Aakash Gupta
===

Jeff: [00:00:00] How are you doing? Thanks for jumping on.

Aakash: Couldn't be better. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Jeff: Yeah, this would be great. You, I think you have a fun background, right? You started out. In product moved up through, growth and growing products. And now you sit in the position where you get to, create content and work with just product leaders and product folks from across the world on educating and continuing to improve this community.

So that's super fun. How's that been?

Aakash: I love the shift. Personally for me, I feel like connecting the dots backwards. I can see all the points in my life that led up to this moment, whether it was Having been an entrepreneur and starting my own company or having worked a lot on growth marketing and social media channels like at the time in 2014 for ThredUP working a lot on Facebook growth.

Now what I'm doing now is both. It's [00:01:00] starting my own company, growing through social media and writing where when I was in high school and college I was a debater and that's all we did so it's just a culmination I guess of everything I've done and it's cool to be there. Um,

Jeff: Actually all those experiences, which is really cool to see.

So we typically ask people like to explain their role. But you're not an operator from a standpoint of working in product anymore.

now that you have the benefit of maybe a little bit wider aperture. We all have the problem of , you have non technical folks, I'm sure in your family or in your social circle who, used to tell them like, Oh, I'm a product manager and just whoosh. How do you explain to someone like that though? What product management is or what that function is. And you know what I guess you did before you moved into a content creator role.

Aakash: Oh boy, [00:02:00] my kids are one in three, so I feel like I'm going to put the three year old hat out. Okay. Like these things that you see on these screens. that I let you see on planes. Somebody needs to make those actually work. And so data helps build those. And specifically, data's It's really just helping, everybody get along, making sure everybody likes each other, making sure everybody's nice to each other, making sure that everybody agrees on what we're doing.

If we're going to go to the playground or if we're going to go to the museum. And so that is helping everybody along the path of deciding. Where we want to go next and where we want to play next. I think that's how I'd have to describe it for a three year old.

Jeff: I gotta be honest. I think that's a pretty clear, good one. I might not call myself data, but I would probably otherwise use almost the exact same word. I liked that. 

And then you've had the benefit now of, career, , you've been an employee at a company, you founded a company in 2010 you did that for a few years, you went back and went back into a practitioner role where you worked in product and ascended up to [00:03:00] being a leader at actually a rapidly growing company called Apollo.

And now you're, in this current role. Throughout that time, yeah, What is, one of, or the biggest kind of failure or something that went wrong that, maybe has a good story attached to it as well. But, and, what did you pull from that? Would you learn from it? And, how did it help you get here?

Aakash: Yeah. So if you think about rap to beats, that was my company. That's probably the thing that I have the most influence on the fate of. Even if you're a VP of product, there's a bunch of other VPs and stuff driving the success of Apollo. And realistically, when I got there, a lot of the success was based on product efforts that happened a year or two before, because product efforts do take some time to bake in.

Huge results that drive the stratospheric growth that we saw when I was there and Apollo became a unicorn So if you look back to my founder role, though I really deciding like the strategy the monetization and so rap to beats we grew to seven people we were Bootstrapped. So we were able to pay for those seven people's salaries.

But [00:04:00] in terms of going further than that, we hit this wall where we had 350, 000 monthly active users. We actually got to that fairly quickly, almost like two years into our journey. And then from year two to year four, we were basically at that. So it was good that we were able to maintain it.

And we were thinking like, we're going to focus more on the monetization side, less on the acquisition side. So originally where we were funded by mainly ads, we added in like Premium products, for instance, premium beats, premium ways to improve your wrapping, premium editing functionality. And ultimately we weren't really able to create that next step change in growth.

We were only able to monetize basically off the original idea, the original thing me and my brother sketched back in 2009 on a piece of paper before the company even started. And so we weren't able to add on that other monetization. If I look now to like my business today. So I actually had the reverse.

So I started with a paid subscription newsletter, and then I added in ads with the podcast. And I've been able to do that very successfully. So I [00:05:00] was able to learn from all the mistakes I made as a founder. But the key mistakes I think are. Thinking through number one, like you can't just exclusively focus on one growth lever at a time.

So you can't just focus on monetization for the expense of acquisition. And then number two, like even though team members have like really good ideas about things and what they're doing, I think I was too young to just put my foot down and say yes, that's good work, but it doesn't have the ROI to pay off your salary.

Like now when I think about hiring somebody, my team. I think about, are they in this month going to pay themselves off? Is there a direct benefit where we will be able to pay for another person so that we can continue to grow and invest in growing this thing? And so those were the two most important lessons for me and how they've reflected into what I'm doing now.

