Are you ready to learn how to build products that truly count? In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Cisco’s Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel will be speaking on maintaining a founder’s mindset at scale. Jeetu shares transformative insights on product leadership, AI’s impact, and creating a culture of innovation that can turn even a large enterprise into the world’s largest startup.
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Show Notes:
- Maintain a founder’s mentality, even at massive scale
- Build products people love so much they can’t stop talking about them
- Operate with an ecosystem mindset, not a zero-sum competitive approach
- Strive for 10x improvement, not just incremental gains
- Prioritize quality as “priority zero” before discussing innovation
- Create a culture that embraces constructive conflict and truth-seeking
- Take primary responsibility for product challenges
- Hire for hunger, curiosity, and clarity of thinking
- Develop a personal board of directors/mentors
- Approach AI as a tailwind, not a threat
- Understand that the quality of problems you choose determines success
- Deflect credit to the ecosystem when products succeed
- Maintain an “unrealistic dash of optimism” in challenging business environments
- Think company first, team second, self third
- Continuously learn and unlearn
- Use back-channel references over provided references when hiring
- Recognize that most people want to do a good job but lack clarity
- Embrace AI tools to complement human skills
- A founder’s mindset means always seeking to understand something new
- Build products that create “intrinsic pull” in the market
About the speaker
Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration. He leverages a diverse set of capabilities to lead the strategy and development for these businesses and also owns P&L responsibility for this multibillion-dollar portfolio. Jeetu combines a bold vision, steeped in product design and development expertise, operational rigor, and innate market understanding to create high-growth Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses. Prior to joining Cisco, Jeetu was the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Box, a role he pioneered. He also created the Box Platform business unit where he led product strategy, marketing, and developer relations – driving products from the incubation stage to mature offerings.