Vikrama Dhiman on the Three W’s, PM Career Growth, and Operating as a Product Leader
Vikrama Dhiman heads product management, design, programme management, research and insights at Gojek across India, Singapore and Indonesia. He is among the most cited product leaders in Asia. This episode is structured around one framework — the Three W's Framework — and a set of honest observations about what blocks PM careers, based on fifteen years of watching strong and stalled trajectories.
Key ideas
- The Three W's Framework. Career growth for product managers tracks three axes simultaneously: (1) What you produce — outputs that evolve through outputs → outcomes → direction as seniority increases, but never abandon outputs as you advance; (2) What you bring to the table — impact on impact, demonstrated through the quality of PRDs, product notes, experiment designs, Jira stories, and strategy docs; (3) What’s your operating model — three tenets: raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with, bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself, be in charge of getting decisions made not making all the decisions. The framework defines the three dimensions on which PMs are evaluated, whether they know it or not.
- Don’t abandon outputs as you grow. The most common mistake at the mid-senior transition: PMs stop producing quality artifacts (PRDs, product notes, briefs) because they believe strategy is their new job. The strongest leaders produce better artifacts than juniors, not fewer. Can you show me your last PRD? Your last product strategy doc? If the answer is weak or absent, the framework predicts a growth ceiling.
- Eight skill axes. PM skills map to eight dimensions: data, design/research, technology, strategy, communication, collaboration, organisational skills, and community. Career growth stalls when you benchmark yourself only against colleagues at your current level. Benchmark against the best in the industry and your score recalibrates — revealing where to focus.
- Three blockers of PM career growth. (1) Focusing on things outside your control — at mid-senior level, complaints about the organisation, stakeholders, or opportunities start displacing attention from the craft; (2) Your relationship with change slowing — rate of skill acquisition is high early and decelerates unless you deliberately seek it; (3) The stories you tell yourself — labels like “high agency PM” or “collaborative PM” become permission structures for corresponding weaknesses (“so it’s okay if I’m brash” / “so it’s okay if I’m slow”). Correct the stories first; frameworks cannot fix an incoherent self-model.
- Mindful agency over high agency. Vikrama replaced “high agency” with “mindful agency” after working in Southeast Asia, where hyper-aggressive styles misfire. Agency is necessary but insufficient without calibration to context, culture, and pace. The term shapes behaviour; choose it deliberately.