The Three W's: A Practical Framework for Growing as a Product Manager

Dhiman, who leads product, design, program management and research at Gojek across India, Singapore and Indonesia, says he once believed a PM's growth depended on how exciting the product area was. Over fifteen years he watched PMs on hot products complain that they hadn't grown, while others on unglamorous streams rose quickly. That mismatch pushed him to take notes and talk to other product leaders about what the fast risers did differently.

The result is a framework he calls the three W's: what you produce, what you bring to the table, and what your operating model is. Strong PMs are usually good at two of the three. The ones who are actually rising are performing well on all of them at once.

Dhiman describes a progression from outputs to outcomes to leadership and direction. At the start of a career, what you produce is outputs: a launch, an experiment analysis, a contribution to a go-to-market plan. As you gain comfort with stakeholders you begin to decide which outputs are needed, which is when you graduate to owning outcomes and goals. The common mistake is to abandon outputs once you move up, when you should keep making product notes and drafts that others can build on.

He gives a small example of what a good output looks like. A PM on his team ranked every possible source of content for a homepage by ease of sourcing, and it made life simpler for many people and fed into the broader strategy. Had that PM obsessed over the whole content strategy, he suggests, they might never have delivered anything. He also recalls losing the chance to lead his own product area to a colleague who was simply better at launching, working with design and running experiments.

Host Lenny Rachitsky agrees and frames it as a question of earning trust: when you are new, nobody has asked you to define a three-year vision, they want things done. Dhiman adds that the same mindset applies to senior people joining a new team or company. You are one cog in the wheel, not the whole wheel, and the "mini CEO" folklore around product management can mislead people who are just starting out.

The second W is what Dhiman calls your "impact on impact". A successful product area does not automatically lift you; you have to show you contributed to it through the quality of your PRDs, strategy notes, north stars, experiments and metrics. He says these artifacts demonstrate progress on four pillars: data and metrics, design and research, technology skills, and strategy. When a PM tells him their impactful work isn't helping their career, he asks to see their last PRD, product note, strategy doc and design brief, and usually something is missing.

The third W, the operating model, is about communication, collaboration, organizational skills and community, and he sees it as the most important one for moving from mid-senior to senior. He offers three tenets: raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with, bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself, and be in charge of getting decisions made rather than making them all yourself. He notes that they are easy to say and hard to embody every day.

Rachitsky shares the story of a head of product whose team was pushed into low-value work, who later realized that pushing back was precisely his job. Dhiman responds that people should concentrate on what they control, rather than obsessing over what they don't.

Asked how to level up document quality, Dhiman says it is not just the breadth of artifacts but their depth. Some PMs bring arguments, debates and pushback to the table; others turn questions and inputs into strategic choices that shape discussions and direction. His advice is to be the second kind. Rachitsky's summary is that you want an aura of "I've got this", so that people trust a task given to you will be done well.

On the art of pushback, Dhiman says people who push back successfully without being seen as difficult tend to bring the tempo of a conversation from an emotional space to a logical one. A war cry and high urgency are sometimes appropriate, he admits to doing it himself, but in most cases a more equal, logical footing works better. PMs who can do that with executives, he says, will see more rapid career growth.

Dhiman says part of the problem lies with product leaders who haven't defined growth frameworks well, but mindset matters too. Early on, PMs focus on their craft, their output and their own learning. By mid-senior levels the questions drift to why the organization isn't doing something for them or why a stakeholder won't change, things outside their control. He urges people to keep returning to what they can influence, which, through the three W's, still offers years of work.

The second mindset is your relationship with change. Younger PMs pick up new skills every six months, so their growth rate is high; later, people hesitate over which product to take on and the rate of change slows. His practical fix is to benchmark yourself against the best in the industry, or against other functions, so your self-score drops and you can see what to improve. Changing teams or companies, he adds, should be the last resort.

