Rubrik CPO on Scaling AI, Cybersecurity & Business Model Transformation | Anneka Gupta | E274

Product managers don't own the sales team. That doesn't mean that the product managers and product leaders shouldn't feel accountable to the revenue numbers. The lifeblood of a business is growth, and every business has some kind of transformation that it's probably going through. And we incubate the new products with all of these people together. And what that allows us to do is as we're hearing feedback from the market, we can build enhancements to the product very, very quickly. The best place to start is with your existing customers. If they love your product, they're gonna give you a warm intro to the other personas. Biggest business risk is that you're gonna churn your customers or you're going to substantially decelerate your new sales because of this change that you're making in the business. What matters the most is, like, you have at least one Hey. This is Carlos's AI voice clone. Carlos is the CEO of Product School and the host of the Product Podcast. He asked me to set the stage before he takes over the mic. This episode was recorded live from our podcast studio in San Francisco. Today's guest is Anika Gupta, chief product officer at Rubrik, a leading cybersecurity company that helps over 5,000 customers, including half of the Fortune 500 protect, manage, and recover their data in the face of ever evolving cyber threats. Since joining in 2021, Annika has been the driving force behind one of the most impressive product transformations in tech. She helped evolve Rubrik from an IT backup solution into a full scale cybersecurity platform, and the results speak for themselves. Rubrik went public in 2024. Subscription ARR crossed $1,090,000,000, and the company's market cap climbed well past $10,000,000,000. In this episode, Anika shares hard earned lessons from leading three massive transformations. Shifting Rubrik's business model from perpetual licenses to a SaaS first approach, expanding from a single product company to a multi product platform with two new product lines now approaching $100,000,000 in ARR and repositioning Rubrik as a cybersecurity first company trusted in high stakes enterprise environments, she also gets real about navigating tough org changes and learning from early missteps. If you're an enterprise product leader navigating change at scale, you're in for a treat. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the adaptable identity platform that helps businesses fight fraud, meet compliance requirements, and build trust. For example, how can you know you're really listening to me, Carlos, and not my AI voice clone? These days, it's easier than ever for fraudsters to steal voices, faces, and identities. That's where Persona comes in, helping leading companies such as LinkedIn, OpenAI, Etsy, and Twilio to securely verify individuals and businesses worldwide, going far beyond traditional identity checks. Of course, every company has different needs depending on its industry, use cases, risk tolerance, and user demographics. That's That's why persona provides flexible building blocks that allow you to build tailored verification flows …