Jeff: I love that you bring up that thinking about how do you justify the value of decisions or early, you said hiring. Cause I feel like in general. For a long time, we had this like bifurcated world where you [00:06:00] had venture capital funded companies and they would hire, and you had bootstrap companies that made those decisions.

And the interesting thing was, we ran to the end of Zerp there and, end of 2022. And. It turned out those companies that were just hiring and not thinking as much about that, aggregate, additional value being added, had some trouble versus if you had been thinking about that kind of bootstrap mentality of let's justify the value of what we're doing.

Probably not much shifted there. So , good position to be in come in through the last couple of years. 

Aakash: Like the Zerp companies also eliminated a lot of product managers. So it was very painful for the profession. I think the data is like pretty clear. Like the layoffs hit product management much harder than design engineering or marketing. Okay.

Jeff: on we talk to probably, hundreds of [00:07:00] product leaders every quarter I have definitely noticed the shift where even at that, you know senior level more people are transitioning and more people are taking more time to find, their next role it definitely seems like a correction from you know You The early teens when it was like, everyone thought of product managers and then it got really cool and it became like the thing to do.

And now we're, I feel like we're just in that correction period and it's going to level off again, it's an interesting observation of. How we've come back and forth, but having that background and having a bootstrap, I'm sure set you up to, be as successful as you are right now.

And it's really impressive. I'm serious. I read the newsletter quite regularly. Listen to the podcast. Like it's, you're doing good work. It's great for the community. So I'm glad you're doing it and doing it well. There was one thing though, you were on. A podcast called diving deep into product a little bit ago and to get into like your experience in product itself.

And maybe even now you have the benefit of a much wider aperture and product, but you said something that really caught my ear. I thought it was [00:08:00] interesting. Talked about there's three types of product leaders. And maybe I'll leave it to you to go through that. But can you explain this theory about three types and how they operate?

Aakash: by Shreyas Doshi, although the archetypes are slightly different, just based on my personal experience. But the idea is let's name the major buckets of product leaders that exist out there. So number one is like the tactician. These people, they just know what to build. They keep going back to, Hey, the team, their roadmap, this is off.

I'm going to go in and correct it. They're willing to get their hands dirty. They're willing to figure out, okay, these are the top problems that the product has. These are the investments we need to make. They're willing to think through and dive into a PRD even to say, okay, this PRD needs these edits that when it comes to design reviews, they are the most active and vocal voice like tacticians.

What I find is that like they are. eminently able to direct the team as a leader. Then you have this politician stereotype or archetype, whatever you want to call it. So the [00:09:00] politician is I think we were talking before the podcast about this idea that as you become a VP, you don't spend as much time doing the craft.

The politician is that type of a leader, where they're doing less of the craft, and they're doing a lot more around what is the org structure, what does My vp of marketing think about product. What does my vp of sales think about product? What does my ceo think? How am I managing the board? These politicians are really common in like the cpo ranks Especially because they do have so many stakeholders and often the whole company as a stakeholder to think through and so You really do need that skill set.

It's very valuable It's not a knock on these people at all but that's how they influence and you'll find like they're amazing in your one on ones, but they might not be You Improving your craftsmanship per se as a PM because they're not diving into PRDs. They're not diving into design reviews. They're operating at a different layer.

They're applying to results emails, right? And then you have craftsmen. So these are really interesting. This is like a variant of your tactician. So if you [00:10:00] think about the tactician, They're excellent at deploying feedback, like I mentioned. So they're commenting in the design review. They're commenting in the PRD.

Now if you think about the craftsmen, these people can write the PRD better than you. They can write the strategy better than you. They can do the design better than you. They can sketch out something that's It's better than your designer, probably, even though the designer is an expert. They can go to the engineer who says that this is going to take six weeks and say, that's BS.

Here's a way to build it in two weeks, right? So the craftsmen, they tend to be these people that are extremely good at the craft of product management. They've often been an IC product manager for 20, 25 years. And I think perhaps a little different from marketing, like you'll see a lot of technicians and craftsmen as product leaders, and these people are still practicing the craft.

So I often find like craftsmen, they'll have daily standups on the most important feature, maybe even the three most important features. So those product managers and designers are going to daily standups led by these [00:11:00] craftsmen who are telling them exactly how to nail the feature. And so they're molding the entire process.

My wife's a research professor, right? There are some professors who actually like help write papers and then there's others who just have meetings. The craftsmen are like the type of people who are actually writing the paper. So those are the three archetypes I tend to see most often in leaders.

