Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber, Google Maps) on how to build consumer apps, why it’s useful to be optimistic about technology, creating inflections in your PM career, the changing CPO role, and more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:03)
Manik Gupta has led two of the most successful consumer products in history, Google Maps, where he was Director of Product for the Maps team, and Uber, where he was Chief Product Officer.
After leaving Uber, he spent most of his time working on a product to help people avoid getting COVID, called CVKey. And most recently, he took on a role at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President leading much of their consumer efforts. In our conversation, we cover what he's learned about building successful consumer products, how to structure and hire product teams building consumer apps, the concept called the Consumer Stack, company market fit versus product market fit, what it's like to be a CPO, what he learned working at Microsoft versus Uber versus Google, and also a ton of career advice for anyone thinking about becoming a CPO someday. I hope that you enjoy this episode with Manik Gupta.
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Hey, Casey Winters, what do you love about Coda?

**Casey Winters** (1:59)
Coda is a company that's actually near and dear to my heart because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, you know I love loops. And Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a Coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be how you create OKRs, run annual planning, build your roadmap, whatever.
Every one of those Codas can then be easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally wrote it. So they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops, which is something I'm personally passionate about.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:36)
I actually use Coda myself every day. It's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation. I use it for first drafts, organize my content calendar, to plan each podcast episode and so many more things. Coda is giving listeners this podcast $1,000 in free credit off their first statement. Just go to coda.io/lenny. That's coda.io/lenny.
Manik, welcome to the podcast.

**Manik Gupta** (3:05)
Thank you, Lenny. It's great to be here, man.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:08)
I don't know if it's obvious, but I am quite honored to have you on this podcast. You've had such an illustrious career as a founder, leading the Google Maps team as CPO at Uber for, I believe, four years. Now you're kind of a fancy VP at Microsoft on consumer stuff.
It's kind of this incredible career and trajectory. And my first question is, looking back at your career, what would you say is maybe the one or two main things that you did that helped you get to where you are today for folks that are maybe earlier in their career of what they should be focusing on?

**Manik Gupta** (3:38)
Yeah, thanks, Lenny, for having me. I'm also a big fan of yours, by the way. I love your newsletter, and it's been incredible to just see how you have also grown both the sort of topics that you cover and this podcast. So just really a big fan. So again, thanks for having me.
Let me start by telling you a little bit about kind of my philosophy on this, right? So I recently, I'm maybe a little bit late to the party, but I recently read this book from Morgan Housel on psychology of money.
And I highly recommend your listeners read it if they get a chance. And there's a chapter in there, he talks about luck and risk. And what he says is, you know, when you look at individuals and you think about, or you ask them or you think about like what they have done that have made them successful, we tend to put a greater amount of emphasis on effort and a little less emphasis on luck and risk, right? And I think I strongly subscribe to that, which is the important thing when you look back is, you know, how much luck played a big part and of course the risk that somebody took played a big part. So this is something that I've been thinking a lot about myself, which is what are some of the patterns of people who have had multiple careers and have gone through a journey where they have learned a lot and they've contributed and things like that. And I think there are two patterns that stand out, both when I look at myself in terms of what I've been through and also when I talk to a lot of my friends who have also gone on and done interesting things. And I wanted to cover both of that. So the first one is really about people.