When I first became a PM, I thought the hardest part would be deciding what to build.
It wasn’t.
The real challenge was aligning a group of people who didn’t report to me—and didn’t always agree—to move in the same direction.

You’re working with engineers focused on scalability, designers aiming for delight, legal scanning for risk, marketers thinking about positioning, and multiple product teams each with their own priorities. Every function speaks a different language, moves at a different pace, and brings its own incentives to the table—all in service of making the product better. And as the PM, you’re expected to create clarity, resolve friction, and keep momentum going.

It’s like conducting an orchestra where everyone’s playing a different instrument.

But when collaboration works, it’s magic:

• Execution speeds up

• Decisions get sharper

• Creativity expands

• Trust deepens

It doesn’t happen automatically. It takes deliberate effort, invisible leadership, and a whole lot of listening.

In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned about leading cross-functional (XFN) teams effectively. This is a playbook built from personal experience and shaped by excellent thinking across the product community.

Subscribe now

1. Start With Shared Purpose, Not Tasks

Too often, teams are handed a backlog and told to execute. But great collaboration starts with a shared understanding of the problem.

“What are we solving, for whom, and why now?”

A clearly defined north star, rooted in user needs and business value, gives everyone context and agency. Teams don’t want just direction. They want meaning. Without this shared foundation, even the most talented functions can drift.

Tactic: Kick off every initiative by co-defining the problem, goals, and success metrics. This builds alignment and motivation from day one.

2. Communicate With Context

I’ve learned the hard way that saying something once in a team meeting isn’t enough.

Different functions hear things differently. Engineers focus on scope and feasibility. Legal listens for risk. Design zeroes in on experience. Marketing wants a story they can tell.

My job as a PM is to translate across those lenses while keeping the narrative consistent. Not to spin different versions of the truth, but to frame the same core insight in the way each team can act on.

Your job? Speak their language while keeping everyone grounded in the shared narrative.

Tactic: Use 1-pagers, decision logs, 1:1s and centralized working docs.

3. Build Psychological Safety Early

I’ve been in rooms where people were hesitant to speak up—and others where people felt free to challenge ideas. The difference wasn’t process or structure. It was trust.

Psychological safety is not about being agreeable. It’s about being honest—early. It’s about creating a space where people feel they can say the hard thing early. Where dissent is respected, and risk doesn’t mean reputational damage.

This isn’t about team offsites or icebreakers. It’s about everyday behavior.

A quick litmus test I use to assess team safety:

• Do people feel safe sharing dissenting views?

• Are wins celebrated cross-functionally?

• Are trade-offs discussed openly?

Tactic: Publicly recognize team contributions, invite dissent early, and model transparency, especially around unknowns.

4. Slow Down to Align, So You Can Move Fast Later

There’s always pressure to move fast. But rushing into execution without alignment doesn’t save time—it just delays the pain.

I’ve made the mistake of skipping conversations about ownership, definitions of done, and risk planning. And I’ve seen how that misalignment shows up weeks later as confusion, rework, and frustration.

Take the time up front to:

• Align on ownership, decision rights, and escalation paths

• Define what “done” means

• Anticipate risks via pre-mortems

Tactic: Use frameworks like RACI, RICE, or ICE to define ownership and decision paths, outline risks upfront and work with the team to figure out “What worries you most about this plan?”

5. Let the Experts Lead

Great PMs orchestrate. We connect the dots—but we don’t need to draw them all ourselves.

Some of the best outcomes I’ve seen happened when the PM stepped back and created space for the right function to lead. My role was to make sure those voices came together, not compete. Let each function lead within their expertise.

Tactic: Ask more than you answer. Synthesize instead of controlling.

6. Use Friction as a Signal, Not a Red Flag

Disagreement isn’t a breakdown—it’s often a breakthrough waiting to happen. When people challenge each other, it usually means they care about the outcome and are seeing the problem from different angles.

Friction isn’t the issue. Silence is.

Moments of tension often reveal hidden assumptions, misaligned incentives, or unclear trade-offs. Instead of smoothing things over, surface the disagreement. Make it explicit. Then work through it with structure.

