Do CPOs Even Care About AI?

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Ready to move to the next level in your product career? I'm Shobhit from Intentional Product Manager. Join me as we discuss ways to help you stand out in your job search and your career so you can have more impact and make more money. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Intentional Product Manager podcast. I'm your host Shobhit Chugh. Today I'm sitting down with Shardul Mehta. He's the $100 million-plus non-Silicon-Valley product Jedi, and that title is very well earned. Shardul has spent about 30 years or so in product management across Fortune 100s like Capital One, startups, healthcare, fintech, the Department of Defense, where he was honored by the Secretary of Defense, and most recently led the launch of a GenAI medical coding product targeting a $300 million ARR opportunity. He founded ProductCamp DC, ran an improv comedy school, and today runs the Street Smart Product Manager newsletter and live show. He's on a mission to help product managers gain the influence, respect, and impact they deserve. Shardul, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.

Shardul: Thanks, Shobhit. It's wonderful to be here.

Shobhit: For folks who haven't come across your work yet, who is Shardul Mehta, and what drives you in the product management world?

Shardul: I've been recognized as a product management expert and a business growth specialist. I help product managers develop their careers, and I help organizations install a scalable decision discipline that connects product choices to business and financial outcomes. I've always been a builder and creative at heart — when I was a kid, my dad brought home an HP-85, and I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I first learned to code in dBase, then moved on to C, C++, Java, and so on. As much as I love technology and computers, I always wanted to do my own business — so instead, I went to business school thinking it would teach me everything I needed to know. Since then my career has had two parallel and intertwined tracks: one in product management, the other in entrepreneurship and business ownership. On a personal note, I've been married for 27 and a half years — my wife and I met 32 and a half years ago — and we have two kids, both grown into adulthood now. Another fun fact: I was born in the US but grew up half my life in Mumbai, so some people get fooled by the accent.

Shobhit: Great to have you here, and I love your origin story. You call yourself an accidental product manager, and you've mentioned being seen by business people as too technical and by technical people as not technical enough — too verbose, not communicative enough. Tell us what that moment was like and what changed over time.

Shardul: It was really interesting — I was called too verbose to my face, and also not communicative enough to my face. I was called detail-oriented yet not presenting the right level of detail, whatever that meant. Honestly, I had no idea back then how to navigate an organization, how to foster cross-collaboration — I had no executive presence, zero leadership skills. But my reality was that I had a young family to support, and at the time I was the primary breadwinner, so I knew I had to make a change and really 10x my skill set. Along the way, I founded ProductCamp DC with a few others, and through that I met other product people, especially outside the Silicon Valley bubble, who had a lot of the same challenges. At the same time I was exposed to the world of entrepreneurship, startups, business ownership. I gained several mentors — product leaders, seasoned business managers, other entrepreneurs. That's when I had this epiphany: great product management is not about a development methodology or any particular tool or template or framework. Great product management happens best at the intersection of business management, leadership, and an entrepreneurial attitude. That was the unlock for me — after that is when my career started taking off.

Shobhit: That's a very important aspect we'll dig into more — the business side of product management. You mentioned ProductCamp DC, and connecting with people like Steve Johnson and Rich Mironov, relationships that have lasted over 20 years. How have those mentors shaped how you think about your craft?

Shardul: Both of them have been doing this even longer than I have. Rich was really the first product management mentor I had. I can't remember how we met, but he was always very generous with his advice and his time — I got to the point where I'd call him on his personal number with some career issue or product issue I was tackling, and he'd always give me great advice. I was following his blog — there's a lot of noise in product management, most of it not very useful, and I don't think it was back then either. I was looking for grounded, actionable advice, and his blog was one of those, and I got lucky to get to know him. We still stay in touch. It's similar with Steve Johnson — I never took the Pragmatic Marketing course, but I met him through ProductCamp DC. When we started ProductCamp, we had no idea what we were doing, and Pragmatic was sponsoring every ProductCamp out there at the time. Steve came for the first several years and was a really good mentor, helping guide us on how to run a ProductCamp. Even today, I think they're two of the few people who still talk a lot of sense about what product management actually is and what its value is — leading thinkers in the space.

Shobhit: Now let's talk about a major topic — the new "product scoreboard" you've mentioned. You've been having candid, off-the-record conversations with many CPOs and VPs of Product across different scales of companies. You'd expect these executives to be consumed by AI — frankly, everyone might expect that right now. But that's not what came up. Tell us what you were actually hearing from them.

