Udayan has leadership experience in product management and engineering. His passion is building and learning from great products.

Udayan is currently helping brands create meaningful connections with consumers at Shopkick. He previously worked at Coupang, Walmart eCommerce and eBay to make shopping uncomplicated, transparent and rewarding. He has 16 years experience, with 8+ years spent in Product spanning:

1. Mobile Growth and Buyer Experience at eBay
2. Content and Engagement at Walmart eCommerce
3. Pricing experience at Coupang

How did you get into the Product space?

We were building a checkout platform at eBay to help individuals and smaller sellers grow their brands on eBay about 10 years ago. The platform had no Product Manager; as the Senior Development lead, I naturally assumed the PM role. I collected customer feedback, partnered with design to outline the mobile checkout experience, led 10 engineers to execution and launched the eBay Mobile Checkout MVP in 1 year. After a successful launch, I realized that I loved being a Product Manager more than writing code and that’s how I transitioned into the Product space.

How did you adapt with the transition from Product Manager to Senior Product Manager to Principal Product Manager to eventually a Product Leader?

As you grow as a Product Manager, you’ll need to develop strategic thinking – the ability to drive answers for increasingly large problem sets and product areas, combined with thought leadership.

• Junior Product Manager – owns a feature set or a set of tasks for a product.
• Senior Product Manager – owns strategic roadmap for single product value. 
• Product Leader – owns product portfolio strategy and alignment with bigger organizational activities in a 3-5 year plan. They may begin to think about entering new markets, capturing additional consumer segments etc.

What are your job responsibilities as a Product leader at Shopkick?

At Shopkick, we’re a two sided marketplace: we have brands that want to connect with markets and we have shoppers who are looking to connect with the brands they love. Brands will pay Shopkick to advertise and shoppers are rewarded when they make purchases through the app. 

I am currently responsible for the platform side of Shopkick. My immediate responsibilities are:  

1. Strategy & Alignment – craft the platform strategy and long-term roadmap by aligning with market needs and business objectives. This includes figuring out what initiatives we need to support, how we can build a stronger “moat” for the company, and setting up successful launch plans. Communicating roadmap to leadership teams for buy-ins.
2. Tactical Execution – devising experiments, overlooking team’s execution, mentoring team members in any way needed through the Product life cycle. 

It also depends where we are in the year. For example, we spend a lot of time with strategic planning for the upcoming year. Other weeks may be focused on client meetings to ensure features are being adopted, working with Sales and Marketing to understand if the adoption value is live, or looking through the onboarding flows to ensure it’s as frictionless as possible.

What are some of the biggest challenges you faced going from a Product Manager to a Product Leader?

To answer this, let’s focus on the growth path from PM to Product Leader. As you grow, your scope of influence grows in these areas (cumulative):

Though I’m still learning in all areas, my biggest challenge was acquiring strategic focus. It takes a lot of discipline involving both internal and external analysis to understand what the problem space is (not just for the consumer, but for the company as well). You need to understand and analyze your competition, trends in the market, and understand the research portion of the strategy.

That’s where business school really helped me. It opened the world of structured frameworks for analyzing problems and how to research relevant information to make better business decisions. Another challenge I faced is communicating, influencing and creating alignment of these ideas across the rest of the broader organization. Once you have all the information, you may have hundreds of data points, so you’ll need to weave all of that into a narrative that’s inspiring enough for others to follow you on that journey.

How do you encourage alignment with the Product team across the rest of the organization?

This is a challenging road to navigate – and I’ve definitely failed at times. The major building blocks for any successful outcome are the amount of planning and groundwork in all PM areas outlined above, along with relationship building. This includes:

• Problem framing: Outlining the challenge, providing validation through quantitative and qualitative means.
• Pulling in external dynamics: Competitive positioning, industry analysis.
• Key stakeholder management: Communication, obtaining buy-ins
• Generate and prioritize ideas with appropriate reasoning

The more qualified data you have to back up your reasoning and decisions, the better. 

Note: Qualified data includes both validated feedback and hard numbers.

If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would that be?

Find a mentor. 

Find someone who has the role that you think you want and work with them. I’ve made a lot of mistakes – leading by opinion, arguing for distributive outcomes instead of working inter-professionally for collaborative wins etc. If I had a Product mentor to guide me through these situations, they could’ve been avoided. Ultimately, you should understand what the gaps are in your skillset and find a mentor that can help you develop those skills.

Written by: Christian Karkada