The third and most powerful is how you see yourself. Labels like "high agency" or "hyper-collaborative" can become excuses, since a self-described high-agency PM may feel allowed to be brash, while a collaborative one may feel excused for being indecisive. He suggests identifying the stories you tell yourself, asking trusted people to reflect them back, and correcting them.

Dhiman shares his own example. He prided himself on his SQL and data skills until he joined Gojek and saw how good colleagues like Crystal Widjaja's growth team were, and he realized he was nowhere near their level. Rather than being crushed, he says it created a hunger to improve and let him reframe himself as someone still in a learning phase. He also moved from calling himself a "high agency" PM to a "mindful agency" one after working in Southeast Asia, where hyper-aggressive styles don't suit every team.

Rachitsky notes that some listeners feel discouraged by how good guests are. Dhiman answers that PM feedback comes from many stakeholders on many dimensions, so you must channel it into the skill areas you are deliberately targeting. You can't improve everything, and trying is what overwhelms people. Pick the area with the highest leverage, or fix a glaring weakness first, then move on.

On timing, he says soft skills like communication, collaboration and community are lifelong work. For hard skills, his recommendation is to choose between data and tech, plus design and research, and only then to focus on strategy. Rachitsky adds a reminder that feedback is a gift, and that visibly appreciating it keeps people giving more.

For people moving into product from other roles, Dhiman's advice is complementary: if you come from design or research, build data or tech skills; if you come from data or tech, build design and research. Demonstrate two of those three before you move on to strategy. He says the approach has helped Gojek convert many product managers, particularly in Indonesia.

He gives two recent examples. A PM from a growth and data background led a redesign of Gojek's driver-finding experience, using data-rich PRDs and close work with designers, and the result is, in his words, "a piece of art". A PM from research was pushed on technology and data skills until engineers said she was strong to work with, and she turned a heated feature question into a full proposal with designs and trade-offs.

The caveat is that it doesn't always work. Transitions go more smoothly earlier in a career, and a senior person from another function may take much longer, and may need a strong product leader to shape their skills. Going a little slow at the start, he says, can let you go faster later.

Dhiman admits that after decades of tech product work the PM role is still loosely defined, and that confusion extends to stakeholders who ask whether a given task is the PM's job. His rule of thumb is that if something blocks progress on the product, the PM should work on it. He compares product management to acting or dancing: there is an art to it, but science and structured frameworks can help you learn it.

His preferred picture is four circles for strategy, technology, design and data, with a product management circle enclosing them all. The PM is the only discipline collaborating with every other one, which gives a unique vantage point, and the role could be played by someone not titled PM. Rachitsky adds that PMs don't necessarily have magical skills; they just don't have another job like coding or designing, so they have time for the glue work. Dhiman concludes that you should see yourself as playing a role, not holding a title.

He then runs through the eight axes of his ladder, such as data, design and research, technology, and strategy, plus communication, collaboration, organizational skills and community. A level-five data PM could start a data company; a level-zero one can't define basic metrics. In strategy, someone else picks the mountain, such as growth versus profitability or which country, and the PM defines how to climb it: which segments, which needs, and in what order.

In the contrarian corner, Dhiman says he once believed good intent would carry him even when his communication faltered, but he now thinks actions, behavior and communication must also show who you are. He also argues it has become politically incorrect to say that effort, including hours, matters for growth. Rachitsky agrees, saying he sees a strong correlation between hours put in and success.

In the lightning round, his recommended books are Small Data by Martin Lindstrom, Adam Grant's Originals, and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. He says change and feedback are hard because we are used to thinking fast. His favorite interview exercise is to brainstorm choices on a product the candidate uses often, and he looks for whether they can abstract the goals and users and whether they care about what a feature enables rather than the feature itself.

He also calls out short-video drama apps, such as DramaBox, as a recent product discovery, praising their gamified unlocking and storytelling. His life motto is that it's never too late: he started his tech career at 25 and joined Gojek in 2018. For visitors to Singapore, he recommends a Hawker Center, specifically Lau Pa Sat.