Shardul: It really ran the gamut in terms of industries and investment models, and the feedback was kind of surprising. We were just asking them, "what challenges are you facing currently" — expected to hear a lot about AI. Didn't hear about AI at all. It was acknowledged, but that wasn't what was keeping them up at night. These conversations have honestly been some of the most enriching I've had in the last three to six months. There's a shift taking place in product management, and most people think it's AI — it's really not. What I've been hearing from these product executives is that the charter used to be about shipping and improving product, and frankly product management was able to get away with that in the age of near-zero or zero interest rates, unlimited access to capital, growth at all costs. But now more and more product leaders are telling us they're being held accountable for real business outcomes — growth, revenue, margin, profit. They're being asked to actually sign up for a number, and they're being judged on whether the organization believes in their ability to execute against those plans — not the shipping plans, the investment plans. Where are we making the bets? How good are we in the rigor of making those decisions? Are we able to execute to realize the expected returns? The issue I'm hearing more and more is that a lot of product leaders, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, were trained in product craft, but not in the language executives and boards use to allocate investment — and that mismatch creates what I call a credibility gap. It's getting more expensive. The shift is toward becoming more like portfolio owners — true business operators responsible for capital allocation. That's a real change.

Shobhit: That's really eye-opening, and I love when somebody brings a counterintuitive point of view. I love the "3 a.m. problem" — what keeps your boss up at 3 a.m. You wrote something that really stuck with me: one CPO told you, "my teams can explain what they built, they can't explain why it deserves continued investment." Tell me more — what's behind that gap?

Shardul: What I'm hearing from these product executives is basically five challenges. First, product initiatives seem disconnected from company-level goals — it's not clear to the C-suite or commercial leaders how product work is helping drive the business forward. That gets to the second challenge: product narratives lack explicit financial and commercial grounding. We do a lot of product work — I'm not saying roadmaps are useless — but the connection between how the product work materially impacts revenue, margin, profitability often isn't there. That leaves the third challenge: product teams struggle to communicate initiatives in the business language that executives, commercial teams, boards, and investors actually understand and want to hear. So product executives end up paying what I call a translation tax, stepping in themselves to establish credibility with the leadership team and the board — that's the fourth challenge. The fifth is lack of coordination with go-to-market. Product plans — just go on LinkedIn and you'll see this — have a ton of detail on features and development plans but are sparse or even completely lacking on commercialization: how are we going to actually get this to market, coordinate with sales, marketing, support? Do we have a fundamental understanding of our sales motion? Many times that's a missing link, and product leaders have to step in to translate.

Shobhit: Is that purely a communication gap, or a thinking gap — where the translation between product plans and business goals hasn't even been thought through?

Shardul: We actually asked several of these product leaders that exact question — is it a comms gap, a skills gap, or a knowledge gap. Their response: it's a skills and knowledge gap for the most part. Is it also a communications gap? Yes, absolutely — but it starts with having the knowledge and skills. Rich Mironov has recently published a book, Money Stories — free plug, Rich — and he's been talking about this for a long time. That's what executives, boards, and commercial teams care about. We as product people get wrapped up in our product craft, our roadmap, agile frameworks, the lingo — product-led, product thinking, product sense. When it comes to the executive team, lecturing them that we need to become product-led instead of tech-led or sales-led just isn't going to win the day. That's not how businesses think. Product teams do a bunch of work, propose priorities, and describe them in terms that make no sense to these people. I talked to a CPO who had his team audit all the product work from the last year — they found 75% of it had no tangible business value, or they couldn't describe the value in clear terms. That's pretty stark. Another one — this was in December — had a board meeting where they presented a $16 million spend, and a board member literally asked point blank, "so what did we get for all that spend?" This is a billion-dollar-valuation company, and the CPO didn't even directly control that piece of the business — but guess who got the question. They had to scramble over the next couple weeks and come back with an answer. That's what I mean by the game changing — this rigor, this translation tax, and it's affecting the credibility of product teams. I believe it's going to trickle down from the head of product, the product executive, down to individual product managers over time.

Shobhit: Another thing you wrote that got a lot of reaction — positive and negative — is that "product owner is not product management." What nerve did that hit?

