Leader Spotlight: Leading with influence, with Anand Narayanan
Anand Narayanan is Head of Product, Jira Scale, and India Product Site Lead at Atlassian. He began his career in engineering — first at National Instruments and later at Dell, where he was promoted to Director of Product Management for Enterprise Storage. Before his current role at Atlassian, Anand served in leadership roles at Rackspace, an end-to-end hybrid cloud and AI solutions company, and Simplilearn, an edtech company.
In our conversation, Anand talks about how product management differs in B2B versus B2C environments, including access to data and ownership over the end user. He shares leadership lessons acquired from working in the nonprofit sector and offers thoughtful career path recommendations for PMs. Anand also speculates on how a PM’s role will evolve given the prevalence and quick advancement of AI.
The importance of understanding perspective
You've managed large-scale product organizations in several roles. How do you lead with influence in large, distributed product environments where formal authority is limited and visibility varies?
You have to manage up, down, and sideways. But, I’ve found that some of the common principles of leadership are the same regardless of the environment. Typically, disconnects happen when there are asymmetries in information, the goals that people are driving, and their perspectives. Before you try to solve a problem and attempt to influence people, it's important to do a few things right.
First, understand the perspective that each stakeholder brings to the table and what uniquely motivates them. Second, establish the broadest possible perspective on that problem. I tend to do at least one or two customer calls every week. These stack up over time, and within a year, without having to do anything else, I’ll have talked to 50–100 customers. I spend time looking at the data and understanding how funnels work.
Third, learn how to speak the same language. If you don’t understand a stakeholder’s perspective, your language won’t land. Earlier in my career, I would go to the board of directors — who were mostly investors — and say, "We're going to solve for NPS or engagement." And the board would look at me blankly. Their perspective was very simple: I put in X amount of money into the company, and I want 10X. It's as simple as that.
I learned that I needed to speak the board’s language. I was able to show that engagement drives repeat behavior, which correlates to revenue and success. All of a sudden, we were speaking the same language, and everybody was aligned. It was exciting.
In terms of motivating your team, how do you balance giving PMs the autonomy they want with accountability for outcomes?
First of all, it starts with being very comfortable in your skin. Trust that you have the experience and judgment to make the right kind of calls at the right time. Instead of solving the problem for your team, ensure that the right framework for solving the problem is defined.
For example, we’re working through AI use cases on my team. I've got a really bright set of product managers, and they’re all jumping right in. My job is not to go and tell them, “Here are the five greatest ideas that we should go build.” Instead, I'm providing how we would measure the success of whatever ideas come out of this brainstorming conversation. My goal is to help us agree on a framework and create the guardrails and structure of the discussion.
We've had three meetings already, and we've come up with seven or eight great ideas that we're going to put on the roadmap. I probably spoke in that meeting two times, but these were six hours' worth of discussions. It’s so important to understand your role and the maturity of your team. I’ve inherited less mature teams, and in those cases, I was more directive. I showed them how things were done and led by example. But at some point, you start slowly stepping back. If the team is quick to learn, then your job is to structure the problem and guide them in the right direction, but not necessarily solve the problem itself.
Another good example is the go-to-market efforts with my team. We work with product marketing and sales. A lot of leaders would say, “Hey, that's my job. The team's going to go do the product work, and I'm going to go talk to sales and marketing." I've taken a different approach where I’ve asked our senior PMs if they wanted to learn the go-to-market work. Now, my current senior PM is leading this entire charge. Behind the scenes, she's working with me to create the structure, framework, and templates.
In doing this, you create leaders who are doing more than they ever thought they could. You build leaders who could eventually take on your role. It comes down to trusting your team, making sure that you're able to gauge where they are on that journey, and then giving them autonomy based on where they are.
Leadership skills in B2B vs. B2C
How did your early experiences in the nonprofit sector help you learn to manage without direct control?
Early on in my career, I was an engineer, and I just didn’t have the exposure and experience to run teams well. But I learned a lot of leadership lessons outside of the office. I ran a music band in Texas, and it was actually a nonprofit. We’d collect funds at our community shows and then donate them to worthy causes. We’d tour six or seven cities in and around Austin, Texas. All 20–25 people involved in the band had day jobs — they were just there because they were passionate about music.
One thing I learned is that you can't push volunteers to do things that they're not fundamentally invested in doing. In the first few years, I felt like I knew everything and could do everything, and I lost a lot of people because of it. They’d say, “Anand wants to take things in a direction that I'm not interested in." I realized very quickly that I was making rookie mistakes. This was a tough lesson. From this experience, I learned that first and foremost, you have to agree on mission and vision.