When conflict shows up, pause and ask:

• Are we still aligned on the problem and goals we’re solving?

• Can we re-ground in facts and metrics—not just opinions?

• Are we using the same criteria to make this decision?

Tactic: Treat conflict as a cue to realign, not retreat. The goal isn’t to eliminate disagreement—it’s to make sure it leads somewhere productive.

7. Relationships Drive Execution

Projects rarely get unblocked in meetings. They get unblocked in side conversations, quick pings, or casual syncs with someone who trusts you.

Strong execution depends on strong relationships—built through consistent 1:1s, honest questions, and genuine curiosity about what your partners need (and how they work best).

Don’t just manage the project—know your people.

• What motivates them?

• What’s blocking them? What are their constraints?

• What do they need from you?

Tactic: Regular 1:1s with key stakeholders are not optional. They’re the foundation of influence without authority.

8. Centralize Documentation and Share Generously

In cross-functional work, shared context is everything. A lack of visibility kills velocity.

Make information accessible:

• Central docs for every initiative

• Meeting notes and action items shared async

• Decisions logged in one place

Tactic: Don’t wait until the end to document. Write as you go. Share before meetings to reduce live debates.

9. Create Feedback Loops and Act On Them

Cross-functional work is messy. That’s OK—as long as you’re learning and improving. What worked last quarter might not work today. That’s why feedback should be a regular process.

• Normalize feedback on process and leadership

• Run regular retros with stakeholders

• Iterate not just on product, but on how you work together

Tactic: Ask “What’s one thing we could do better next sprint?”—then show that you listened.

10. Lead With Soft Skills

The systems we build—docs, meetings, frameworks—only work if people trust each other. And that trust is shaped by how we show up.

When things are unclear or tense, people look to the PM to steady the room. Are we consistent? Do we listen well? Are we fair in how we engage across functions?

Self-awareness, empathy, and steadiness don’t just hold the process together—they set the tone for how the team shows up.

Tactic: Be the person people want in the room during a tough conversation.

Recap: The Operating System for Cross-Functional Leadership

Final Thought

Cross-functional collaboration isn’t a side skill—it’s the operating system of great product management.

It’s what turns ambiguity into alignment, tension into momentum, and a group of specialists into a team that ships with purpose.

It’s not always clean. It’s often hard. But when it works, it’s what makes great products possible—and great teams unstoppable.

Product management is a career built on decisions—when to launch, when to cut scope, where to invest, and what to shut down. The job gets hardest when the stakes are high and the path is murky (which is most of the time). Great PMs aren’t just great builders; they’re great deciders who can move teams forward without perfect information.

Below is a decision-making playbook you can reuse for anything from “Should we tweak copy?” to “Should we spin up an entirely new product line?”

Subscribe now

1. Calibrate Effort to Importance

The goal isn’t 100 % certainty—it’s momentum with acceptable risk.

2. Map the Option Space: Frame → Expand → Distill

The toughest part of any decision is defining the right set of options. Skip this and you either miss the winning idea or drown in analysis. Use this three-step loop:

1. Frame – Draft a rough problem statement and two or three straw-man options yourself.

2. Expand – Pull in thought partners, criteria, and every messy fact until no new surprises surface.

3. Distill – Collapse everything back to three or four viable choices, each scored in a “traffic-light” table.

2.1 Frame

• Write the first skeletal doc yourself (goals, constraints, 2–3 options).

• Circulate to a small core of thought partners for fast feedback.

• Avoid the empty template trap—show up with a rough draft, not by asking everyone else to fill in the blanks.

2.2 Expand

Unearth everything that could bite you later:

• Start with criteria. Articulate the outcomes that matter before naming solutions.

• Qualitative inputs. User research, customer interviews, competitive scans.

• Quantitative inputs. Experiments, logs, benchmarks.

• Risk canvas. What could sink us, and how would we mitigate?

• Close gaps. Design experiments or prototypes to answer open questions.

You’re done expanding when feedback shifts from “Have you considered…?” to “Given this data, I lean X.”

2.3 Distill

With the full mess in view, prune ruthlessly:

• Re-frame with your instincts. How would you explain the choice to a new hire?