Silence.

Jeff: where you run into, people who can really help you get better. People who can really drive, everyone to be better and really understands what you're doing, getting the weeds, but maybe isn't, writing the specific stuff and, I do find it, I know you said it's not a knock, but that you characterized Yeah.

Politician was the only one that you accidentally characterized as stereotype. but I think you got a point, right? These are all valuable skills, but in the kind of parlance of current debates in product, it seems almost like if you look at tactician that seems to almost map to what, Paul Graham called founder mode, whereas [00:12:00] you get this kind of idea of the politician. That's quite clearly that whole like manager mode if they don't really do, but they just tell people what to do or talk about doing. And then the craftsman probably, I think similar as tactician almost, but I don't know.

It's I like the archetypes. It's really good to see. I feel like it's a personality test where you it's a mix of all three, but it's where you land and where your depth is at different ones. But right looking at it like I guess if you're at a company, which is the one you want to operate under or you know Where do you think the strengths lie here?

Aakash: think all three can be equally effective. I've worked with leaders that are all three and yeah, I had that Freudian slip on politician most likely just because I identify least with politician and the difference with tacticians and craftsmen so probably founder mode is actually really closer to craftsmen so tactician is still more of a manager it's like a variant of manager mode where you're really good at being a manager around specific details politicians like they don't get into the details whatsoever and then the craftsmen they're like better than you at [00:13:00] doing Your craft, all your details, and that's very much Brian Chesky, that's Kari Saranin at Linear, right?

These people, we know that they're better designers than you, right? They started as designers, everything they design turns into billions of dollars, right? So those are craftsmen archetype. Steve's job was actually, he had no technical skills or design skills, so he might have fault, he might have still been founder mode, but he'd more likely be a tactician.

So there is actually a difference because, Kari and Brian, they have that design background. Steve, he really didn't have any of that background. So it's actually a nuanced take on founder mode.

Jeff: Yeah, I like this one a lot better because it gives room for not being binary it gives room to like place weights and Because right if you're looking at you know a company that's maybe You know on the ascendance like apollo maybe a couple years before you got there even you don't want a politician You don't need someone who's heavy in that politician skill.

You want someone who's gonna get in and Know just what to freaking build. And you want them to make a team around them probably [00:14:00] because you want to grow and you want to scale it seems like almost too heavy in craftsman You might get a little dangerous where , you want to teach people how to do it you don't want to just always jump in and fix it for them, but like that level of tactician and then some level of politician as you ramp the company up probably seems where you want to aim versus if you're just a pure politician, I can see how that kind of gets maligned by the programs of the world into being, just great liars or great upward managers.

Aakash: Yeah, Apollo's VP of product before me, Christian, he was at first a craftsman for the first half of his career, and then he shifted into a tactician. And he was never a politician. He was a shapeshifter. He could do whatever the company wanted, and that's what they needed. 

Jeff: Yeah, I guess it'd be interesting to see how this goes forward, but I've had a problem with a binariness of founder mode manager mode where it seems like We actually had on recently a guy named David Lepresti. He's a director over at U Haul actually manages all their mobile apps.

But he made a point that I loved, which is, when you're hiring, when you're building the team, it's hire people who understand [00:15:00] the solution and want to be a part of solving that. And that's going to probably take you really far because you're not going to run into the trappings of manager mode, but you can scale and I thought that was a really good take that kind of maps to this as versus that binariness.

So let's go back a little bit further you touched on this briefly a couple minutes ago, but in 2010 you co founded a company with your brother called rap to beats.

And it was about three hundred twenty thousand users That is there's nothing to sneeze at. But to look one meta level up, you know Do you think that experience of being a founder? Led you to be a more productive and successful product leader later on, or, even just a product career throughout the years after that.

Aakash: Yeah, 100%. I think it's actually a really good path. I recommend that most probably. Starting in product management, even though I did. Like starting in engineering or starting in design or starting in sales as a founder, you have to do. A mix of all three of those. We coded the very first version of rap [00:16:00] to beats I You can still quote code and iOS Swift till this day and build up little apps here and there as little micro SAS ideas that I launched into the world.

So yeah, having that coding skillset was nice. I designed the very first versions in Photoshop. If you go find the designs online, you'll see how bad they are. Those were my designs. So I'm glad they're so bad. It still managed to generate. So more importantly for us than monthly active users, our North Star metric tend to be hours in the app because we're monetizing via ads, right?

