Vasudha Swaminathan

I constantly oscillate between sharing in-progress work and completed work. This means I'm long overdue to share some exciting updates on Wonderment Delivery Promise, our pre-purchase ETAs product. Wonderment now supports Rules for transit estimations and fulfillment estimations to allow you to account for per-product ETA customizations (like embroidery and engraving), warehouse delays, or other events that would impact coming estimates. Here's a quick demo of how you can use them for communicating pre-orders, backorders, and delays: https://lnkd.in/eb88vmcu

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In product development, the biggest myth is that progress is linear. Write the PRD. Hand it to Design. Then to Engineering. Wait for delivery. But anyone who has built products knows the best outcomes don't come from handoffs, they come from collaboration. At project44, we have built our process around that truth. Product, Design, and Engineering work together from day one, shaping the problem and the solution in real time. The PRD is not a static document; it is a shared understanding that evolves as we learn. AI plays a large role in that evolution. It helps us move faster, explore more options, and uncover insights earlier, not by replacing expertise but by amplifying it. In a recent blog, I explain how this collaborative, AI-enabled approach has transformed how we define, design, and deliver solutions, and why the future of product development depends on making discovery a shared responsibility. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/g5seXSzh

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Plans are useless, but planning is ESSENTIAL. - Eisenhower This quote has been echoing in my mind as I navigate our annual planning process at Intuit. How many of us have meticulously crafted annual plans only to see them become outdated before the fiscal year even begins? 🙋‍♀️ Changing customer needs, tech shifts, company pivots – the reasons are endless! But here’s the secret: the REAL value isn’t in the plan itself, but in the act of planning. It’s not about debating the minutiae of sprint estimations. It’s about something much bigger. Here are 3 powerful ways planning drives success, beyond the document: 1️⃣ Cross-Functional & Leadership Alignment: Planning forces crucial conversations. Which customer segments are we prioritizing? What problems are we tackling? What are we not solving? And most importantly, what’s the relative priority for the company? At Intuit, we use a one-priority list to stack rank our quarterly plans, ensuring everyone is on the same page and leadership input is streamlined. It's about creating guardrails and avoiding the trap of "everything is equally important." 2️⃣ Dependency Identification: Planning reveals the critical teams for your roadmap’s success. Early clarity means you can anticipate roadblocks and find creative solutions. On one project, we foresaw dependencies on an oversubscribed team. Instead of being stuck, we trained an engineer to approve PRs, unblocking us creatively. It took 4-8 weeks, but because we planned ahead, we were ready! 3️⃣ Resource Planning: Planning provides clarity on team capacity. How many people will you have? This drives strategic decisions about breadth vs. depth. When our team faced major cuts one year, we were able to reset, narrow our scope, and set realistic, clear goals. It reduced ambiguity and ensured everyone was aligned. Planning isn’t about creating a perfect, static document. It’s about fostering alignment, anticipating dependencies, and strategically managing resources. It's the process that empowers us to adapt and thrive in a dynamic environment.

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As I am coaching PMs, I often get the question on how I navigate alignment challenges between cross-functional partners. I spent many years at YouTube building products where safety and user value must coexist. Finding common ground when the stakes are high and opinions diverse felt draining but over time I’ve come to enjoy the process. There is both an art and science to aligning stakeholder. One of the key things I've learned is thinking of alignment at three levels - Problem, Principles, and Product. 1️⃣ Problem - Starting with the Right Question I can't tell you how many times I've been in a room where we've spent hours debating solutions only to realize we weren't even solving the same problem. I remember one particular project where our team had many meetings of increasingly tense discussion before someone finally asked, "Wait, what problem are we trying to solve here?" It was a weird question to ask and felt like we are going backwards. But in that moment we realized how misaligned we were on the problem itself. 2️⃣ Principles - Your North Star in Difficult Terrain Clear principles are non-negotiable, especially for products focused on Safety and Responsibility. They serve as guardrails when you hit those inevitable crossroads where all paths forward involve tough trade-offs. A good way to test whether the principles are written well is to see if they can help answer questions like "Do we delay launch to address this use case? Are we ok to miss the near term opportunity?" 3️⃣ Product - Where the Rubber Meets the Road This is where alignment gets really tested. In my experience, developing options is the secret weapon for driving alignment at the product level. I typically spend hours in 1-1’s trying to understand everyone's perspective before bringing the group together to review options. Something I learned listening to Lenny’s podcast with Ami Vora is that pushback often indicates the other person knows something you don't. So rather than getting defensive, try to approach disagreements as learning opportunities. In evaluating options, I've found that simple pros and cons lists don't help much. Every option will have pros and cons! Instead, I define a few key dimensions that matter based on our product principles and company priorities. Then I grade each option against these dimensions (e.g high/med/low impact). This approach leads to much richer trade-off discussions. It's very rare for one option to be "green" on all dimensions, and that's where the real alignment work happens - deciding what matters most to the company and what you're not willing to compromise on. 👉 Alignment isn't about getting everyone to agree with you. It's about creating a shared understanding of the problem, establishing clear principles, and facilitating informed decisions about the product. Thanks James Beser for coaching me on the art and science of driving Cross-Functional Alignment. Link to the detailed post in my comments.

