Vish Srivastava always expected that product leadership was a precise science.
If a leader had enough experience and the right information to solve a problem, the correct answer would simply just emerge, he thought.
“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Srivastava said.
Srivastava is the lead product manager at Evidation Health, a healthtech company that partners with healthcare companies to measure health in everyday life and enable anyone to participate in research and health programs. While climbing the ladder into a managerial role, he learned many lessons, one of which stuck with him: Building teams and products is hard, especially when you are constantly tasked with making decisions using incomplete information.
“If there are no right answers, what could I rely on? I learned that for me, the answer is a foundation of personal values,” Srivastava said. “One that stands out for me is integrity.”
With the rapid rate of hiring happening in the tech world, there are ample opportunities for talented tech professionals to climb the ladder. That’s why Built In SF caught up with Srivastava, who detailed his career trajectory, the lessons he’s learned, and what advice he’d give to someone looking to move into a product leadership role.
Give us a brief idea of your career trajectory at your current company.
I started my product career at BCG Digital Ventures, a corporate venture studio. Within a year I was leading product teams, including complex cross-functional teams working on thorny and massive product problems like, “How might we build a platform to enable and accelerate global philanthropic grant-making?”
After several years of working with large organizations to build and launch new products, and a stint in the middle to get my master’s degree, I recently made the move to Evidation Health. The move was motivated by my desire to build products and teams at scale, and do this in a space to measurably improve people’s lives. I lead our push into consumer health programs, an exciting growth area for our company that exercises all of my muscles as a product leader.
I attribute this to persistence and a whole lot of “right place at the right time,” or in other words, luck. An important aspect of this was encountering product leaders that were incredible role models and willing to mentor me. When I’m faced with a new problem (and in our line of work, that’s every day), it is powerful to be able to say, “What would X do in this situation?”
Detail an experience that shows a learning opportunity after transitioning to your leadership role.
Prior to my time at Evidation, I was part of a team building a two-sided home services marketplace. I made the decision for which payment processor to use to facilitate payments between service providers and consumers. Well after engineering work was underway, I realized that it didn’t support a critical use case. I made the wrong decision and I was deeply embarrassed. My instinct was to hide this. My mentor guided me to do the opposite, to instead own the decision and its consequences, and confidently drive to a solution. We unwound months of work, rebuilt the feature, and delayed the launch. The venture launched, scaled, raised funding and eventually exited.
And I learned the value of integrity!
Your passion and clarity of vision, specifically what value you want to create for your users, company, team — and dare I say, the world — is what defines product leaders.’’
What advice do you have for product professionals looking to move into a leadership role?
Great product people know that you cannot start with the ‘how.’ You always start with the ‘why,’ and from there flows the what and the how. For example, an effective product manager starts with framing the problem statement and validates their understanding of the problem with qualitative and quantitative data and stakeholder input. Only then do they dive into solutioning in close partnership with design, engineering and more.
I coach product managers to think of their careers in the same way. It’s rarely effective to start with, “I want to be a product leader,” or, “I want to have direct reports.” Rather, what vision do you want to bring to life? Your passion and clarity of vision, specifically what value you want to create for your users, company, team — and dare I say, the world — is what defines product leaders. Everything else will come!
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