Do you feel stuck in your current role and not growing? When you seek out growth opportunities, do you have difficulty landing them? You know you deserve that next promotion on the PM ladder, but you feel sidelined?
If you are just managing a product backlog instead of managing for landed impact, you will stay stuck. You need a completely different standard.
Let me first introduce to you the Amazon "Bar Raiser" concept. A Bar Raiser status is something you earn at Amazon by demonstrating that you live the Amazon Leadership Principles. You become a Bar Raiser by demonstrating a relentless focus on ownership and delivering results. You plan by working backwards from the customer. You consistently show a bias for action. You hire and develop the best people. You drive measurable growth. Bar Raisers protect the long-term vision, block mediocrity, and force the standard upward.
I brought that exact mindset to Google from my experience at Amazon where I was a Bar Raiser. I applied it to incubate a business and not just build a product. I did not limit myself to just define product roadmaps and ship features. I understood the high level needs of the organization and went into a “startup founder” mode to create the vision and a plan to build a business.
If you want to accelerate your career and operate at an elite level, you must adopt this standard. Here is how I made it happen, and the exact approaches you should copy.
Establish the Baseline
I started by taking a hard look at the reality and the objectives of the team I joined. I locked in our key OKRs, current state of our product metrics and underwood desired impact. I calibrated my approach towards driving landed impact to deliver on OKRs and decided to take the challenge of driving expansion growth OKR, right alongside my mandate to build our AI/ML platforms.
Building the product is only half the job. You have to build a model to drive its adoption and growth (the business) that scales.
The Lesson for PMs: Own the business outcome, not just the code. Never accept a roadmap without understanding the business mandate behind it. Own and drive landed impact. If you do not tie your product to the key metric of your leadership, your impact remains invisible.
Apply First Principles and Second-Order Thinking
When I took on the expansion growth OKR, I did not accept surface-level assumptions. I applied first principles thinking. I asked "why" repeatedly. I peeled back the layers of the problem to validate and firm up my core hypothesis. I stripped away conventional wisdom to find the fundamental truth of what our customers and our business actually needed.
Then, I used second-order thinking. I did not just look at the immediate impact of a feature. I looked at the next level. I mapped out the downstream effects on the sales motion, customer retention, and system architecture.
The Lesson for PMs: Never accept the first answer. Strip problems down to basic facts. Ask why until you hit rock bottom. Once your hypothesis is firm, look past the immediate result. Understand the second and third-order consequences of your product decisions before you commit resources.
Build the Vision from Day One
I led a zero-to-one motion in developing Google’s first AI/ML-based signal-intelligence system to drive a Product Led Sales hybrid motion to drive expansion.
I saw a massive gap in our business and an untapped opportunity for a severe need. I envisioned and proposed a product and a platform and GTM motion that simply did not exist across the company. I stepped directly into startup founder mode. I built a hard business case to convince leadership of the financial and strategic upside. I brought a challenger mindset to the table. I forced innovation. I aggressively adopted new AI/ML technologies to keep our products at the bleeding edge of the AI era.
Most product managers start with a list of features. I started with that business case. I mapped out a holistic strategy from the beginning. I defined the go-to-market motion and engineered exact paths for adoption and growth into the product itself. Features do not sell themselves. You must build adoption into the core architecture from day one.
The Lesson for PMs: Embrace the challenger mindset. Do not just build what is asked; build what is missing. Pitch it like a startup founder. Push for bleeding-edge technology, but ground it in a rigorous business case. Work backwards from the customer and the sale. Build your GTM strategy before you write a single line of code. If you bolt on an adoption strategy after launch, the product will fail.
Remove Constraints Through Action
When I started the signal intelligence platform, I had zero headcount. I had no engineering team assigned to build my product/platform.
Most PMs would log a dependency, blame resource constraints, and wait. I did not let that stop me. I needed data to prove my business case, so I went and got it myself. I rolled up my sleeves, learned the internal Google engineering systems, and queried the data directly.
I took it a step further. I leveraged Gemini to analyze that data and identify patterns specific to Google's scenarios. I prototyped the solution using AI tools. I designed a prototype machine learning model using K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) to find high-value expansion candidates. I operated as a forward-thinking AI PM long before others moved past traditional PM workflows. I built the foundation of the case with my own hands. I proved the opportunity was real.
The Lesson for PMs: A lack of resources is never an excuse. If you do not have engineers, be the engineer. Learn the systems. Pull the data yourself. Use AI tools to accelerate your prototyping and analysis. Prove the value of your product before you ask for a team to build it. Show a bias for action.
Influence for Impact
Because I had the data and the AI prototypes, I could show the “art of the possible” and secure alignment from cross-functional teams and leaders. I achieved this through crisp, clear writing. Good writing forces clear thinking and eliminates ambiguity.
This approach first secured the cross functional commitment from Sales to use my signals to drive sales-led expansion before it secured engineering headcount investment I needed. As my preliminary signals landed in some successes as a pilot, the leadership got confident on the approach. That helped me secure a commitment from Engg. leaders to actually build the MVP of the product. My VP called me a "man with a plan." I executed cross-functional motions by leveraging direct influence for impact. I won alignment with clear documents and sound logic.
The Lesson for PMs: Master the written narrative. Stop relying on slide decks to hide weak ideas. Write clear, direct documents. Make strong arguments supported by your own data and prototypes. Use your writing to force a decision and lock in cross-functional commitments.
Iterate and Deliver
I built an iterative strategy roadmap and we executed it relentlessly. The results were undeniable. We delivered 20x growth in our first year.
Leadership noticed. They doubled down on our success. Appreciating the hard evidence, they gave me a larger team and a multi-million dollar strategic OKR that reports directly at the CEO level.
The Lesson for PMs: Deliver outsized results fast, then ask for more. Build a roadmap that shows traction early. Use that early data as leverage to secure larger investments. Do not wait for permission to scale.
Lastly, Operate as a General Manager
Leadership acknowledges my approach because I do not work like a standard PM. I operate as the general manager of my business.
My boss said I act as an intrapreneur. My goal is to build scalable, billion-dollar businesses inside Google that deliver massive, outsized impact for our customers.
The Lesson for PMs: Stop acting like a project manager. Be an intrapreneur. Manage your product like a standalone startup. Take responsibility for the P&L, the marketing, the sales motion, and the customer success.
Set a high standard. Think holistically. Write clearly. Deliver results. That is how you become a Bar Raiser.
I mentor Googlers, MBA students and other early-in-career professionals using my Career Growth OS. Apply this system, my product management frameworks, and my AIPM playbook to advance your career. Book a meeting with me. Together, we will map out your exact steps to succeed in the AI industry.