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How confident are you in your roadmap this year? Are you playing it safe, or taking real swings at opportunities that could change your product’s trajectory? Today's insight on The PM Brief, featuring John Cutler, hits this tension perfectly. He reminds us that prioritization isn’t just about how confident we feel right now. It’s about how quickly we can learn, reduce risk, and collapse uncertainty early. This is just one of many strong insights in John’s article. All 10 prioritization traps are worth a read if you’re rethinking how you plan and prioritize heading into 2026. #ProductManagement #AI #Prioritization

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Hot take 💥 most PMM org problems are not talent problems. They are design problems. I wrote this after seeing the same patterns repeat across teams. PMM brought in at the wrong time. Success measured by assets shipped. Org structure copied from companies with totally different product realities. If you’ve built or scaled a PMM org, what was the hardest decision you had to make to move from tactical support to strategic impact? https://lnkd.in/e-gXXZMT

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In every product leadership role I’ve taken, my key to success was spending as much time on recruiting as I did on product. Great teams build great products. I believe building teams deserves the same craft and intentionality as building the product itself. And with AI giving teams unprecedented leverage, teams that hire top talent faster will emerge as the winners. Given how much I value recruiting, it’s fitting that Paraform was the first investment I led at Felicis. Paraform is an AI-enabled, recruiter-first marketplace that helps companies hire 3x faster and helps recruiters earn 3x - 5x more than traditional recruiting roles. Their marketplace and tools give elite recruiters more speed, leverage, and time dedicated to helping companies hire their hardest-to-fill roles. The traction to date speaks for itself. Companies like Palantir, Ramp, Rippling, Cursor, Windsurf, and Decagon all rely on Paraform to help them hire the best people. Some recruiters have already earned $1M on their platform, and Paraform’s pace is accelerating. I’m so excited to partner with John Kim, Jeffrey Li, and the entire Paraform team on building the future of recruiting. Read more about why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/g6zb8ZrY

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Starting a new PM role is exciting — and overwhelming. The pressure to make an early impact is real. One of the most helpful resources I used was ProductPlan’s “First 90 Days” guide. It breaks your ramp-up into a simple sequence: Learn → Align → Contribute But there’s one overlooked habit that made this framework actually work for me — and helped me avoid the onboarding mistakes most PMs make. Here’s what I wish every PM knew about their first 90 days 1. First 30 Days: Learn the System Your only job early on is understanding the ecosystem you just entered — the product history, workflows, user needs, team culture, constraints, and unwritten rules. This context prevents early missteps. 2. Days 31–60: Build Alignment Once you understand how things work, start creating clarity: priorities, expectations, success criteria, and where your role fits. Being informed is good. Being aligned is better. 3. Days 61–90: Make a Visible, Meaningful Contribution Not a big launch. Just one thoughtful improvement (a decision, a process fix, a prototype) that shows you understand the system and can move it forward. 4. The Overlooked Habit: Bring People Along for the Ride Most PMs try to “prove themselves” quietly. I did the opposite. I shared my 90-day plan with my manager, walked through it in 1:1s, and even set up coffee chats with teammates to pressure-test ideas and gather input. Narrating my thinking created shared context and helped me calibrate early. 5. Why This Habit Matters Bringing people along: • prevents misunderstandings • builds trust faster • creates focus in an endless sea of “things you could look into” • keeps you from trying to do too much too soon By month two, I already had big project ideas but revisiting my plan with my manager kept me grounded and incremental. Without that collaboration, I wouldn’t have built the foundation that made my early impact possible. A solid 90-day plan gives you direction. Bringing people along gives you traction.

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🚀Hi all - I’m launching a newsletter (Reflections by TK) for builders and leaders in tech. I've spent over a decade operating at the intersection of product, engineering, and business. This newsletter is my attempt to slow down, reflect out loud, and synthesize my learnings on building, scaling, and leading in complex environments—with the hope it helps others in navigating their own path with more clarity and confidence. It is also an attempt to finally shape my writing dream. ✍️ The first post is about a tension many of us wrestle with: How do you scale good judgment without replacing it with undue process? In large organizations, we rely on frameworks and processes to scale good judgment and reduce risk of poor decision-making. But somewhere along the way, it’s easy to forget that these are just tools, not truths. We start optimizing for metrics instead of solving real problems, and following checklists instead of thinking from first principles. The best leaders know when to follow the lines, and when to redraw them. In this piece, I share: 🔹 Why process is necessary 🔹 How it starts to break 🔹 When to override it 🔹 How to build a culture of first principles thinking 📖 Would love for you to give it a read and let me know what resonates. How have you balanced the need for process with critical thinking in your teams? #productleadership #techstrategy #firstprinciples #decisionmaking #leadership #reflectionsbytk

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