Shardul: Honestly, I'm not really sure, but I know that anytime you post anything about product owner or agile, people get triggered. My basic point, which I've said many times, is that just implementing agile doesn't mean you have product management. It's a software development methodology — it works, and it doesn't work, I don't think it's a silver bullet. A lot of people want to get into product management, and it's hard — I don't want to trivialize that — so they take a product owner certification and think, voila, we're in product management. And I know this is going to sound harsh, but that's not product management. If you go back to first principles, when I learned product management decades ago, it was a business discipline — really the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, promotion. In tech we adopted it and it became overly focused on technology and delivery, and then agile just poured kerosene on that fire, and suddenly product owner became accepted as part of product management. I'm sorry, but it's not. I'm not saying it's not an important job, or that you should feel bad if you're doing it — but every implementation of that role I've seen is a delivery role. There's no ownership from a business perspective — you're maybe owning the delivery or the backlog, which, fun fact, AI is now going to streamline and make a lot easier. I've met product owners who don't spend any time with customers, who have no understanding of the business, nothing involved in go-to-market. There are huge elements of the actual product manager job that most product owners aren't doing. I'd love for somebody to explain to me how that's product management at the end of the day. Again — not saying it's not important, and if you're doing it, awesome, maybe you're the best in the world at it. But it's just not product management to me.

Shobhit: Let's do a reverse translation. Many of our listeners are individual PMs, senior PMs, maybe new directors, and you said this effect trickles down. If product leadership is now accountable for revenue and margin, how does that change what's expected of the product manager working on part of a product, and what shifts for them?

Shardul: They need to act as fiduciaries who can prove the return on capital being invested in their product development efforts — stewards of the capital being invested in the R&D. If it's happening at the top, it's going to come down, because every product manager now needs to prove not just customer outcomes but business outcomes — why are you proposing the product plans and priorities you're proposing? It's not good enough to have a spreadsheet scorecard and implement some prioritization framework. You have to fundamentally understand the business model behind your product, understand the company's financial or strategic goals, and directly or indirectly tie to those. The interesting thing is I started talking about this years before I began these recent discussions with product leaders — I think something has shifted, partly because we're no longer in a world of zero interest rates and free capital. Because of that macro shift, boards and investors are applying more rigor and discipline to how capital is invested, and you have to be able to defend those initiatives. So if you're in that role, you either keep paying this translation tax yourself, or you teach your people how to do it. If you keep doing it yourself, maybe that makes you look good — but as a leader, I think you're doing a disservice to your product teams, and putting more of a burden on yourself. I look back on my career and the PMs who were successful — even before I started talking about this shift, I was always saying you have to connect your work to business outcomes that matter. I had a couple of CFOs who were kind mentors — they asked me sharp, pointed questions, and it's not about becoming a financial analyst. I have an article called "Justify Your Existence" — take your own salary, add overhead, say 25-28%, how many people are on your engineering team, five, ten, whatever — even if you don't know their salaries, Google the average. Quick back-of-the-envelope math. That's the cost of your development team. Now what's the return you're producing on that? Because believe me, your CFO is wondering that, and it's exactly the question that comes up every year in budgeting — why are we spending all this money, and what are we getting for it? I've been asked point blank: "so you and the CTO are proposing to add three more squads to get these initiatives done — are you signing up to get that $10 million more in revenue?" I wasn't formally required to sign up for the number, but I was asked, and an answer was expected. I get on calls with product managers and ask a simple question: do you know how much your team costs? They have no clue. Go back and calculate it — for a typical two-week sprint or whatever your cadence is, you can calculate the cost of each sprint. Why wouldn't that be a factor in determining what goes in your next sprint, release, or quarterly roadmap?

Shobhit: To your point, it doesn't have to be complicated — back-of-the-napkin math, and if it makes sense, that can make for a very compelling case. You don't have to be a spreadsheets person doing a whole financial analysis.

Shardul: Exactly. We will always have a finite amount of development capacity. I had a CFO once tell me, "even if we got a hundred million dollars tomorrow, we'd just have a new constraint — you still haven't told me how you plan to spend the resources you already have wisely." It's really about tradeoffs and opportunity costs — if we do one thing, we can't do another. You don't have to crack open a massive spreadsheet for every feature — if you have a backlog of 300 items, doing that for all 300 is pointless. It's more about order of magnitude, given your strategy and goals: is this a four-digit opportunity, a five-digit, a six-digit, a seven-digit opportunity? Comparing and contrasting where's the biggest bang for the buck.