I also learned to ask for help when needed. Once you ask, you’ll often find many people who will run to help. You’ll start building a core set of volunteers who are committed to driving meaningful impact, and that core team will stick together.
I take these lessons into my work today. My team and employees have a choice — they’re at the company because they're doing something exciting. It’s part of my role to get their buy-in in order to get things done.
You've led product teams both in B2B and B2C settings. What mindset shifts happen for PMs when moving from one setting to the other?
I was very fortunate to have this experience, both in B2B and B2C, and in small and large companies. The way I look at it, B2B is sold to aggregated champions in some sense. In B2B, you sell to a buyer persona or procurement lead who provides it to the end user. In B2C, you cut out the middleman and go straight to the end user. It’s aggregation versus disaggregation.
In B2C, you have direct ownership of the end user. You can run experiments quickly and, as a result, see behavioral changes and data. In B2C companies, teams tend to rely more heavily on data and experiments. They view product management more as a science because there are so many experiments to get data from.
It takes a bit of maturity and product sense to be a B2B product manager. You actually help the end user in different ways. Sometimes, the person who buys the product, the administrator, and the user are three different people. It takes a certain level of maturity to grow product usage and create value for each of those personas.
You also have to use this product sense to figure out what matters more and what matters less. Typically, causations are difficult to find. You’ve got to look at statistical correlations and attribution models.
Finally, B2B tends to be a little heavier on verbal and written storytelling. Exceptions exist, but because B2C tends to be a lot more metrics and experimentation-driven, the numbers often tell a story. In B2B, you have to bring your product sense to a slightly stronger point of view. You have to do a bit more work persuading people and advocating for what you think is right.
Joining different environments throughout your career
For PMs who are planning their career path, how should they think about B2B vs. B2C in their journey?
Data skills are crucial to being a strong product manager. You learn those very fast in B2C, with its faster cycles, so I would start there. I believe that the more diverse problems you solve, the more you’ll learn, and the stronger you’ll become as a PM. In addition to starting in B2C, I also recommend trying various product types, if possible.
Once you've mastered B2C, then transition to B2B, ideally in a mid-sized or larger company. You’ll be bringing your learnings to a place where the cycles of execution are slower. Then learn everything you can about storytelling and product sense, and get immersed in that.
I believe that product managers should spend at least two years in a problem space. This allows you to not only deliver something, but also see its results. Over time, you'll identify patterns that are common across different industries and business types, as well as some that are unique.
If a PM is making the transition from B2C to B2B — assuming they have worked in various-sized companies — do you recommend they make that initial transition within the same vertical?
Each person has to consider their own journey, but there are some common criteria. I moved from automation to enterprise storage to cloud to edtech to software work management. These are all very different things, but changing verticals forced me to restart with each move. This strategy really enables bottom-up thinking, which I think is great.
Each PM has to ask, “How adaptable am I? How quickly can I grasp the fundamentals of a new industry? Am I risk-averse? Will I be OK if I take a big risk and it doesn’t work out?”
If you’re risk-averse and want to take this one step at a time, I’d suggest you stay close to where you’ve been before and slowly expand from there. But if you don’t mind taking more risks and failing once in a while, I’d encourage you to change segments and industries. It is the fastest learning that you’ll ever have.
Nearly every company is pursuing AI, experimenting with it, or at least talking about it. How do you think this will impact the role of the product manager?
The PM’s role is evolving daily. I find that if product managers aren't using AI to analyze their customer data, support tickets, suggestions, requests, etc., they’re missing out. AI is very helpful in articulating the story and being a sparring partner.
For example, you can use ChatGPT’s voice mode and tell it to be somebody who's interviewing you for your product pitch. Tell it to ask tough questions. From a base level and analytics, it can give you some solid ideas. Perplexity can do deep research today as well — it can provide ideas that round out what you're already doing.
AI is also excellent for rapid prototyping. There are tools like Cursor, Bolt, Loveable, etc. that can help you create a prototype based on what you feed it. This type of iteration used to take weeks or months, and now, it is almost instant.
Further, you can connect your GPT with Zapier or another automation tool to monitor data, bring back alerts, and analyze them. There are constant signals that these types of tools can give you.
AI is not yet great at multi-step solutions. But I think this is a problem that's going to be solved in the next few months. That's sort of the next frontier for AI solutions. It's an exciting time. Things are evolving very quickly.
The net of it all is that PMs will have AI helpers to increase their ability to solve problems faster. The AI helpers accelerate ideation, prototyping, coordination, and many of the mundane “time wasters” and sharpen a PM’s thinking and direction.