Rethinking product management: Lessons on balancing chaos, conviction and empathy
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Product management is one of the most misunderstood functions in tech. Some see it as just about organizing backlogs, writing PRDs, or running standups. Others assume it’s just about interfacing between engineering and business teams. And in large companies, it often is just that.
But in startups? It’s everything.
Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder & CEO of DevRev and former CEO of Nutanix, and Amit Prakash, Co-Founder & CTO of ThoughtSpot, know this firsthand. Their careers have taken them through some of the most critical phases of product evolution—from the structured environments of large enterprises like Oracle and Google to the volatile, high-stakes world of building startups from scratch.
Their conversation on this episode of The Effortless Podcast laid bare the reality of modern product management. It’s a relentless pursuit of balance—between conviction and adaptability, between essentialism and complexity, between risk-taking and listening to the market.
Whether you’re a founder, a product manager, or a builder at heart, these lessons will reshape how you think about product leadership.
Why product management in startups is a different beast
I used to think that product management is just like people come to a meeting and take notes and run through the process. And then we started ThoughtSpot and my world completely changed. And I realized that product management can make or break a company.
Product managers in startups don’t have the luxury of specialization. Unlike in large enterprises, where PMs operate within well-defined swimlanes, startups require them to be Swiss Army knives—part strategist, part executioner, part firefighter. They must bridge the gap between development, sales, and customers, ensuring constant iteration to achieve product-market fit.
Amit’s early experience at Google and Microsoft shaped his initial perception of the PM role as a procedural function. In large, distribution-heavy companies, the core product is already built. PMs focus on optimizing existing systems rather than shaping entirely new ones. As he describes with a chuckle, product management in such enterprises was just people coming to a meeting, taking notes, running through the process.
But the moment he co-founded ThoughtSpot, he realized product management wasn’t just one of the functions—it was the function that determined whether the company would survive.
Dheeraj, too, echoes this sentiment, drawing from his experience at Nutanix. He argues that great product management isn’t about feature development but about focusing on the details that others ignore. This seemingly mundane focus on upgrades turned into one of Nutanix’s biggest competitive advantages.
That’s the hidden power of great product management: transforming friction into delight.
One of our biggest successes was taking care of upgrades. This would be a boring topic, but to me, it's the essence of product management. “How do you make the boring beautiful?” is at the core of product management. We took a boring thing called upgrades and said we'll take care of it.
Dheeraj likens the PM’s role to that of an oil in an engine. Engineers, designers, and sales teams may be the fuel that powers the company, but without the right product management, the entire system grinds to a halt. “Done right, the best oil is invisible. The bad one will create gunk. But the best oil is invisible," he notes.
Product managers must ensure that engineering teams aren’t just shipping features in a vacuum. They must deeply understand the customer’s pain points and ensure that the product’s evolution aligns with real-world needs.
The art and science of balancing risk in product management
Great product managers take calculated risks. They must decide when to double down on an idea and when to pivot based on market signals. The most successful startups are often those that place bold bets without hedging too much.
Snowflake is a textbook example. As Dheeraj points out, the company made a high-stakes decision to be a cloud-based data platform that runs exclusively on public cloud infrastructure. No on-premises deployment. That bet paid off massively and gave them a dominant market position.
This level of conviction is rare. Most companies hedge their bets, trying to please too many stakeholders at once. But when boldness is grounded in deep customer insight, it can lead to exponential outcomes.
However, not all risks pay off. At Nutanix, Dheeraj recalls how his team underestimated enterprise needs in the early years. “We were so happy and enamored by the mid-market that we never thought of the enterprise use cases up front,” he recalls.
The key lesson here: some risks are worth taking early. Security, scalability, and enterprise readiness aren’t things you can bolt on later. They must be baked into the foundation of the product. As Dheeraj warns from his experience, “It’s really hard to retrofit security thinking later than if you don’t do it earlier.”
Given that startups live in a constant state of ambiguity, another hard question that PMs face is knowing when to stick to their vision and when to course-correct.
When a startup clings to their vision too much and becomes rigid, they tend to build a product that’s blind to the pain points of your target market. But when they listen to the market too much and bring in every little input from the market to the building process, they’re not going to have a minimum viable product (MVP) on their hands anytime soon.
This is the paradox of great product management: knowing when to push forward with conviction and when to pivot with humility.
As Dheeraj puts it, product management is a “tightrope walk” between having the conviction about the general direction of the product but also being humble enough to listen to the market. “Humility to listen to the market while you have the fierce resolve,” according to him, is the essential requirement of successful product management.
Finding product-market fit in the ‘negative one to zero’ phase
Product-market fit (PMF) isn’t something you find—it’s something you forge. It’s a process of continuous iteration, testing, and learning from your users. And in the “negative one to zero” phase—the earliest, most uncertain stage of a startup’s journey that precedes the well-known “zero to one” journey—it’s the difference between survival and failure.
