Shifting Career Altitudes: Insights from a CPO’s Journey Leading in Nearly Every Function | Anneka Gupta (Rubrik, ex-LiveRamp)
In Depth
Deep Dive
How did LiveRamp achieve $30M to $200M ARR in 3 years?
LiveRamp achieved this growth by migrating Fortune 500 customers from Acxiom's product to LiveRamp's platform, focusing on digital targeting and measurement use cases. This allowed them to expand their portfolio and leverage success stories to sell to other large brands.
Why did Acxiom acquire LiveRamp instead of building a competing product?
Acxiom's organic efforts to develop a product for connecting offline data to the digital ecosystem were unsuccessful. They saw LiveRamp's technology as a superior solution and decided to acquire it to accelerate their digital transformation.
What challenges did LiveRamp face during the migration of Acxiom's customers?
LiveRamp faced challenges due to the complexity of Acxiom's custom solutions for each customer, emotional distress among Acxiom employees, and the ambitious timeline of six to nine months to migrate all customers. They had to rip out 90% of Acxiom's features and focus on the core functionality that customers valued.
What is the importance of commercial sensibility in product management?
Commercial sensibility is crucial for product managers to understand whether the product they are building will sell and why. It involves identifying the root cause of sales issues, such as product-market fit, roadmap alignment, or communication strategies, and addressing them effectively.
How does Anneka Gupta approach hiring for product leadership roles?
Anneka looks for candidates who demonstrate the ability to learn quickly, drive clarity in ambiguous situations, and handle complex stakeholders. She values diverse experiences over domain expertise and often hires people with backgrounds in sales or sales engineering to ensure they have strong commercial sensibility.
What is the significance of 'doing things that don't scale' in product development?
Doing things that don't scale is essential in the early stages of product development to achieve initial milestones. It allows teams to focus on rapid iteration, customer feedback, and problem-solving without worrying about scalability until the product gains traction.
How does Rubrik approach building new products for adjacent personas?
Rubrik focuses on identifying a killer differentiating feature that solves an urgent and important problem for the new persona. They build a minimal viable product (MVP) around this feature and use it to gain initial traction, while also showing a roadmap for future capabilities to build trust with customers.
What lessons did Anneka learn from her mistake at LiveRamp regarding growth strategy?
Anneka learned the importance of planning for future growth by identifying where new revenue will come from as the core market slows down. She emphasizes the need to have multiple growth levers in place to maintain a company's growth rate over time.
- LiveRamp's initial struggles to find product-market fit
- Pivot to connecting offline and online data
- Acquisition by Acxiom
- Rapid growth after acquisition
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