CPO Rising Series: Carta CPO on Why Knowing What to Build Matters More Than Ever

What does it take to stay relevant as a CPO when the very definition of the product manager role is being rewritten in real time? In this episode of the CPO Rising series hosted by Products That Count Resident CPO Renee Niemi, Carta CPO Vrushali Paunikar will be speaking on why knowing what to build matters more than ever, why she frames her best PMs as systems architects rather than feature owners, and what eight years at a founder-led company has taught her about trust, speed, and creating excess value. She also gets into how she structures product reviews, why the hardest problems at Carta are the ones you can’t measure, and what battle scars really mean in a product leader.

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Show Notes:

1. Vrushali stumbled into product the way many of her generation did: she was a strategy consultant who didn’t know product management existed as a job, found it through an APM program at a predictive analytics software company, and immediately knew it was her thing. She was the first APM at Applied Predictive Technologies, a firm she describes as doing AI before AI.
2. The evolution of the PM role has come full circle. In the early days it was a catch-all for everything that wasn’t engineering. Then came specialization — technical PMs, UX PMs, clearly defined archetypes. Now AI is dissolving those boundaries again, and the role is trending back toward a more general “problem solver” identity.
3. Product management is not dead. Everything the role has always required — finding the right problems, defining them, partnering on the build, shepherding the process, getting product into customers’ hands — still needs to happen. It just has to happen differently and faster.
4. In a world where the cost of building is approaching zero, knowing what to do is more important than ever. That judgment is where product managers have the most to contribute, and it is not something AI replaces.
5. Carta’s product philosophy starts from a single line in their principles doc: experts building for experts. Their users are technical, their product is deeply technical, and that means PMs cannot be generalists. They have to be domain experts who go deep.
6. When Vrushali thinks about what PMs actually do without using the job title, the best frame she has found is systems architect. Not in the engineering sense, but in the sense of understanding the humans, the data flows, the inputs and outputs, the constraints, the emotional journeys — and then mapping the system and figuring out how to get it to the right end state.
7. The trap for many PMs is being too myopic when solving a problem, so that when their aperture eventually expands, they have to rebuild from scratch. Carta operates at a scale where that is not acceptable, so systems thinking is a prerequisite.
8. Team chemistry matters more than team composition. Vrushali has found that the most productive teams are the ones where skills layer in complementary ways, and the makeup of those pods does not need to follow a formula. It might be an engineering manager and a couple engineers with a PM, or a designer and engineers with no PM. Whatever combination produces great results is the right one.
9. The challenge she has not yet fully solved is how to scale that pod chemistry approach. For now, the question she asks for every incremental headcount is: what is the specific problem we need this person to solve, and who would be the right complement to unlock it?
10. Carta is a founder-led company and Henry moves at a speed that most people find incomprehensible. That pace sets the tempo for the entire organization, and if you cannot keep up, the role is genuinely challenging.
11. The Carta founder-CPO partnership works because of trust built over eight years and the ability to have what Vrushali calls spirited debates. When she and Henry disagree, they can approach it from a place of mutual respect that makes the disagreement an aperture-broadening moment rather than a political fight.
12. Her advice for CPOs trying to build trust with a founder: approach the founder the way a great PM approaches a customer. Understand their history, their core truths, their emotional operating manual. Speak their language and make your case in their world.
13. User value is Carta’s north star metric and it comes directly from Henry’s philosophy: create excess value in the world, and always leave value on the table. Customers should always feel like they are getting more than what they paid for.
14. The hardest problems at Carta are the ones that cannot be measured. Those are threshold problems — you will know when they are solved, and you will know when they cannot be. Those problems go to the people you trust most because there is no progress chart to check along the way.
15. Vrushali’s competitive moat at Carta is simply tenure. Eight years of depth, being the first internally promoted CPO — that accumulated understanding of the product, the customers, and the organization is something no external hire could replicate quickly. She acknowledges it freely and knows she will need to figure out how to build something equivalent at whatever comes next.
16. What she brings as CPO that her PMs cannot is aperture. She is deep enough to understand exactly what each PM is working on and why, but she can also pull them out of their area and show them what ten other things are happening that they need to connect to.
17. Carta did not have formal product reviews before she became CPO. She built a Thursday cadence where every other week teams present their recent progress, and the alternating weeks are open problem-solving sessions with business stakeholders and leadership invited. Being in the product with her team regularly is how she stays calibrated.
18. The other half of her time she tries to spend with customers, including on sales calls with prospects. Sitting in on calls with people who have not yet bought is one of the best ways to continuously sharpen intuition about what is and is not resonating in the market.
19. What makes a great product leader comes down to two things for Vrushali: battle scars and first principles thinking. The best leaders have navigated downturns and turnarounds, not just been present during a company’s up-and-to-the-right years. And they have stayed somewhere long enough to correct their own mistakes.
20. Product managers have to justify their existence by creating enormous value because the role can look superfluous from the outside. The foundation is user empathy and first principles thinking — not just knowing what to build, but deeply understanding why, and being able to come at the same problem from multiple angles when the first approach does not work.