What should product leaders prioritize when scaling product businesses? In this episode of Product Talk, Sid Shaik meets with Global IIT Artificial Intelligence Forum Co-Founder Tushar Kant to discuss strategies for taking a product business to a larger scale. Key topics include understanding customer problems, developing strong leadership skills, and executing growth plans through defining vision, momentum, and market expansions. They share insights on sustaining growth through ongoing innovations and expanding into new markets as segmentation evolves.
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Show Notes
- The importance of understanding customer problems from both a technology and business perspective when developing products.
- Tushar’s journey from engineering to business school to product management.
- Managing different types of product businesses from private cloud to public cloud.
- The importance of hiring based on both skills and attitude.
- The role of values and connecting with people as a leader.
- Books that have influenced Turshar’s leadership journey, including Start With Why and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
- Scaling a business through understanding growth engines, customer challenges, and sales/marketing.
- Challenges in executing a growth plan like persistence and understanding situations.
- Playbooks for scaling like defining vision, momentum, and focusing on innovations/expansion into new markets.
- Sustaining growth through vision, momentum, and innovations/expansion.
- How market segmentation evolves from small to large businesses.
- Taking inspiration from Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field approach to product vision.
- Current work on generative AI products for enterprises.
- How enterprises still want solutions to their problems over new technologies.
- The goal of building a massive business in generative AI for enterprises.
About the speaker
Tushar Kant has more than 20 years Industry Experience across Silicon Valley & Wall Street at Amazon Web Services, VMware, Facebook, Intel Corp., Sun Microsystems / Oracle Corp., Bank of America Securities and GE Capital. He has worked in diverse fields spanning across Product Management (Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Security, Database and Analytics), Business Development, Mergers & Acquisitions, Software Development, Investment Banking, Private Equity and Venture Capital. Tushar has BS in Electrical Engineering (IIT-India), MS in Computer Science (USA) and MBA (NYU Stern School of Business) where he was designated a Stern Scholar and was Member of Beta Gamma Sigma. He has publications in Artificial Intelligence, High-Performance Algorithms and Bankruptcy & Reorganization. He has been a National Level Debater in Macroeconomics, organized concerts of International Artists and is an active member of various IIT Alumni organizations, including being co-founder of Global IIT Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Forum. He has spoken as guest speaker and in competitive events at MIT (USA), IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur.
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.