So we actually were had about four hours. Per user per month of those active. users. So something like 1. 2 million, or we actually had yeah, 1. 3 million monthly active user hours per month. And that was pretty good. What I think it taught me though, is to not think about product in isolation, right?

Think about product as it relates to ROI. Think about product as it can be taken to market. Think about product as how it can be supported. If it's Creating a bunch of support tickets when you're the founder, that's literally less [00:17:00] time building your product and marketing. And so it gave me that holistic perspective that I'm sure most senior PMs will generate anyways, just by launching a lot of features.

But for me, having that aperture of. We're not going to be able to pay our team anymore. We're going to shut down the company. Gave me a good hard lesson before like scaling. And I sometimes saw some of my peers, especially at the height of Zerp, like I felt like there were like org building. And I was just never of that variety of org building because I'd experienced kind of the flip side of it myself.

Silence.

Jeff: That's fair. It gives you, when you run through that decision making process of, do I add people? And if I do, we will run into not being able to pay them. How do we pay people? That's a great motivator there. So now. , this experience, and I got a chicken and egg question for you.

That experience of being a founder, did that give you the magic founder powers to utilize founder mode later on or, Conversely, did the, inherent drive and maybe skill or, the [00:18:00] attributes you brought already, did that set you up and enable you to be a founder?

What do you think of those goes first? Or what, what's more causal?

Aakash: Yeah, I hate to reflect on my end of one experience to say what's more causal and what would be more helpful for the listener. But what I would say is that for me personally, I think that It totally shaped how I think about product management. So for me, I would say it was like, it was a causal relationship in the sense that being a founder, first of all, enabled me to get a good product management gig at a company that's public.

And then second of all, enabled me to succeed in that. And then third of all, enabled me to grow to director, head of product and VP. So I think that it. Paved the way for my path. It also paved like I think a little bit of character I think like jensen huang has recently been going viral, right?

It's just about talking about how like success doesn't come from iq. It comes from character, right? And as a founder like, zarka zuckerberg said you get wake up every day and you get punched in the face Like it's okay There's a support problem or [00:19:00] there's a marketing problem or there's a parodic problem in some area of the business There's some Problem that you probably even caused because you didn't respond to an email or whatever it might've been.

And so then you figure out, you diagnose that problem. Then you go to the other part of the business and you just act like everything's okay. And you help motivate them and make them think that they're working at the place they should stay at. So it really helps you bring that approach to product management too, where you get beaten up in the product review by the VP, and then you go to the next design meeting and your designer feels like they're on the best product team in the world.

So you have to be able to do that and. I think that it definitely helps to have a gritty experience because I've never met a product manager where every single day there isn't bad news. It's not like some jobs. I've managed growth marketers in my career when their channels are marketing.

It's just every single day is a good day. Like they're just running AB tests. They're like learning how things are going. Their pixels aren't failing. Everything's just working well up into the right in product management. There's always some stakeholder who's mad at your decision. There's always some user who thinks that your implementation was wrong.

[00:20:00] I find that it's yeah, it's one of those jobs where grittiness really helps.

Jeff: Yeah , the compartmentalization, it probably teaches where, you have to take bad news on the chin and like you said, then go out and the next team you talk to, you can't see that. , you can't be bringing down the whole company or the whole org just because one tough thing happened, you have to keep people motivated and, using the momentum and part of that is, dust it off quick and, back up because we're going again.

Still. It's interesting. I early in my career. Not to the level you did where you fully, you know, for four years worked on a product full time. But I co founded a smaller company with a friend and ran that and it was profitable and did good business and grew pretty decently.

And early in my career. Whenever I would go interview at a new role we would talk maybe, 15 percent about the role I'm at currently and previous experience. And then probably, 75 percent was spent talking about this small business that I started and ran. And I think that's something I learned.

I tell, people who are looking to grow in their career and really want to get into leadership or want to grow influence of like. What's the best path. And one thing I tell them [00:21:00] is go start something, go start a company, go start something that you own, go drive results. Doesn't have to be huge.

Doesn't have to be life consuming, but go learn what it's like to really, I think it gives you a better perspective to look at the entire picture and, you can come in and you'll be a better, Product person you'd be a better marketer. You'll be probably better at sales even if you go through and do that I love your answer there about kind of it You drove you'd be better But probably partly you came in with a set of drive to let you be good at it, too so after rap to beats you moved up in your career pretty quickly, right?

You went in and you came into product management back into that again. And, within not too long, you were running product with a VP of product at Apollo. And this has been one thing I think we talked about briefly. This is one thing I've run into and counseled some people on my teams in the past as well about, but when you look at kind of the Ascendance.

