How do top product leaders turn customer whispers into global tech revolutions? In this podcast hosted by Sid Shaik, Statsig Head of Product Margaret-Ann Seger reveals the strategic playbook for scaling products in today’s hyper-competitive tech landscape. Drawing from her transformative experiences at Uber, Instagram, and now a cutting-edge startup, Margaret shares the data-driven insights that separate breakthrough products from mere ideas.
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Show Notes
- Customer empathy is the foundational skill for successful product development, especially in an AI-driven world
- Understand your core growth loop and focus on accelerating it relentlessly
- Be willing to completely redesign products for different international markets
- Activation is the critical moment when a user sees real value in your product
- In startup environments, unscalable activities like direct customer support are crucial for learning
- Distribution and unique GTM strategies will become more important than product features
- Always be prepared to pivot and explore new market opportunities, even when current products are successful
- Hire exceptional people and then trust them to do their best work
- Use data to inform decisions, but don’t rely solely on frameworks
- The first day of user experience is critical – 80% of successful activations happen within 24 hours
- AI will transform product development, shifting focus to impact validation and feedback mechanisms
- Build platforms with “Better Together” scenarios where products complement each other
- Be transparent and collaborative with early customers to build trust
- Have at least one product feature that is definitively best-in-class
- Pricing and packaging strategies are critical and should be considered early
- Product teams should be customer-driven, not just execution-focused
- Understand local market nuances when expanding internationally
- Create feedback loops that are push-based, not pull-based
- Be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable when expanding product capabilities
- Continuous learning and market awareness are more important than rigid methodologies
About the speaker
Margaret-Ann Seger leads Product and Design at Statsig, helping teams like Notion, Figma, and Microsoft run better experiments and build more reliable products. Before Statsig, she spent nine years working on growth and new products at Facebook, Instagram, and Uber, where she launched Uber Money and unlocked new international markets. She studied Engineering with Computing at Olin College and Computer Science at KTH.
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.