What does it take to build award-winning products and teams? In this episode of the Product Leaders to Watch series with Cognizant Product Director Chenny Solaiyappan, Expedia Group Platform SVP of Product Archana Arunkumar shares her insights on evaluating award-winning products for the 2024 Product Awards and leveraging generative AI. As a seasoned product leader, she discusses the skills that make great product managers, such as empathy, listening, and removing roadblocks. Archana also offers her perspective on navigating growth phases strategically and transforming business models successfully.
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Show Notes
- Generative AI has the potential to solve problems at an unprecedented scale by leveraging large amounts of data.
- Access to data and ethical frameworks are enabling more practical applications of generative AI
- 3. Finding problems to solve, rather than searching for solutions, is key to building products and teams.
- Truly understanding user needs, even if problems aren’t clearly stated, leads to the most impactful solutions.
- Great product managers are curious, empathetic listeners who can execute well by enabling teams.
- Removing roadblocks before they arise and clearing paths for teams is important for product managers.
- Soft skills like influencing others and problem-solving are as important as technical skills for product managers.
- Great product managers can adapt to new domains and industries by focusing on fundamental skills.
- Competing priorities, limited resources, and time crunches are constant challenges product managers face.
- Delivering value without shortcuts requires balancing goals, resources, and timelines skillfully.
- The AB awards showcase a wide range of solutions to problems from nominations.
- Understanding existing pain points thoroughly leads to intuitive, easily adopted products.
- Products should solve real needs rather than search for issues to address.
- Engaging users and resisting preconceived solutions aids understanding of true needs.
- Influencing teams without direct authority relies on soft skills and empathy.
- Recognizing unstated problems is key to capitalizing on opportunities.
- Scaling products successfully requires strategic thinking and navigating growth phases.
- Visionary leadership generates multimillion dollar revenues through transformation.
- Advising organizations on innovation and guiding high-growth requires strategic foresight.
- Building products and teams across enterprise business models is an asset for product leaders.