Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more

Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer at Rubrik and former President, GM, and head of product at LiveRamp, shares practical lessons on strategy, decision-making, working with founders in 'founder mode', giving and receiving hard feedback, and breaking into product management. The conversation also covers her approach to mindset, summarization in meetings, and how she uses AI tools in research.

01Key learnings

• Being strategic means pairing a compelling, simple 'why' behind decisions with the courage to champion hard, long-term changes; having only one of these is not enough.
• Reframe high-stress situations by asking what you can learn and by bringing humor into meetings, since your mood shapes how the whole team approaches the problem.
• Summarize what others have said in meetings and end with a question inviting agreement or dissent; this builds trust and moves stuck discussions forward.
• Commit to a strong, well-articulated hypothesis and decide rather than over-analyzing; you learn more from acting, then iterate on the remaining 20-30%.
• Study the company's past product decisions, failures and their reasons, to understand baggage and make better calls, especially when joining a new organization.
• When working with a founder in founder mode, understand their underlying objective and use their influence as a lever, while choosing carefully which hills to fight for.
• Treat difficult colleagues as sources of learning: find out what motivates them, ask others who work well with them, and look for something to learn from each person.
• Receive feedback by first feeling the emotion, then getting curious about its source; give feedback directly, with explicit care, and frame it as how others perceive the person.

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.