CPO Rising Series: ATOSS CPTO on Why Product Managers Need to Think Like Investors

What does it mean to run product like a mini company, and how do you say no to a multi-million dollar deal when it conflicts with your strategy? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, ATOSS Software SE CPTO Vikas Seth will be speaking on on why product managers need to think like investors. Drawing on seven years growing ID Now from startup to scale-up at 10x revenue, Vikas shares his framework for closing the gaps between customers, go-to-market, and R&D, and why building enthusiasm for the product is the most underrated leadership skill.

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Show Notes:

1. Vikas describes himself as an accidental product manager who started as a developer and naturally gravitated toward asking why things were being built, before he even knew that was a product management mindset. Someone eventually pointed out that his curiosity sounded like a PM and the rest followed.
2. Atos is building at the intersection of AI agents, human workforce, and customers in the workforce management space. The mission isn’t just to optimize scheduling for companies like IKEA and large hospitals; it’s to revolutionize the entire interplay between AI, human workers, and the customer experience.
3. In a CPTO role, the T is largely in your control and the P is not. Technology execution can be managed and planned, but product means navigating disruption, shifting customer demands, and the hard decisions of which markets to pursue and which to walk away from.
4. The CPO should be a true strategic partner to the CEO, not just a feature delivery leader. Company strategy and product strategy are tightly aligned, and the CPO is often the person best positioned to help the CEO shape and communicate long-term direction.
5. Vikas frames product management as solving a triangle of customer needs, go-to-market, and R&D/product. Gaps between any two sides of that triangle create what he calls a “leakage effect,” where the organization quietly loses money and momentum without knowing why.
6. The most important evolution in product management is the shift toward outcome-driven thinking. Product managers should ask themselves whether they would invest their own money in the feature or initiative they’re proposing, thinking like a VC rather than a feature requestor.
7. Product managers need to understand P&L, gross margin, EBIT, and ARR, not just product metrics. Running product like a mini company means having enough business fluency to build a real investment case for every major decision.
8. Saying no is a core part of the job, and Vikas made that concrete by canceling multi-million dollar on-prem contracts that conflicted with ID Now’s cloud strategy. He built a reverse business case to show the true cost of saying yes, including infrastructure, 24/7 support, and strategic distraction.
9. Saying no only works when it comes with the reasoning. Vikas made sure stakeholders understood the full trade-off, not just the lost revenue, by showing what each yes would actually cost the company in complexity, maintenance, and long-term strategic drift.
10. Product managers should be the organizational glue, not isolated spec writers. Vikas regularly brought all stakeholders including sales, security, legal, compliance, and engineering into the room to fight out priorities together, creating transparency and two-way accountability.
11. Reverse traceability is one of the most neglected disciplines in product management. Going back six to nine months to check whether a decision actually delivered the expected results is how you build organizational credibility and a culture that learns from outcomes rather than just outputs.
12. The three qualities Vikas hires for are communication (can you translate complex problems into messages that land), collaboration (can you get the right people in a room and have them listen), and analytical courage (can you say no with authority and without arrogance).
13. In interviews, Vikas asks candidates to describe something they built that they’re proud of, then digs into how they arrived at that decision rather than the outcome. He also asks for real examples of failure to understand how candidates make decisions when information is incomplete.
14. Traditional PM-to-engineer ratios of 1:8 or 1:10 are going to blur as AI tools compress the time needed for prototyping, design, and discovery. Vikas sees tech-savvy product managers increasingly generating designs and running experiments directly without waiting for dedicated UX or engineering resources.
15. The biggest challenge going forward isn’t building solutions; it’s asking the right questions with the right attitude. As coding and prototyping become easier, the ability to formulate precise, thoughtful questions becomes the rare and genuinely valuable skill.
16. Vikas sees three categories of AI adopters on his team: those who are genuinely skeptical, those who are fully bought in, and those who talk about it enthusiastically but aren’t actually using it. He finds the third group the most puzzling and is working to convert them by pointing to free tools that require zero procurement approval.
17. Regional differences in AI adoption are real and significant. US teams show higher risk tolerance and willingness to experiment, while European teams are more conservative, often citing data privacy and GDPR implications as reasons for slower adoption.
18. The ability to constantly update your toolset is now a core product skill. The tools that matter are changing every few months, and product managers who can’t adapt their methodology alongside their tools will fall behind those who can.
19. Vikas’s current favorites are Figma for its AI-powered design capabilities and Claude Code for generating simple prototypes quickly. Being able to show a customer three design variations in 15 minutes has genuinely transformed how he approaches product discovery.
20. The single most important attribute of a great product leader, in Vikas’s view, is the ability to build enthusiasm for the product. If people believe in what you’re building they can sell it with bugs and missing features; if they don’t, no amount of polish will compensate.