Product Leader & Trail Seeker
Building products that matter.
Finding silence on trails that don't.
“Let your passion take the lead.”
About
I'm a product leader obsessed with the space where complex problems meet real human behavior. I've spent a decade helping teams go from fuzzy ideas to products people actually use, in enterprise SaaS, consumer apps, and AI-native tools. I'm also the creator of the SU-RICE prioritization framework and the author of three books on product and adventure.
When I'm not in a product review or writing a spec, I'm on a trail. Backpacking forces the same clarity I chase at work: strip away noise, understand the terrain, commit to the next step.
I write about strategy, AI product development, and the craft of building. Occasionally I write about getting lost in mountains. MIT xPRO · AIPMM Certified.
Framework
A product prioritization framework I created to fix the blind spots in traditional RICE scoring. SU-RICE adds two dimensions, Source and User Persona, so teams prioritize by where value actually lies instead of by the loudest voice in the room.
Featured & cited by
Books
Product Management
Building A Career in Product Management
Is there a logical path into product management? Drawing on his own route (mining engineer to MBA to Head of Product, with a failed startup in between), Anup argues there isn't one, only the ten skills any background can deliberately build.
Strategy
The Art of Product Prioritization
RICE scoring quietly breaks the moment strategy and stakeholders enter the room. SU-RICE, the framework Anup built across real SaaS growth stages, adds Source and User Persona, so you prioritize by where value actually lies, not by the loudest voice.
Adventure
A Solo Backpacking Journey
Twenty-three miles, three days, alone on the Badlands' Sage Creek Loop, and the day-one wrong turn that nearly ended it. Not a survival epic, just an honest account of an ordinary backpacker testing his limits in an unforgiving place.
Thought Leadership
Every roadmap is a story we tell stakeholders, and ourselves. A hard look at why roadmaps mislead the people who depend on them, and how to make yours tell the truth.
AI ProductsAI makes building almost free, which is exactly why discipline about what not to build matters more, not less. Buy the commodity, build the differentiation.
LeadershipAI erased the engineering-bandwidth bottleneck and pushed it upstream to decisions. The new CPO edge is deciding faster without deciding worse, and the wiki system I built to do it.
0→1Product management in a startup is less about process and more about passion, agility, and the willingness to innovate under constraints, drawn from life inside early-stage teams.
GrowthA primer on product-led growth: what it actually means, when it works, and how to build a product that sells and expands itself instead of leaning on a sales motion.
LeadershipWhat separates the product leaders who'll thrive from those who won't: perspectives gathered from industry thought leaders on leading through a pandemic-era reset.
Learning in Public
Across boardroom finance, quality, moats, and enterprise pilots, talk after talk at the CPO Summit converged on the same word: judgment, the unglamorous human work of deciding what's worth doing that AI makes more valuable, not less.
ConferenceTwelve sessions, one argument surfacing from stages that hadn't coordinated: when building gets cheap, the constraint moves upstream, to judgment, org design, and the context layer. Field notes, and where they rub against how I already think about the work.
On the trail
Solo expeditions across America's wild places, each one a reset, each one a reminder of what matters.
Leisure Travel
When the pack stays home: trips with family and friends, good food, and no agenda beyond being somewhere new.
France
Croissants, cobblestones, and staying in one arrondissement long enough to feel like a local.
Japan
The most organized chaos in the world. We ate our way through every neighbourhood.
Italy
A city that refuses to be rushed: we came for a weekend and stayed as long as we could.
Nights & Weekends
Side projects and experiments, usually born from a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.