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Product Leader & Trail Seeker

Anup
Sheshadri

Building products that matter.
Finding silence on trails that don't.

“Let your passion take the lead.”

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Anup Sheshadri on a mountain trail
∞ Miles on trail

About

I think in
systems &
summit by feel.

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.

Strategy AI Products 0→1 Builds Backpacking Nature Adventure

Framework

SU-RICE
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

ClickUp Productboard Onenine ProductLift Everything Product Producter

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.
Product Thinking ×Trail Logic ×Ship Fast ×Hike Far ×Think Clearly ×Move Boldly × Product Thinking ×Trail Logic ×Ship Fast ×Hike Far ×Think Clearly ×Move Boldly ×

Thought Leadership

Writing

All Articles
Leadership

Access Is Not Adoption

Handing your team a login to an AI tool isn't the same as making them effective with it. The gap between access and adoption is human, and it lives below the feature line, in fear, ownership, and shared context.

Jun 2026 · LinkedIn Read →
Strategy

Transformation Is Earned in the Foothills

Everyone can see the peak; pointing at it costs nothing. You don't train for Everest, you train up to it, and the same is true of an AI transformation. Why progression, not ambition, is the whole game.

Jun 2026 · LinkedIn Read →
Strategy

Your Roadmap Is Lying to Everyone. Including You.

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.

Jun 2026 · LinkedIn Read →
AI Products

Just Because You Can Vibe-Code It Doesn't Mean You Should Build It

AI makes building almost free, which is exactly why discipline about what not to build matters more, not less. Buy the commodity, build the differentiation.

Jun 2026 · LinkedIn Read →
Leadership

The CPO's New Reality: Decide Now or Lose the Room

AI 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.

May 2026 · LinkedIn Read →
0→1

Startups and Product Management: A Tale of Passion, Agility, and Innovation

Product 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.

Jan 2024 · Medium Read →

Learning in Public

Notes & Takeaways

All Notes
Conference

AI Isn't Your Strategy — Judgment Is

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.

Jun 2026 Read →
Conference

The Bottleneck Moved. Did Your Org?

Twelve 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.

May 2026 Read →

On the trail

Adventures
& Dispatches

Solo expeditions across America's wild places, each one a reset, each one a reminder of what matters.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Colorado, USA

Rocky Mountain National Park

▲ Solo · Backpacking ↑ TBD
Shenandoah National Park

Virginia, USA

Shenandoah National Park

▲ Solo · Backpacking ↑ 4 days
Great Smoky Mountains

Tennessee / North Carolina, USA

Great Smoky Mountains

▲ Solo · Backpacking ↑ 5 days
Badlands National Park

South Dakota, USA

Badlands National Park

▲ Solo · Backpacking ↑ 3 days
All Adventures

Leisure Travel

Exploring
the World

When the pack stays home: trips with family and friends, good food, and no agenda beyond being somewhere new.

Paris

France

Paris

Croissants, cobblestones, and staying in one arrondissement long enough to feel like a local.

 Tokyo

Japan

Tokyo

The most organized chaos in the world. We ate our way through every neighbourhood.

 Rome

Italy

Rome

A city that refuses to be rushed: we came for a weekend and stayed as long as we could.
All Travel

Nights & Weekends

Things I've Built

Side projects and experiments, usually born from a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

All Projects

CPO Intelligence Wiki

Active

A personal knowledge system for Chief Product Officers, maintained by Claude. Instead of re-reading files every time, it compounds competitive intel, customer insights, and product decisions into a living, interlinked wiki that gets richer with every source.

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