How can product leaders successfully grow product businesses? In this episode of Product Talk with Sid Shaik, CrowdStrike CPO Raj Rajamani shares lessons from his experience growing startups and large companies, emphasizing the importance of having the right people in place and aligning goals through a clear strategy and OKR framework. He also stresses the need for continuous innovation, experimentation, and disrupting oneself before others can. Overall, the discussion provides insights into scaling a tech company through a focus on people, strategy, execution, and relentless innovation.
Subscribe to the Product Talk podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and catch every conversation with leading product executives. Episodes drop on Wednesdays.
Show Notes
- Hire people with a deep sense of ownership and accountability.
- Look for employees with perseverance and a bias for action.
- Develop high-performing teams through collaborative strategy documents.
- Align teams around winning aspirations, areas of focus, and strategies.
- Execute strategy effectively through roadmaps and measurable goals.
- Continuously innovate and disrupt yourself before others can.
- Be “super paranoid” and make changes before problems are critical.
- Triangulate perspectives to identify agreement and potential issues.
- Emphasize open and honest communication across functions.
- Experimentation is important for solving problems and winning as a team.
- Focus on differentiating through uniquely innovative solutions.
- Leverage a single platform to simplify usage and drive adoption.
- Continuously improve products through user feedback and trials.
- Align goals and priorities across the organization through OKRs.
- Review goals regularly and be flexible about necessary adjustments.
- Provide transparency, support, and multiple chances for success.
- Identify what’s working and not working to make course corrections.
- View your real competition as yourself and strive for growth.
- Apply generative AI to simplify tasks and fulfill unique needs.
- Growing product businesses with strategy is important, but strategies but must be executed effectively.
About the speaker
I am an extremely versatile and entrepreneurial Product Manager who is equally at ease performing discounted cash flow analysis for M&A deals and writing kernel level code. My strength and expertise is in Market Analysis and Product Strategy, but I have worked in Sales (carried a quota), Marketing (Pricing/Packaging, Analyst briefings, published Datasheets/Whitepapers, ran Mktg Campaigns), Product Management (Strategy, MRD/PRD, Release planning, QBRs) and Engineering. And yes, I still write code.
About the host
Sid is a seasoned Product Leader in the Data Platforms domain. At present, he runs Product at Cloudera for its fastest growing product line, Private Cloud Data Services. Prior to Cloudera, he co-founded a Silicon Valley startup-- Performance Sherpa; his company built performance engineering workflow automation for databases and middleware. Prior to those roles, he worked at Yahoo!, Qubole, Asterdata and Oracle in various Product and Engineering roles. As a Product Manager, Sid loves the creative process of discovering, defining and solving meaningful technology problems in large markets and enjoys scaling product businesses. In his down time, he enjoys taking his kids to soccer practice, he practices yoga, and advises startups.