• Sequence decisions. Handle the key question first, break any complex spin-offs into smaller parts, and postpone anything that isn’t urgent.

• Spot one-way doors. Prioritize what can’t be undone.

• Skip throwaway options. If an option is obviously bad, park it in the appendix.

Example traffic-light snapshot

Recommendation: Option B—max reach, low complexity, easier to build, quick to market

3. Drive to a Decision

1. Right-size the room. Only people who can change the outcome attend; everyone else gets the summary. Use frameworks like DACI to assign roles up front:

   Driver – pushes the decision forward

   Approver – makes the final call

   Contributors – give essential input

   Informed – stay in the loop afterward

2. Single decider/approver. Name the approver in bold at the top of the doc.

3. Durable outcome. Capture inputs, rationale, and revisit triggers so the call doesn’t unravel three weeks later.

4. Operationalize

1. Broadcast the verdict. Share what was decided, why, and next steps.

2. Assign Owners & ETAs. Every follow-up gets an owner and a date.

3. Link back. Reference the decision doc in future specs to keep context fresh.

5. Decision Hygiene Boosters

1. Over-communicate critical dates. Everyone should know the hard stop and the last responsible moment for changes.

2. Plan the change, not just the choice. Ask “What breaks Monday morning?” before pressing Go.

3. Track opportunity cost. If you wouldn’t start a project again today, consider killing it.

4. Shrink the circle. Use DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) to avoid decision-by-committee.

5. Ditch silver-bullet fantasies. Trade-offs are the norm; frameworks make them explicit.

6. Pre-mortems & contingencies. Stress-test your option before reality does.

Final Thought

Decisions are bets. Your leverage as a PM comes from placing enough of them to create real momentum—and from learning fast when the odds change. Use this playbook to keep the option space clear, the process tight, and the team moving even when the data’s fuzzy and the clock is ticking.

(Originally published on LinkedIn, March 16, 2022.)

You’ve no doubt experienced the impacts of the Great Resignation. Several colleagues have likely left your organization in recent months, maybe you are thinking of leaving as well. The pandemic has given people the headspace to think more deeply about their lives. Where are we going with our careers? What skills do we need? What are we good at? There are many questions to answer.

A few decades back, it was commonplace to have the same job throughout one's life. Not only was this a societal norm, there was much less knowledge available about other careers. Knowledge in the past was guarded by those who had access to it; now anyone with an internet connection has access to more knowledge and information than many experts of the previous generations. If you’re interested in having multiple careers, now’s a great time! That said, changing careers is much easier for those with the resources and means to do so. But read on, for ideas that might help anyone looking to think about alternate career paths.

Subscribe now

Are you a rockstar or a superstar?

Let’s begin by exploring career trajectories in the modern knowledge economy. They often take two forms. Figure 1 is an example of someone finding their calling early and moving up the ladder with each new role in a given field. You can also call these type of people the “rockstars,” a term Kim Scott in Radical Candor uses – rockstars are experts in their field, or specialists. I must say I am envious of those who have found their calling and have built on their strengths in one domain. For many, you might fall into Figure 2, which has a lot of loops and setbacks, but ultimately can lead you to where you want to be. These types of people are the “superstars” per Kim Scott – they have different passions and like trying out different jobs and careers. The world needs both rockstars and superstars, so it is a matter of finding out what interests you most. Also, you might not want to climb the career ladder; and that's fine too!

Figure 1: Rockstar Career Figure 2: Superstar Career

How to make choices for the long term

The clichéd term of “your career is a journey, not a destination” is true. We need to think of our careers long term. There are so many skills I have acquired that I didn’t know I was good at and others I thought I would like but did not in practice. Annie Duke talks about the 10-10-10 framework when making a big decision. We can use the same framework when making a career decision. How will you feel with the decision 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now and 10 years from now? When making hard decisions or moves, it might be painful and difficult for you in the short term but if you think it will take you where you want to go 10 years from now, then probably you have made the right choice.

