ensure the product leverages company strengths for unique value, avoiding me-too extensions like SMB-to-enterprise jumps without capability shifts.

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What you'll learn

1 **[00:03:55] Career patterns for success**
2 **[00:09:23] Proudest product achievements**
3 **[00:13:41] Major career challenges**
4 **[00:19:56] Counterintuitive lessons on consumer products**
5 **[00:26:17] Company-product fit before PMF**
6 **[00:30:11] Consumer stack: 5 capabilities for success**
7 **[00:36:23] Evolving CPO role toward GM model**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Manik Gupta has led two of the most successful consumer products in history—Google Maps, where he was Director of product for the Maps team, and Uber, where he was CPO. After leaving Uber, he spent some time working on a product to help people avoid getting COVID called CVKey, and most recently he took on a role at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President leading many of their consumer efforts.

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/startups

• Coda: http://coda.io/lenny

• Unit: https://unit.co/lenny

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In this episode, we cover:

[3:55] Patterns for career success

[7:19] Why it’s valuable to be optimistic about technology

[13:54] Challenges and mistakes through Manik’s career

[17:28] How you learn the most about yourself through challenges

[20:25] What Manik’s learned about building successful consumer apps

[26:18] The importance of company-product fit

[30:02] “The consumer stack”—what your company needs to have in place to build a successful consumer product

[36:22] The path from PM to CPO

[39:19] Evolution of CPO role

[44:40] What leads to promotions in a PM career

[47:58] What creates inflections in one’s PM career

[52:05] How PMs shoot themselves in the foot

[55:05] What it’s like to work at Google vs. Uber vs. Microsoft

[1:01:35] What he wished he built into Google Maps

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Where to find Manik:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manikg/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/manikgupta

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