At this stage, startups are battling not just for relevance but for existence. The best product leaders know that market fit isn’t about having the perfect product but about identifying a core, undeniable need and iterating ruthlessly around it.
For Dheeraj, this meant focusing on a fundamental gap he saw in how companies manage customer and product data. Rather than trying to build another project management or sales CRM, they wanted to unify these functions in a way that had never been done before.
This insight led to a bold vision—DevRev would unify customer and product data into a single system of record, making product teams more customer-driven and customer-facing teams more product-aware.
Very few people in the front office understand product. At best, they’re process people. If you’re lucky, they’re customer-centric. But they’re barely into product. And the people in the back office, which includes a lot of technical product managers, many times they're project managers or programme managers than product managers. But the back office is barely customer-centric because there's a comfort of building things and looking at code.
From passive users to active contributors: How users shape product roadmap
We were shooting for self-driving cars, but actually the market was more like Uber where there were drivers and passengers. And when you have drivers and passengers, the drivers have a lot more at stake than passengers. So, you should help drivers create the best possible experience for passengers, but then you have to give drivers all the tools
Great products don’t just serve users—they empower them. The more users can shape a product to fit their needs, the more deeply they invest in it.
This was a critical lesson at ThoughtSpot, where Amit initially resisted giving users too much control over customization. The goal was to keep the product simple. But over time, he realized that users wanted the ability to tailor their experience.
This shift in thinking led to the introduction of ThoughtSpot Modeling Language, which allowed users to modify a worksheet, view, table, Liveboard, SpotIQ result, or answer in a flat-file format.
But what about ease of use? The best-designed products strike a delicate balance between accessibility and depth. They welcome beginners while rewarding experts. They appear simple on the surface, yet offer layers of complexity for those willing to invest the time.
Dheeraj describes this paradox through the lens of well-known products like Cisco, Oracle, Figma. Taking Figma as an example, he notes how it democratized design. By making it browser-based and enabling multiplayer collaboration, Figma lowered the barrier to entry.
A design tool built for creatives is expected to be intuitive. Counterintuitively, Figma requires weeks, even months, for visual designers to fully grasp its capabilities, requiring workshops and several hours of learning sessions. But once inside, users had to invest effort to master its capabilities.
This approach created a new kind of stickiness. The harder a product is to master, the less likely users are to abandon it. Mastery creates retention. When users dedicate time to learning a tool, they form a bond with it. They become power users, evangelists, champions.
One has to imagine that they will be experts of your product, which actually works in your favor because then they become the champions. And if they had to climb a mountain on something that required a lot of expertise building, they don't want to let it go that quickly for yet another product, the shiny object out there.
How the Essential Methodology helps PMs avoid decision fatigue
By focusing only on what truly matters, startups can avoid feature bloat and ensure that their product remains focused on solving real user problems.
Dheeraj delves deep into this by breaking down the Essential Methodology, the philosophy that drives DevRev’s approach to not just product management, but to every dimension of building a product that endures ever-changing market dynamics, evolving user behavior, and unpredictable economic conditions.
The Essential Methodology has three pillars: customer-centric, product-led, and AI-native. He explains that this principle forces companies to think beyond Agile Methodology, which emphasizes only on iterations that are continuous, faster, shorter to complete tasks. This stops companies and teams from spending time working backwards from the end goal.
On being product-led, Dheeraj notes that it’s basically about democratizing the product roadmap to users. “I don’t have to have a meeting and have a PM go do slides to show the same road map over and over and over again. How do your salespeople actually go and say, “What’s happening to my request?” So you really have to democratize all the product stuff to everybody and finally make it efficient,” he says.
Wrapping up: The most underrated skill in product management
In product management, empathy can be the difference between products that stick and those that fade into irrelevance. The best product managers don’t just analyze data; they listen. They observe. They ask better questions.
"You start with human thinking first, then get to the product and then get to the features and functions and things like that,” Dheeraj asserts. This idea of waiting before jumping into solutions is at odds with Silicon Valley’s relentless push for faster development cycles. But speed without understanding is wasted motion.
There’s a reason product management is often regarded as the hardest job in tech. It demands both strategy and execution, vision and flexibility, confidence and self-doubt. As Dheeraj succinctly puts it, “How do you be humble and have a fierce resolve at the same time? It’s a paradox. And product management is exactly that."
This conversation between Dheeraj and Amit on The Effortless Podcast underscores one truth: Great products are not just built—they are discovered, shaped, and refined in the hands of their users. The best product managers don’t just build. They listen, they adapt, and they master the delicate dance between leading with conviction and learning with humility.
And that’s what makes them, and their products, truly effortless.
If this deep dive into product management got your gears turning, there’s more where that came from. The Effortless Podcast Substack unpacks the toughest, messiest, and most transformative lessons in product, engineering, and design—straight from those who’ve lived it. Don’t just build. Master the craft.