What was some things that maybe being a manager or director did not prepare you for being a VP or be on the [00:22:00] executive team? I feel like everyone hits that and they just have this big disconnect, even maybe manager director, but what are some of those disconnects that you ran into? And how'd you get through those?

Aakash: So it was interesting. I got really lucky that at ThredUP it was like a company that had real life warehouses. And so the actual tech engineering and executive org when we were series C was maybe just like 50 people total, all sitting in one floor in one office. And it was probably like the second week itself where I was still young.

I called a meeting. I invited like the whole senior leadership team and I gave like my point of view on how ThredUPs compared to competitors and they were like, This is a shit ton of work. I actually printed out a 100 page slide deck and I gave it to every single person who walked into the door.

It was comical stuff back in 2014. But, they enjoyed that. Immediately I was able to ascend from manager, senior manager, to director of growth at ThredUp. Very quickly. And even though my title was director of growth, [00:23:00] because, compared to other directors, I was even still young I was fully involved in all the senior leadership team activities, like all this stuff that the C Suite's planning for every board meeting, all of this going out and talking.

So when we raise our Series D and Series E, like Goldman Sachs investment partners, like going out with them, To dinners and like getting our 81 million fundraising. I was involved in all that activity. So I got really lucky that gave me a good leadership start. Then after that, I actually transitioned to like very regular ICPM roles.

So that was like where I unlearned some of the leadership skills that I had. And honestly, when I got back into closer into leadership at a firm, I originally started at head of product growth. Then I ended up ascending into. Product leader for one of the key seven product areas. And I got back involved with these senior leadership team activities.

I found I'd already forgotten all the skills after five years. So I had the same, like haunting flashbacks that I had at thread up. But like one of the most important ones as a [00:24:00] leader is like literally how you conduct yourself as a manager. I think it's okay to even like, blunt with your team about, okay, this project failed because of This person or this project failed because of this team not supporting us like as soon as you ascend into the senior leadership team ranks like You're not just managing your team, you're managing the whole company.

You need to make the whole company look good. And you need to not just think about your function, you need to think about all functions. So if that means you want to take half the engineers on your growth team and give them to a core new product team, because that'll be better for the business, you should do that, right?

As a leader, you should be willing to sacrifice your own org and give it away. And so I had to have flashbacks and relearns. And also as a leader people expect you to be responding 24 7. So if another VP messages you at 11 o'clock, if you're in IC even you can just pretend like you were asleep and then respond in the morning.

But as a VP, you have to wake up if you were asleep and understand the message and respond, right? And then and there, because, and then you never know, it [00:25:00] might be another two hour chat that comes in the middle of your sleep night. So I think as a leader, like the expectations are so high on communication and responsiveness.

So I had to relearn everything like as an ICPM, deep work is all that matters. So I had gotten really used to having three times I responded to email and Slack a day, had to completely unlearn that and just like always respond to email and Slack. So just the amount of effort it takes to be on a leadership team, how you have to up level, how you show up.

to meetings and just your communication practices. Those were probably the three biggest wake up calls for me. I feel like the other skills, like thinking about strategy, et cetera, PM prepared me pretty well for. 

Jeff: More powerful your voice like every level up where i've seen kind of new executives Give someone a pretty harsh feedback or not even that like medium harsh feedback But something that in their previous role would have rolled off their back and maybe the person would have left in the worst case Scenarios, they would have gone to a co worker like wow, that guy's a real jerk.

But now that same feedback People will leave and have an [00:26:00] existential crisis about what they're doing at the company if they're good at this and i've definitely had people who moved in that role where i've you know worked with them where i've had to explain like it's different now, like you That person reports to someone who reports to someone who reports to you potentially so like you gotta you almost dull the blade a little bit and figure out how we You Communicate that.

And that's probably one of the most important things to figure out is working with the people. Cause at the leadership level, if you don't, master how you work with those people that's life and death of what you're doing. So I'm glad you brought that up. That's a really good point.

Conversely, what do you think it is that like people on the more junior end maybe don't fully understand or misconceptions they have about, what goes on or what the important things are, what key differences are there between those roles? 

Aakash: leaders specifically, the biggest misconception is that you can somehow stop getting your hands dirty, that you're going to somehow not be responsible [00:27:00] for the roadmap, and not be responsible. Responsible for the quality of the features. The fact of the matter is that if there's like a bug in the CEO version's, live version of the product, he's gonna come to you and he is gonna sign that blame to you.