Shobhit: I want to add something — sometimes there's a misconception that this matters for startups, but that companies like Google and Meta, with all their resources, don't need to answer these questions. I can tell you, you get asked the exact same questions, because those resources could be on another team adding margin or revenue elsewhere. You have to justify your existence and your roadmap no matter where you are.

Shardul: Yeah, you were at Google, so you'd know better than me — I've never worked at Meta or Google or Amazon or Apple, which is why you never hear me talk about them, I don't talk about things I don't know. But you're absolutely right, it's not unique to startups. In a way the equation in a startup is somewhat more simple — not easy, but simple, because generally you're either trying to get to product-market fit, or once you've gotten there, it's about growth, signing up logo clients, getting to the hockey stick. It used to be that VC investors might sacrifice profitability in the short term for revenue growth — that may be changing a little now. It gets harder once you're at scale, with a more complex portfolio — you have to be more robust in how you make investment bets. If you're in private equity, that's a big eye-opener for folks — PE is pretty ruthless, they'll beat you down on revenue and EBITDA, they're not that interested in innovation for its own sake, they want to drive the numbers, the metrics, the ratios. It's not unique to private equity, it can happen universally, but in startups you generally have smaller teams — I might be head of product with two or five PMs, and it's a lot easier to communicate, align, shift priorities, even if it's chaotic week to week. Try doing that once you're at 50 million, 100 million, 250 million, half a billion — very different game, very hard decisions.

Shobhit: Let's talk about the transition from senior PM to director. You wrote a piece called "Why Product Directors Fail," about the creator-to-operator shift — a director who'd been a top-performing senior PM, got promoted, and was drowning within months. I've seen this too. What's the fundamental trap?

Shardul: They basically try to act as super PMs — a very common trap, I've been guilty of it too. You gain experience, get some wins, maybe an upgrade in title — senior PM, principal PM, group PM — and you start thinking, I'm an awesome product manager, I deserve to get promoted to director. Right there is the mistake, because it's a fundamental lack of understanding of what the role is. Director of PM is a totally different job — you are not a super PM. A lot of new directors, myself included at one point, get involved in all the details, feel the need to weigh in on every decision, and in a worst case try to impose their own way of doing product management onto their PMs. I get it — you were the best PM, so you got promoted, so you should tell the other PMs how to do it, right? That's the worst thing you can do, because the thing that got you here is not going to get you there. As an individual contributor you're driving execution, leading decisions, your success is what you deliver. As a director, you're building the system that produces good decisions — your focus is on building the machine, the operating system, that produces good decisions more consistently. Your success is based on how well that machinery works, on what the team delivers. Your job is creating leverage — turning time, talent, and process into sustainable results. It's a completely different equation, a massive step up. If any of your listeners are senior PM or principal PM thinking "I want to become a director," learn what that job is about first, see if you can grow into it within your company. And if you're a product leader looking to promote from within, it's incumbent on you to identify those people, nurture and grow them, and give them honest feedback on whether they're ready. I've lost senior PMs who quit because they were frustrated about not being promoted to director — they weren't ready at the time, could they have gotten there in a year or two, absolutely, I was prepared to help them, but they couldn't wait. I sleep well at night because I didn't think they were ready. Others grew into the role and got promoted at the right point. The thing about promotion is you get the title after you've already done the job — I know it's frustrating, it frustrated me too, but that's just how it works. When I wanted to go from director to VP, I had to already be doing the VP job before I got the title formally.

Shobhit: That's important to keep in mind — I hear all the time, "they essentially promoted me but never gave me the title or the compensation." Sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's "that's coming, they just want to make sure you can perform at that level."

Shardul: Absolutely, and it has to be fair — you should not string the person along. If they deserve it, create a path, be honest. And if they really do deserve it and it's not happening, maybe it's time to look elsewhere — that's fair enough too. But make sure you learn about the job, make sure you're prepared, because otherwise you'll drown. In the story I mentioned — the company shouldn't have promoted him when they did. He started drowning within six months, and he was let go. The people who made the promotion decision — were they let go? No. But he was. Maybe that's unfair, but you see that all the time. It's just what happens.

Shobhit: Let's talk about product managers earlier in their career. You've done a lot of free mentorship calls with PMs around the world — PM to senior-PM band. What are the common things they're struggling with?

