Subhasish Chakraborty-Seasoned Group Product Manager, Ex-Google

Subhasish is a seasoned tech leader, 17-time US patent holder, and former Google Cloud Storage product leader who helped scale the business from $440 Million to over $5 Billion. With 21 years of experience building multi-billion dollar data storage and security products, he combines high-stakes Silicon Valley execution with conscious leadership, meditation, and artistic creativity. Today, he serves as a startup advisor, Product School guest lecturer, and founder currently bootstrapping his next venture. Drawing from experience as an engineer, inventor, principal engineer, and product leader, Subhasish explains how customer insight, industry context, ruthless prioritization, and strong product judgment help turn technical capabilities into products that people actually use and businesses can scale. In this episode, we cover: 1) Why the strongest products come from deeply understanding how customers actually use a product, what is missing, where they struggle, and what could make their experience dramatically better, rather than inventing technology in isolation. 2) How to distinguish between what a customer says they want and what they truly need, using Subhasish’s “Five Whys” approach to repeatedly question the initial request to reach the underlying problem that actually needs to be solved. 3) Why customer requests should be treated as the starting point, not the final requirement, and how going several layers deeper can reveal a completely different product opportunity than the one initially presented. 4) Why understanding the industry context is essential before deciding what to build, because even highly advanced technology can be useless if it does not fit the customer’s regulatory, security, compliance, workflow, or operating environment. 5) How Google learned that financial services customers did not need even more advanced data capabilities first, they needed the security, encryption, auditing, and compliance foundations that would actually allow them to use those capabilities. 6) How to balance listening to customers with pursuing ideas customers may not yet know they need, including allocating engineering resources between explicit customer requests and larger, more visionary product bets. 7) Why ruthless prioritization may be the single most important product skill, and why strong product leaders must be willing to say no to many important ideas in order to focus engineering resources on the few problems capable of transforming the customer experience. 8) Why empathy, active listening, communication, and open mindedness become increasingly important in senior product and engineering roles, since the ability to understand different perspectives and extract the right insight often determines whether a great technical idea turns into a useful product. #Google #ProductManagement #GroupProductManager #ProductStrategy #CustomerCentricity #Innovation #EngineeringLeadership #BusinessStrategy #CustomerExperience #Leadership #Technology