He's not gonna sign it to the director of product under you who manages a group product manager who manages the ICPM. It's your fault, right? And at some point, you'll see that all really good product leaders, even the politicians, like they're showing up for the final test of that important feature that has the eye of the CEO.

Like you can just simply never get away from actually building product as a product manager. If you look at some of the really great product leaders, like Claire Vaux, she's a CPO at LaunchDarkly, a company that's doing super well. She can build her own app. She's built her own app chat PRD on the side.

Like she has the full ICC. skill set to this day. And from what I hear at launch darkly, she's doing the same where she's getting into all the IC tasks. And that's generally what both the more public and the more private, really good product [00:28:00] leaders do. Like I had one Vinod Ramachandran, he was a director of product at Google for 10 years, and he managed me at a firm.

This man was like so amazing at giving feedback on how, like how a specific feature should work. Like he's able to predict in my one on one in 30 seconds, what my designer is going to learn over three weeks of discovery. That's a level of craftsmanship that very few people have in the whole world.

But because he's been building products so long, he's able to do it. And that's the expectation for product leaders. So that's the number one misconception. A more broad misconception that I tend to see about leadership in general is this entire idea that You need to grow your empire, expand your empire.

You need to take the charter that you have and just make that charter. Great. Actually, what I tend to find is that like great leaders, they might just completely blow up their arc. They might just go to the leadership and say yeah, you know what? First of all, everybody's underskilled in this function.

Second of all even if we make the investments aren't going to pay off for three years. Third of all, here's [00:29:00] four options of what we can invest in that would be better. That's what those people do. So sometimes you'll see someone, like there were some amazing leaders at a firm who were like director in three different functions that actually wasn't a knock on them.

They were amazing and leadership trust them. Because they were like, They were going in, they were learning everything about an area, and then they were deciding whether the business should invest in it at all. And so I think there's this false mentality of especially in the Zerp era where people thought that, okay, now I am owning growth.

That means that growth products should exist at this company and I'm going to make it the best growth product team ever. But actually you need to ask whether growth should exist.

Jeff: I think two really good points there, right? One is that great leaders, you really can't go to hands off. Maybe if you're IBM and you have , 100, 000 employees yes, there's a level of hands off. You have to be, but we had Jeff Charles, who's the VP of product at ramp.

He spoke at a event we did in New York. And it was great to hear this level of focus of how do cause they build [00:30:00] product ridiculously fast. Like it is absurd how fast that they are moving over there. And he talked about like, how do you give people. The room to move in the room to execute, but still keep up standards.

And basically one of the key things that took away was, he wants people to understand the, what they're doing, what's the purpose of it. Go do it and then ship an alpha. And you can just ship an alpha without. Him seeing it all like as long as you have the theory behind it and you guys have agreed on the purpose Ship the alpha you have a designated set of people for alpha ship the beta even once that works, right?

But you're not shipping to production until he sees it and I thought that was a really cool kind of breakdown of, he wants his people to move fast. He wants his people to understand the mission and feel the room to operate, but the same time he recognizes he's ultimately responsible there.

And so nothing's hit in production without feedback from him. And as he put it like, typically there's going to be a round or two before it actually goes to production. Yeah. And then the other piece was that you brought up, I think the biggest thing people miss moving [00:31:00] to the exec team is You're not on the product team anymore.

as a marketer, you're not on the marketing team anymore. You're on the exec team and that's your first team. And , you're thinking about the company and the org. 

Back to like kind of career here. 

Aakash: O

Jeff: background is in like demand gen and growth and I feel like If we weren't on a podcast where it's being all recorded, there'd be a lot of fun

Aakash: C

Jeff: gritty discussion to be had because your background is completely in the growth product as well.

And it's just an area I love because it's just like this idea of product thinking and how do you move the needle and have impact. But you've just, you've lived in this for, So long. And I feel like both on the product side and on the marketing side, we've seen an uptick in people moving into these exec roles with backgrounds in growth, whether it be growth product or like demand gen.

When I started in that, 10, 15 years ago, that was not a path to leading marketing. Like that was, you were going to be a director at best, and that was your career, man, and good luck and deal with it because product marketing is the one that gets there. Or maybe corp comms. Now it's growth is [00:32:00] the one that's going to get you to that executive role, both product and here.

So like, why do you think that changed? What's going on? Cause it's not a Zerp phenomenon. This is, not post Zerp at all.

Aakash: Way longer actually. Yeah. So if you look at like the growth of product management from 2002 to 2024, it was basically up into the right from 2002 to 2021 and then saw a decline from 2021 to 2024. So that's like the state of product management. If you look at the state of product growth. It's up and to the right the whole time, hasn't really gone down as much, if anything it's stayed flat over the last three years, and the slope of the curve up and to the right is like 3 or 4x product management.

