What do product leaders need to consider when scaling enterprise tech businesses? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Sid Shaik, Globalization Partners SVP and Head of Product Gangadhar “GK” Konduri shares his extensive experience building and scaling products across various industries, including customer data platforms, digital customer experience, and HR tech. Listeners will gain valuable insights into establishing product-market fit, navigating compliance requirements for SaaS product, and the role of AI in product development.
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Show Notes
- GK’s journey into product management started when a mentor recognized his product management skills emerging during an engineering role at Oracle.
- GK’s favorite scaling journeys include building a customer data platform (CDP) from the ground up, creating a new business unit within a large company, and scaling a new category in HR tech and fintech.
- Customer obsession is a key tenet in scaling a product business.
- Establishing product-market fit for a new CDP product involved understanding unique enterprise requirements and making the product configurable.
- Compliance requirements, such as HIPAA and GDPR certifications, were crucial differentiators and enablers for the CDP product’s sales.
- Scaling from a single product to a portfolio required adapting sales playbooks and go-to-market strategies to different buyer personas.
- Blending digital customer experience into the product and go-to-market strategy played a significant role in scaling the business.
- Staying close to specialists on the sales side and enabling the entire sales team were key to scaling.
- Engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success are the top four functional partners for scaling a product business.
- Customers’ signals indicate when changes are needed in product development, marketing, or sales processes.
- Partnerships are crucial for enterprise software success, especially when solving larger problems.
- Scaling enterprise tech businesses requires staying close to customers and celebrating their success with the product.
- Globalization Partners aims to create a new category of global growth platforms to break down barriers to global business.
- AI is leveraged in various ways, including a global intelligence assistant.
- Patience, not confusing activity with progress, and remembering it’s a marathon, not a sprint, are key lessons for aspiring product leaders.
- Effective messaging and word choice are important when working with multiple stakeholders.
- Instrumentation and metrics are crucial for running a software business.
- Adapting sales processes for a portfolio vs. single product company is an important consideration.
- Bringing in partners can be a valuable strategy for scaling journeys.
- Sharing more stories on adapting sales processes for portfolio vs. single product companies would be valuable.
About the speaker
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.