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Jeremy Epling joins Executive Function this week for a deep dive on what it takes to become an incredibly effective CPO. After a 16-year run at Microsoft overseeing just about every major product line, Jeremy Epling joined GitHub as VP of Product. For one of his first projects, then-CEO Nat Friedman assigned him to a mission impossible: Get GitHub Actions to GA in nine months. No budge on the timeline. It seemed absurd to Epling on paper, but he says Friedman’s confidence and coaching ultimately pushed him to get it done. “I did better work than I thought I could on a faster schedule than I thought I could. It was a career-defining project for me,” he says. Epling’s now CPO at Vanta, where he’s modeled his own leadership MO after Friedman to help his team do great work faster than they thought possible. He shares more gems in this episode of Executive Function, which is well worth a listen for executives across the org chart — not just on the product side: - Find the IC influencers in your company and stay close to them. "I always look for the influencers in my org,” he says. “A lot of companies don't celebrate ICs enough. They're usually extremely good at what they do. They can communicate it well to executives. And I think that is a skill.”
- How to avoid the “go fetch a rock” problem in decision-making. There was a saying at Microsoft that bad decision-making is like asking someone to go fetch a rock. “Someone's like, ‘Hey, can you go fetch a rock?’ And you're like, ‘What rock?’ So you bring one and they're like, ‘Actually, that’s not the right one.’ That's the worst,” says Epling. “So we try to define boundaries around decisions and ask, ‘What data do we all agree we need to make this decision?’”
- Big co experience doesn’t have to be a non-starter at a startup. Epling pulled off a career transition that’s often ill-fated in tech: Big co (like, Microsoft big) to startup exec. He says it worked for two reasons: He went zero to one on new products every few years at Microsoft, which was like working at a “series of startups.” And instead of jumping straight from Microsoft, he took a “bridge” stint at GitHub, which prepared him well for Vanta. He got to experience the full commercial loop — product to messaging to pricing to revenue, whereas product lived on its own planet at Microsoft, disconnected from the business side of things.
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