So within product management, growth has been the single fastest growing sub discipline until the emergence of AI product management. So basically the story of the last 22 years in product management has been the rise of growth product. Now the new story is the rise of AI product management, but I think that the rise of growth product happened for three main reasons.

So the first is that quality is hard to [00:33:00] achieve, like what actually happens in practice, especially in B2B, less so in B2C, but really common in B2B is like, You'll ship something that's 80 percent good enough. That was what was super important. And you'll rarely touch it again. You'll move on to a completely new area of the product.

And so what was happening was the quality of that product where it was 80 percent when it launched, Oh, two years later, it's 70%, four years later, it's 70%. And there isn't a team allocated to figuring out what are like the highest profile quality bets we can do to keep this product growing and humming.

The second reason was that we started to see a lot of core product teams get gold on input metrics, which really frustrated the rest of the company, like marketing and sales, which had output metrics to also be accountable for. So those input metrics might be something like. How many people use this feature instead of like how much ARR was actually driven, which would be like an output metric.

And so growth teams were willing to take on some output metrics that actually drove the business. Like we're going to drive this many product [00:34:00] qualified leads, for instance. So we're going to drive this much expansion revenue, and we're going to drive this much. New net new ARR that's totally self serve through the product, right?

So they were taking on these output metrics and because output metrics are more easy to calculate ROI from there We're getting funded more and then the third thing with outside of quality outside of ROI Is that there was a whole bunch of growth tooling and technology that was developed over the last 22 years So whether you look at the rise of product analytics, so there weren't even product analytics tools you Before everybody used like Tableau, or maybe they use a general purpose tool, like Looker, or they just do SQL.

There was no like dedicated product analytics tool that allowed you to look at product experiments. Then there was the entire experimentation category. Companies like Stats Egg and EPO, where then we have a lot of Grockit and other companies like that, where you start to see Oh my gosh, we have so much.

New tools, [00:35:00] infrastructure to drive growth from a product point of view. We need a team that's setting the bar on speed, setting the bar and using these tools. Oftentimes product growth teams are the ones who first use those tools and then they bring them in and then they propagate them to the rest of their product team.

So those, in my opinion, places like log rocket and other things like that. We're like the cherry on top that really helped the acceleration. 

Jeff: Push comes to shove.

It's usually going to be revenue I think you touched on it a second there, but Even if not is apparent just take a glance at like your linkedin or your resume or just anything about your biography And the breadth of companies you've been across Is a little ridiculous.

I mean you've done you know a rap to beats that you founded to apollo To thread up like there is just no continuity between what these companies do and I don't mean that by the way I mean in an amazing way Like how have you been able to come in and drive growth at such a varied? Set of verticals like what are the key things you look to inform [00:36:00] the growth strategy?

And like how you're going to push this stuff forward You

Aakash: So I've been fortunate that in that whole time, right, product growth has been really ascendant, especially in terms of demand. But the supply has been very little, like they're very few people. Who understand product growth have done it before so As a b2b company you're much more likely to take on a b2c guy or as a b2c guy You're much more likely to take on a b2b person.

So that helps where in growth product There was just such little demand so almost all of my jobs They came to me like people just reach out to me on linkedin and they wanted to talk to me And so like If you write the profile for what Tim, our CEO at Apollo. io, wanted for their VP of product he was like, I wanted someone who's worked in gaming, who has worked in B2B SaaS, whose entire focus has been growth There are, like maybe three or four people in the entire world that fit that profile.

So I got lucky that that's what people wanted. He wanted to

Jeff: wanted you, 

Aakash: onboarding. And so that really helped me along the way. [00:37:00] Similarly, like even if you look at like a firm, like they were looking at like somebody who's set up a product growth team from scratch, okay, I've done it.

Twice before, okay, we need someone else who can do that. You're going to come in. You're going to have no engineers. You're going to have no designers. You're going to help make the case. You're going to have no PMs. You're going to help train them up and build the org. So I think I just benefited a lot from that fundamental demand story.

We talked about a second ago around product growth.

Jeff: Demand story is part of it, but it's also the way you've worked to understand a lot of these things and doing that fundamental work and the journey of founding and driving results there and looking at things from the holistic, like how are we going to move this forward and how you were able to understand that, you're not just going to get there by having opportunity.