Shardul: It really runs the gamut. I'd say the biggest thing is they're trying to find signal from noise — no fault of their own, it's easy to get distracted by myths and misconceptions, some tech bro's LinkedIn post, some 20-something tech founder on a podcast. Unfortunately many also suffer from poor leaders, mentors, and bosses who give them rank bad advice, and it manifests in everything from their resumes to job hunting to understanding what their role is about. If I had to boil it down, two of the biggest things they miss are understanding the business and developing a commercial mindset. Most product trainings and certifications are all about product craft — managing the backlog, writing user stories, journey mapping, A/B testing, maybe Scrum, maybe some customer discovery tactics. What they haven't been taught is how to understand the business, how to develop a commercial mind. Maybe they learned the business model canvas and that's it. I'll ask them, "have you ever been on a sales call?" No. "Do you understand how your sales model works, how your sales team gets compensated?" No. Well, maybe the reason none of your features are successful is because your sales team has no incentive to sell them — they're incentivized to sell the old features. Just a thought. They don't know how to connect their product work to actual business results, and it shows up in their resumes, interviews, performance reviews, their one-on-ones with their manager. You've probably seen even more resumes than I have at this point — you see a resume and think, this product manager is super competent, they really know their stuff, they just aren't connecting it to the things employers and businesses actually care about. That's where they often need the help — sometimes it's a skills or knowledge gap, sometimes it's purely a communication gap.

Shobhit: I mentioned the 3M problem — that's what we use when coaching PMs on finding their next job: can you draw the line between the multi-million-dollar problem your hiring manager has and where you've solved those problems before. If you can do that, you're a category of one — very few people actually do it. That's probably even more advanced than your current role — it's thinking about the kind of challenge you're hiring for.

Shardul: I wrote an article — I'm blanking on the title, I write a lot — about managing up, and the point was: if you're happy where you are, fine, but there's always an element of making your boss's job easier. When I moved into people-management and leadership roles, I was acutely aware of how to make the lives of my people easier and empower them — but there's also an element of making your boss's job easier, and it's true universally. I got some replies saying "oh, you're just talking about politics, kissing the ring." And I'm like, well, a little bit — the person who has the biggest impact on your career advancement, at least within the company you're at, is your boss. It just is. I'm not saying you have to kiss ass, and if your boss expects that, that's a toxic boss. But in general: what keeps my boss up at night, what's on their agenda, what are their goals, how are they held accountable, are there things I can do to help connect my product work to those things? It's just being savvy about your career management.

Shobhit: That reframing of politics is critical — most people quickly create a negative association with it, when it's really just managing relationships, managing people being people. Okay, as we wrap up, let's do some quick fun questions. You've done improv for seven years — performed, taught, ran a school.

Shardul: Loudoun Improv Comedy — I live in Loudoun County, Virginia, so it was offering improv classes within the county.

Shobhit: What's the biggest lesson from improv that made you a better product leader?

Shardul: Learning the power of "yes, and" and "got your back" were game-changing for me.

Shobhit: One product you think is just absolutely amazing?

Shardul: I enjoy using Gmail — it's simple, straightforward, they don't add a lot of useless bells and whistles, the interface is familiar, and it's a heck of a lot easier to use than Outlook.

Shobhit: What's something you believe about product management that many people will disagree with?

Shardul: A product manager is not a builder role. It is a business discipline. Product management is responsible for driving the business growth of the product — it does that through continuous and sustainable delivery of profitable customer value. Everything else is a means to an end, and those means may change over time. There are a lot of AI tools today, but the end remains the same: it's a business discipline, about driving the successful business growth of the product.

Shobhit: This has been a phenomenal conversation. Before I let you go, where can people find you and follow your work?

Shardul: Pretty simple — I have my newsletter and my weekly show that I do on most Thursdays. If you go to streetsmartproductmanager.com, my website, you can sign up for the newsletter and get updates when new episodes are out. And you can find me on LinkedIn — just my name — I generally post daily at 8 a.m. Eastern, so I'm a pretty frequent poster, but that's probably the easiest way to find me.

Shobhit: Amazing — and if you're watching on YouTube or listening on Spotify, in the show notes we'll include all these links so you can easily access them. Shardul, thank you so much for appearing, this was an amazing conversation, I learned a lot and would love to continue chatting.

Shardul: Anytime, absolutely, I loved it too, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

And for everyone — if this episode hit home for you, do us a favor and share it with a product manager who needs to hear it, maybe somebody looking to become a product director, or somebody who needs to make the translation Shardul mentioned. Thanks for listening to the Intentional Product Manager podcast, and see you next time. Be sure to check out our website at intentionalproductmanager.com to see how you can level up in your career.