That said, your vision of a certain career might be completely different from the reality as you might have painted a wrong image in your head. To counter this, I recommend talking to as many people as you can about a certain path to learn if that career is right for you. Try to understand from them about how the organization is in reality and not the buzzy branding that you will usually find on the internet. Glassdoor is a great platform to find out more about the organization. One might argue that only those who dislike the organization or love it a lot will usually review the organization on Glassdoor. The actual truth of what the company is like is probably something in between. Use it as one lens of many to look at the organization. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself, while keeping in mind that no job or career is perfect: Will you enjoy doing what others in the company are doing day in and day out?

As you try to reach your goals, enjoy the journey. It will probably shift and change and maybe you will find something completely different than what you set out to do. Be open to change and have a growth mindset.

Finding flow

So how does one find a perfect career? Daniel Pink, speaker of a famous TED talk on career and author of many books, talks about how we work best when we have autonomy and mastery. In his recent LinkedIn course on motivation, he puts our careers in four quadrants as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Pink says that we perform our best when we have control of our jobs and find it challenging at the same time. We are in the top right quadrant and are in FLOW. If our jobs are challenging but we don’t have a lot of control we might hover into BURNOUT. If we have control but the job is not challenging, you might hover into DRIFT. The worst is where you neither have control nor challenge, which leads to MONOTONY. It’s hard to be in flow mode all the time and there will be aspects of your work that will hover around all the quadrants but one should try to work with your manager to carve a position where you have the most flow.

We can expand further into the topic of FLOW through psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work, which focuses on how we can use challenge and skill to achieve flow. If you have a challenging project in which you are highly skilled, you will be in a state of flow. When we are over ambitious, the work might be challenging but we might not be as skilled in an area, which leads to ANXIETY. Explore Figure 4 below to see where you stand with your current projects and work.

Figure 4

Finding work you want to do

Then comes the question of what work do you want to do? Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their book Designing Your Work Life explain how everyone works for Money, Impact and Expression at different levels. Your focus on each of these three levers will vary by who you are and the point in time in your life. One has to figure out what combination works best for them.

Let’s look at a few examples in Figure 5 of how the three levers are calibrated for different job profiles of an investment banker, a non-profit employee, and an artist. If a non-profit employee is dissatisfied because they are not getting paid like a newly minted investment banker, then their lever and perhaps career is not calibrated properly: one works at a non-profit mostly for its impact and not for the money. Similarly, as an artist your sense of expression is probably very high; money and impact not so much. If you have the levers calibrated properly and are conscious about it, you can substantially reduce your source of unhappiness at work.

Figure 5

Multiple ways to measure impact

Money and expression are easy to measure but what about impact? In my opinion every job has some sort of impact but how can it be measured? I suggest looking at it from three angles.

1. Is the job internally or externally focused? Within a large organization some departments are internally focused, like IT, HR, and Accounting. Some are a combination of internal and external like marketing and communications, and some are externally focused like the Corporate Innovation Arm or Business Development. Figure out what kind of roles you prosper in. You can create an additional lever for how internally and externally focused the job is like shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6

2. Is the unit where you’ll be working the cost or revenue making center? For example, when you are an accounting specialist working for one of the top auditing firms like KPMG or PWC you are generating revenue for the company; however, if you switch to a corporation like Microsoft whose bread and butter is not accounting, you fall out of the cost making center. Figure out from the level below where you stand in the spectrum.

Figure 7

3. Burnett and Evans talk about how your point of impact can be far (global) or near (personal), and the type of impact of your work can be focused on what is new or what needs to be renewed (repaired).

Let’s look at a few examples as shown in Figure 8 below:

Figure 8

• As a startup founder of an innovative healthcare company that helps with curing cancer, you fall in the quadrant of creating something new, and your point of impact is global as the startup may impact thousands of lives if successful.

• As a Product Manager working on a new feature in WhatsApp, you can affect billions of lives with a single tweak of a feature. You fall in the category of New/Far.

• As a professor at a university if you are creating a new digital marketing course, you are impacting probably 50 students at a time, so you fall in the category of New/Near.

• As a general physician you are not creating anything new and working with one patient at a time, so you might fall in the category of Renew/Near.

