Aditya Rustgi of Cision: Your Responsibility Mentoring Future Product Leaders
Take the time to mentor younger product managers, shared Aditya Rustgi, Senior Director Product Management at Cision, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
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Austin VOP #96
What was your path to product management?
I started out as an engineer and did that for five years. One of my bosses encouraged me to consider business school, so I got my MBA at the Acton school of business in Austin. It was there that I found I had a much deeper interest in the business side rather than the technical side. I did not know about product management as a career while there. As part of some informational interviews I did, someone suggested that if I do not want to do engineering, the next best thing might be product management. So that is how I started and my first job was as an associate product manager at a small startup called MPower Mobile where I was the fifth employee.
What advice do you have for product leaders?
I have been in product for the last 13 or 14 years in different types of companies with different business models. And what I have found is that product management is different in each of these companies. There are certain principles that are the same, but there is a lot of variation from one company to another. That is the first thing to consider if you are trying to enter product management.
The second thing is you learn a lot from other product managers. It is a learned skill, almost like an apprenticeship model. Had I known that earlier in my career I might have gravitated towards bigger companies that had better product management practices rather than going into small startups. At a bigger organization, you get to learn from observing others versus doing it by trial and error.
So I would say that this points to the importance of mentorship and being in an environment where you can learn from people who have been doing this for a longer time. This is underappreciated. I think you can learn software programming by yourself, but it is very hard to learn product management by yourself. So I would not recommend your first job being the first product manager at a startup.
My advice to product leaders is to recognize the other side of this picture. We have to take the time to show younger product managers the craft, show them what is expected, what good looks like and to be a shepherd of their careers.
When I was at VRBO, I encountered an environment for the first time where product training was taken really seriously. Our president there, John Kim, is someone who I will look up to for the rest of my career because he had a tremendous impact on how I think about product management and my love for it. He was very committed to developing product leaders and he built training and mentorship programs to make this happen. He systematized it internally to build and grow PMs. I benefited from it and I think it is one of the things that I was to pass on.
I think this is rare in Austin whereas in the Bay Area this is very common. All the major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb and Twitter invest in training good product managers. They win by product management versus just sales and engineering.
What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?
I recently attended Marty Cagan’s Empowered workshop and it was eye-opening in what is good product leadership. Especially the role of product leaders in creating an environment that empowers product teams. It is a completely different way of leading. I picked up a lot of good things that I have been able to put into practice. We recently updated our career matrix for product managers with objective expectations so that they know what it takes to excel and get to the next level. I have also been applying the servant leader model. And thinking about numbers and metrics and how to inculcate them and also use them as a measure of providing freedom to my team to innovate within those bounds. It is very empowering when you do that.
Someone in the workshop pointed me to another product thought leader — Gibson Biddle — who use to be the VP of Product at Netflix. He has some great material on product strategy and the practice of it. It is something that I am incorporating in the annual planning cycle I am in now.
And finally, I am reading Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, about a chapter in, but will keep coming to it as the year progresses.
What is exciting about the product you are working on now?
Cision is a company that provides software and news distribution solutions for public relations firms. So if you are PR specialist at a brand and you want to execute a PR campaign, it involves finding the right journalist contact, an orchestrated set of activities in getting the press release out, and then tracking what has happened as a result of the coverage you have been able to generate. When a journalist picks up your story and writes about it, how is it driving awareness and traffic to your site.
I deal with the first phase of the product which is how do you find the right journalists? How do you get the message out? Another part of my portfolio is building products for the journalist stakeholder. This is a two-sided ecosystem of journalists and publicists. They interact with one another. And they derive a benefit from one another. Journalists need to produce content and the publicists create content that they can use. So I am developing a plan and strategy for building the ecosystem of journalists. Cision has grown up through acquisitions, so we have lots of products for journalists. And what I am trying to do is to have a strategy pull all these products together for a consolidated engagement plan for journalists. The question I am trying to address are: how do we service our journalists better? Their ecosystem is changing, the media landscape is changing. So what problems can we solve for them where they become an active member of our community so that publicists can benefit. This is a two-sided system that I am trying to build out.
The space used to have about one hundred thousand journalists worldwide. Now you have a billion or so influencers on Twitter and other platforms and other things like newsletters that are proliferating. So we are moving away from journalists working for the New York Times to creating their own ecosystem. So the landscape is changing and we are helping PR professionals keep up to date with this shift.
How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?
The number one thing I think about is expertise sharing across organizations. I know some companies like Indeed do this for their engineering teams with internal speaker series, and they have had product talks as well. It would be good to build an environment where we share information and best practices with one another.
The second thing is about hiring: we need a better ecosystem for finding PMs for the jobs we have open. What I have found in the Bay Area is there is a pretty strong network to help enable that. I don’t think we have that in Austin yet. Also, Austin is a smaller market and does not have large product organizations that are developing PMs and VPs that are entering the market, so we have a little ways to go.
Last question, what is your favorite product?
I love Slack both as a user and a product person. It is very user-centric and the learning curve for someone new is low. I feel like the information architecture and the interaction model have so much attention to detail — even with little things like how things fade and how the notifications work. I think it is a brilliantly made product.
I think their acquisition by Salesforce is a good thing because they will have a go-to-market machine to compete with Microsoft. Slack has been emphasizing the horizontal network with their new features so that you can collaborate across organizations with different Slack teams. Microsoft is focused on the vertical network inside an organization and for now that approach seems to be winning. But we will see where this ends up between them.
Thank you, Aditya!
Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to build a stronger product community in Austin. Please like, share and tweet this article if you enjoyed it.
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