You gotta be ready for the opportunity when it hits. So that's, Double edged sword. I like to tell people it's be ready always and that way when it happens You're gonna look really lucky, but it takes a lot of work to be really lucky. There's one thing I wanted to ask you about specifically along your growth journey because I You know I tend to do a bit of research to before we jump on these things and I saw on your linkedin profile under thread up You talked [00:38:00] about that.

You grew referrals channel back when it actually worked was the quote And it was ten dollar ten dollar and famous 99 cent sales and what was this tactic? And what do you think happened? Like why do you I guess more broadly than specifically like I guess specifically what was the tactic?

But more broadly why do you? Effective things tend to wane pretty quickly. I feel like the half life of these things has gotten even shorter, but it's always been true that something will work, and then it decreases until it just doesn't work anymore.

Aakash: Exactly. Yeah. You having been a marketing leader for so long would know this even better than me. I think it's called like the law of shitty click throughs by Andrew Chen, right?

Jeff: It is now, even if it wasn't before. 

Aakash: Yeah, which is basically like every new growth marketing channel that exists, it's best right when it's launched. And then it has a hockey stick growth where you're just like, I can't even believe I'm on this wave.

That was like display advertising a long time ago, even for people who have been around long enough that thing used to work like those annoying banner ads that you see everywhere. But now the click [00:39:00] throughs are like zero. And it's like the worst channel because it's like, The original channel so if you rewind time and history on the referrals channel uber airbnb and dropbox between 2018 and 2013 Like they were the three big players.

They used it really effectively. They were reusing a tactic that paypal used way back in 2000 So it wasn't like totally new, but they made it big and they were in the new wave of companies in that wave. And so ThredUP naturally being in the wave right after them was like, okay, what worked for them?

Let's port it over. So we port over a version of theirs, which is basically like give 10, get 10. That was like one of the first things I launched. Because the channel was working so well and people enjoyed the referral benefits from Airbnb, Uber, and Dropbox, they were keen, they were actually looking at Thread Up Forward.

I remember there were customer support tickets that we used to get that were like, do you have a referral place? Because I want to tell my friend about it. Like when people were telling their friend about it, they wanted to make sure they got money back. [00:40:00] And The channel was working, consumer interest was there.

Now does anyone want to use the referral link? Like nobody as a user wants to use it anymore because ThredUP got lucky. We were basically in the second wave of companies that were using it at that time. Now, if you had a referral program, you're in like the umpteenth wave and it's like display advertising where it's just.

It's on that curve up the law of shitty click throughs to the point where there will be just no ROI left in that channel at some point, because what you tend to find like from these new referrals users is that there's a lot of people referring like their husband and they're like gaming the system and cheating the system.

And so the referral channel has gotten worse and worse over time. But when we were doing it, we could do really cool tactics. Like we could say, you can refer 10. And they can buy 10 pieces of clothing with that 10. It's just amazing to have a 99 cent sale for your first 10 referral purchases.

Getting shirts from Banana Republic that ThredUP's whole thing is being like new. So they were like new clothes that would have been [00:41:00] hundreds of dollars. So it was just a phenomenal value. And as the effectiveness of that channel waned, which I saw in my three years at ThredUP. And I've heard since then has waned even just in an ever increasing slope.

Okay.

Jeff: like it worked once it worked twice If you're not always looking critically at your playbook You're going to run into that, the you're gonna, run to the business end of the law of shitty click throughs.

And so what we always push through here at log rocket and it's been interesting to talk to people about is I don't care if it worked before. I want you to explain how it's going to work here [00:42:00] and why it's going to work here and why we think it's still going to work. And what is the specific things about our audience that we're trying to do here?

Or what is the behavior? Trend that we're trying to take advantage of here and leverage that and learn from these things and you can draw some inspiration from it, but let's not just port the thing over because we're probably just going to fail. It's been interesting over, 20 years of doing this and marketing and working with product teams to see like that in action.

So I, now I always tell the teams like, we're going to find the new thing and then we're going to drive it into the ground. I want to be the one to take it. And, we're going to drive it into the ground because it's going to happen somewhere. So we might as well get all the value out of it though.

Aakash: Ride that thing while it's hot. 

Jeff: Akash we're at the end here. I appreciate you joining. We'll have to do it again. We'll have to have you on again, but I can clearly see why people read and, people read the newsletter and listen to podcasts because you got just such a wealth of knowledge, but thanks for coming on.

I really appreciate it. It's been great to chat with you, man. And yeah, hopefully we can have you on again sometime soon.

Aakash: Thank you so much. Love the conversation and look forward to the next one. 

Jeff: Yeah. Sounds [00:43:00] good. Thanks.