• A program manager at the Work Bank’s headquarters in Washington, DC who is working on an education project in Bangladesh. You are managing the program from afar but there are lots of resources working with you on the ground in Bangladesh to implement the project. Your role is at a high level making sure the millions of dollars being disbursed are being used properly, which falls into renew. Here, you fall in the category of Renew/Far.

Every role can be mapped in these 4 quadrants and your job can traverse many of these quadrants at a time. Try to figure out what kind of impact works for you.

When you choose a career path, remember you are saying no to many other things. In addition, what might work today, might not work for you in the future. Be judicious and conscious about your career path taking into consideration your finances and personal circumstances. I would recommend trying out many things when you are younger to see what works best for you. Small conscious changes will ultimately lead to your goal.

In Summary:

1. Figure out if you work best as a rockstar (specialist) or a superstar (generalist).

2. Use tools like the 10-10-10 framework and Glassdoor and talk to people in the field to think long term and find roles that fit.

3. Aim for a job that has challenge and control, i.e. that puts you in flow state.

4. Calibrate your money, impact, and expression levers with the type of field you choose.

5. Determine how you want to measure your impact through the angles of internal/external focus, revenue generation, and point and type of impact (global/near and new/renew).

The beauty of career mapping in the modern age is that there is no one right answer. None of the quadrants or levels are necessarily good or bad. Figure out what works best for you – it’s your career and no one else’s.

In closing, let’s remind ourselves that career is only one dimension of our multi-dimensional lives. Health, family, friends, hobbies…there are so many things to live a fulfilled life. It’s your individual journey and best to not be bothered by what others are doing and to compare yourself. We need to define what success means to each of us personally. Happy career mapping!

(Originally published on LinkedIn, March 12, 2020.)

We have all heard of India’s rapid development in the past few decades. Its GDP per capita, PPP (in current international $) has grown from $1,237 in 1990 to $7,763 in 2018. I left India in 2002, and every year during trips back home to Delhi and Kolkata I would witness the transformation. While the development in my new home, the United States, was more or less static, the changes in India were constant and “in your face” – new malls, new consumer brands, massive increases in car and mobile phone ownership, to name a few. There was a sense of almost endless growth.

As India has developed, the opportunities for tech start-ups have grown significantly. As of last year, the number of tech start-ups in India clocked in around 9,000. According to Goldman Sachs, India is home to 560 million internet subscribers, 354 million smartphone subscribers, and the cheapest mobile data rates in the world (1 GB for $ 0.26). By 2025, 60 percent of Indians are projected to have internet subscriptions and smartphones.

Subscribe now

How will technology advancement impact India in the coming decades?

To capture the full potential of technology, India’s national and sub-national governments will need to bridge the urban-rural digital divide by addressing barriers such as limited telecom infrastructure, language, slow internet speed, and low computer literacy. Nevertheless, the impact of technology will be undeniable.

While most of India will be connected in the coming decades, India is diverse beyond our imaginations. Start-ups should be careful of one size fits all approaches, as Indians fall in very different income segments than the West.

How do India’s income segments compare with other major players?

Hans Rosling’s work divides the world into four income levels based on household per capita income:

The image below gives an idea of how people in the different parts use transportation, cook, eat and sleep. People in Level 1 live in extreme poverty whereas people on Level 4 are the richest. Most of you reading this article are probably in Level 4.

To give us some perspective, let’s compare India’s population and earnings in 2019 with China, which has a developing story like India, and the United States, the most developed part of the world.

Most of India is still on Level 2 (earning between $730/year to $2,920/year), whereas the majority of China is on Level 3 (earning between $2,920/year to $11,680/year) and the majority of United States is rich on Level 4 (earning $11,680/year and above). Above $11,680/year might not be considered rich to many reading this article, but it gives you perspective on where you stand with respect to the rest of the world.

The population on Level 2, where most Indians fall, are the rural laborers, the rural landowners, the urban blue collar and migrant worker segments. Whereas, the Indians on Level 4 are the rich class of around 2.6 million households, a tiny percentage of didddIndia’s total population. These folks have white collar jobs, are small and medium size business owners or are corporate big shots. Most Indians in Level 4 are concentrated in the $11,680 to $30,000 annual income range.

