The Playbook to Become an ACE Product Leader with Satnam Singh, CPO of Tax and Trade, Global API, and Cloud Leader at Thomson Reuters

A big shoutout to all product leaders. Welcome to the Product Leaders Podcast by Fireart with your hosts, Dima Venglinski and Tolik Nguyen. Every episode is a deep dive into different aspects of product leadership to enhance the end-user experience.

In this episode, Dima is joined by Satnam Singh, CPO of Tax and Trade, Global API, and Cloud Leader at Thomson Reuters. Satnam shares his insights on the critical skills that every effective product leader needs and a five-point framework for product development.

Topics we discuss:

How to build a customer insight pipeline and why you need one
Does your toolkit have the ACE framework?
Why your products need to be industry compliant
The five P framework for product development

Hot Takes and Key Highlights:

Building a Customer Insight Pipeline

Most companies focus on the sales pipeline, but you must also create a customer insight pipeline to measure and monitor how effectively your product solves customer problems. Customer insights are developed from feedback received from every customer touchpoint, including sales, customer support, product marketing teams, and user research.

“It’s important to understand the relationship between what we’re putting out in the market and what is or isn’t resonating with the customers and leads”. - Satnam Singh

As a Product Leader, You Must Add ACE Skills to Your Toolkit

ACE stands for accountability, curiosity, and empathy, which are skills integral to a successful product leader's role. Accountability is the ability to accept imperfect outcomes and thrive in an environment that doesn’t penalize mistakes. Curiosity is the innate desire to understand the problem at its base level, and often, the best solutions flow from this curiosity.

A product leader deals with multiple verticals across the company, including engineering, sales, marketing, and customer support. Empathy is the ability to look at issues from different points of view and understand the challenges faced by these stakeholders.

“The one quality all product leaders must have is the ability to put themselves in the shoes of the engineers, the sales team, and the customer support team for a day”. - Satnam Singh.

Ensure that Your Product is Industry Compliant

Product leaders must be aware of industry regulations and compliances that apply to the product being delivered. Statutory compliances like HIPPA and GTPR are norms across a wide range of products. No customer wants to buy a product where they need a supplementary product to ensure that it is industry compliant. Compliance needs to be woven into the design stage for all new products.

“It’s all about making sure that your customers can use your products without requiring additional support”. - Satnam Singh

The Five P Framework for Product Leaders

The five P framework for product development is built on purpose, plan, priority, principles, and promotion. The purpose of any product is to integrate seamlessly into the user's workflow. Hence, awareness of the user’s upstream and downstream workflow activities is critical to ensure that your product integrates into this workflow. Once you understand the user’s workflow, it becomes easy to plan the development activities of your product.

Priorities are easy to define but must allow for a certain degree of agility and flexibility. Everything will not go according to your plan; hence, priorities will need to be shuffled around. Every product leader will come to a fork in the road where they need to take a call on going left or right. Well-defined principles define their decisions at this juncture and ensure that decisions aren’t taken under pressure.

Promotion is the ability to share your success within your team and the across the organization, and important to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction.

“I’ve applied the five P framework across travel and insurance products and data, analytics, and AI products, and it has worked for me across the board every time”. - Satnam Singh.

Guest at a Glance:

Satnam Singh is a mechanical engineer by qualification and a product leader by practice. He describes himself as a commercially minded, execution-focused leader with a proven track record of value creation. He has fifteen years of expertise in product management, data, analytics, and AI. He is also a Columbia Business School graduate and mentors MBA students at Columbia Business School and Rutgers University.

Satnam Singh on LinkedIn

Thomson Reuters on LinkedIn

Hosts at a Glance:

Dima Venglinski: Dima is the CEO of Fireart Studio, a boutique design and software development company committed to innovation and technology. His client portfolio ranges from startups to established global brands like Rolls Royce, Google, and Atlassian.

Connect with Dima on LinkedIn

Fireart Studio Website

Tolik Nguyen: Tolik is the CSO and Partner at Fireart Studio and leads the strategy team while solving the company’s end user’s issues from an early idea stage.

Connect with Tolik on LinkedIn

Fireart Studio Website