How do India’s income segments impact tech start-ups?

Most tech start-ups in India have targeted their customer base to the Level 4 consumers and the richer Level 3 consumers (earning above $5,500/year). These two groups represent a population of close to 45 million. This demographic is probably the one watching Netflix, using ride hailing services, shopping online, or ordering food through delivery apps. While these customers are more likely to have disposable income, they represent just a small slice of India. Once this market is capped, start-up founders in India are likely to find it difficult to expand into the “bottom of the pyramid” markets, which by their sheer volume merit greater consideration.

Where should start-ups and VCs focus in the coming years?

As the graph above indicates, it will take another 20 years for most Indians to move towards Level 3. For comparison, most Chinese will remain on Level 3, with a significant portion moving to Level 4. In the United States, nearly 100% of the population will be on Level 4.

Given that start-ups do not have 20 years to wait, or they risk going under, VCs and tech start-ups should deepen their focus today on Level 2 consumer and the lower end of Level 3 consumers in addition to their focus on India’s richer segments. However, Level 2 and 3 consumers’ dreams, aspirations and incomes are very different from the consumers on Level 4. Only a few start-ups in the last decade have been able to reach a wide segment of society —Whatsapp, Google and Youtube are examples.

Start-up founders should focus on the right businesses and consumer segments and not create copycat models from the United States or other Western countries, which are too rich to serve as effective models. Indian start-up founders will need to be creative about how to expand their customer-base. One source of inspiration may be to look at how Chinese start-ups address Level 2 and 3 consumers currently and how this could be adapted to the Indian context.

The growth potential in India in the coming decades is huge. While India is a unique diverse market, with its inherent challenges, if tapped properly, the upside is tremendous.

(Originally published on LinkedIn, July 7, 2020.)

The question has plagued many, especially the millennial generation. When we think of startups, we may conjure up images of successful tech startups like Facebook or Apple that propelled their way to mega company status. In reality, the road to a successful exit is often bumpy and not for the faint of heart.

Subscribe now

To know whether a large corporation or a start up is the better fit for you, I like to use the analogy of steering a big ship as opposed to a small canoe. Big ships are more complex and require more expertise to steer but when the waters are choppy, they can weather the storm. Small boats on the other hand are easier to maneuver but during a storm they are more likely to go down under.

Large corporations are like big ships. Change is harder, takes time and requires many approvals and people to steer the ship. Startups on the other hand are like small canoes. Making change within the startup is easier, takes less time and less people to execute. Big ships can travel long distances without need for supplies; startups have a limited runway to execute and need constant cash injection at every point.

Then comes the question of which water do you want to ride on. Some waters are choppy to begin with and the risks of going under are higher. The choppy waters are analogous to the support and ecosystem for building a company in a particular context or country. Large corporations (big ships) can most of the time weather the choppy waters as they are not dependent on external funding. Not so much for startups.

To illustrate this point, the graph below shows the number of startups which have received funding at different levels since 2001. (Note: the data does not cover micro-businesses, information for which is not publicly available, which make up a large percentage of businesses, especially in emerging markets; however, the data represented here is for scalable businesses.) The USA is by far the most entrepreneurial friendly country. The chances of getting funded and having a successful exit is way higher in America than other countries. The water there is relatively calm. That’s not to say that you should not open up startups in other countries, just know that the water is choppy, as the risks are higher there.

Adding to the analogy further, the Angel Investors, VC funds, private equity, large corporations and governments are like the kings and emperors of the olden times that funded explorers like Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus to set sail on the sea; whereas the explorers are the startup founders in today’s time. They are high risk takers. They will challenge the status quo to invent new business models and start entire new industries.

Explorers relish the challenge of creating something new, while their counterparts, prefer the safety of big corporations. To be clear, change also happens in big corporations, but it takes a long time for it to be put to practice.

So what kind of organization do you want to work in? Do you get seasick in choppy waters? Do you prefer the safety of big ships? Or are you ready to explore what awaits you in your nimble canoe?

It all depends on what kind of mentality and risk taker you are. Happy sailing!

Subscribe now