Leader Spotlight: Empowering teams toward growth and ownership, with Pratiksha Rao

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Pratiksha Rao is Head of Product, Thumbtack Pro at Thumbtack, a technology company helping millions of people confidently care for and improve their homes. She started her career at Tata Consultancy Services, where she consulted for companies like GE, before joining Cognizant as a business analyst. From there, Pratiksha transitioned to product management and later became a lead PM at PayPal. Before her current role at Thumbtack, she served in various product and leadership positions at Intuit, Eventbrite, and Shopify.

In our conversation, Pratiksha talks about how true leadership is empowering others, and how she works to empower her teams to grow as individuals and with the organization. She also discusses her style of adaptive leadership and the importance of striking the right balance between guidance and autonomy.

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‘True leadership is empowering others’

You’ve led product teams across a variety of organizations. How would you describe your leadership style, how has it evolved over your career, and what experiences or insights have shaped this approach?

My leadership style is deeply rooted in empathy, strategic empowerment, and creating a collaborative mindset. I create an environment where team members feel heard, respected, and empowered to take ownership of their work while collaborating effectively across functions. When people feel trusted, they feel aligned with a clear vision, are empowered to collaborate, bring innovative ideas forward, and deliver exceptional outcomes.

To do this, I start by guiding my teams through questions like, “What is your role within the organization and the broader ecosystem?” These questions are foundational and existential — they shape their purpose and direction. Most companies call this a mission statement, but the underlying questions are, “Why do we even exist? What does a perfect win look like? And, what is our vision?”

I define these items both qualitatively and quantitatively. It’s very important to do both and create a clear, measurable, north star that keeps our teams aligned and focused, while also inspiring them to work with purpose.

You mentioned fostering strong cross-functional collaboration. Can you talk about why this is important in your role and how you evolved this skill over time?

Uniting diverse perspectives from product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer support, and other cross-functional teams allows everyone to operate as a cohesive unit with a shared purpose. As an organization, we can move collectively in a similar direction — not a single direction — because every function provides its own value-add.

Early in my career, I was more focused on hands-on problem-solving. I started as more of a player-coach where I directly handled some things myself, as an individual contributor, while also leading a team. I constantly had to zoom in and zoom out, and that was a muscle I had to train. I realized early on that I’m unable to accurately zoom in and out of the problem space, especially if I’m not the one leading the area.

As I took on larger roles and had different managers and mentors, I came to realize that true leadership is about empowering others and creating a culture where teams contribute their unique expertise toward a common goal.

What specific strategies and learnings helped shape this leadership style as your career evolved?

A customer-centric approach, definitely. It is essential that we iterate and pivot the product direction based on customer behavior insights. This has led me to always reinforce the need for adaptability and openness as we create a product.

The second aspect is working across cross-functional teams. This has taught me the importance of aligning stakeholders with a shared vision, as I mentioned earlier. The third thing is leading a diverse group of product managers, which sharpens my adaptive leadership skills. This enables me to tailor my guidance to meet the unique needs of each team member, and also ensure that each PM feels supported and empowered in a way that aligns with their individual strengths and growth areas. It has refined my ability to zoom in on the details and step back when needed, as opposed to taking a do-it-yourself approach.

Finally, none of this would be possible without having the right mentors in my life. Mentorship has played a huge role in my growth, and I tell every single person that I directly or indirectly manage that mentorship is a huge deal. You learn from leaders who’ve been there, done that — who’ve had experiences and can help you understand what to strive for and what pitfalls to watch out for. Mentorship is a big part of how I define leadership.

Also, mentorship doesn’t always come from folks that are more experienced or more senior than you; sometimes it comes from people who are kicking butt at their job. Sometimes, they may be more junior to you, but they’ve learned something or built a certain muscle so well that you want to learn from them. I’m fortunate to have found those kinds of people in my life.

Adaptive leadership and striking a balance

You mentioned your adaptive leadership skills and how important they are. Can you provide some examples of how you’ve adapted to meet the needs of each person on your team?

Absolutely. I adapt my leadership style by focusing on each person’s strengths, challenges, and career aspirations. My goal is to provide them with the right balance of guidance and autonomy to help them perform at their best, grow in the organization, and ultimately succeed.

For example, one of the PMs on my team who’s pretty early in their career prefers structured guidance with regular check-ins. They’re not at the stage in their career where, if they’re given a long-term vision, they can slice it into meaningful chunks and know when to measure growth, iterate, and pivot. I adopted a very hands-on approach with them by establishing clear milestones and providing ongoing feedback. This helps build their confidence and decision-making skills. Over time, we felt that there wasn’t a need for such a high frequency of check-ins, so we dialed them down. They started to take more ownership as their confidence and skills grew.

On the other hand, another PM on my team is very senior and thrives in a high-autonomy environment. They are motivated by tackling complex cross-functional challenges. I can give this person a one-line problem statement and send them into the battlefield with users and cross-functional teams. Their strength is structuring all of that and finding the most impactful way to solve the problems. With them, all I do is provide strategic guidance upfront to establish direction, and then I step back and give them space. I mostly serve as a sounding board for insights or blockers, which has worked well for this person for multiple years now.

In organizations like Thumbtack, moving between teams is highly encouraged, but this person stays in the same team because they get the autonomy they need, which indicates to me that I’m operating well as a leader.

As a leader, how do you balance innovation with operational efficiency across your team? Has there been an instance where you had to make trade-offs between those two priorities, and if so, how did you tackle that challenge?

This balance is essential to building all kinds of sustainable products that deliver value, while also staying adaptable in a dynamic market. I approach this by setting clear priorities with the team. We have to identify which initiatives require creative exploration and which ones can benefit from just streamlined processes.

I also strongly believe in the fail-fast method. I encourage the team to define minimum viable chunks of work that we can ship to drive impact or learn from. For example, in a recent role, we were planning for the launch of a new strategic product that had the potential to significantly improve user experience. The team was very excited to push the envelope. Most teams are excited to work on the hairiest problems, and this one had teams coming up with a lot of novel ideas.

Our time and resources were limited, which, in most organizations, is pretty typical. We needed to seamlessly maintain our day-to-day operations while continuing to regularly bring impact. To address this, I encouraged the team to first establish a minimum viable version of their feature. The goal was to focus only on the core functionalities that would deliver immediate value to our users without overextending our resources. We weren’t going after the whole thing from the get-go — we were just establishing the most sustainable way to validate product-market fit.

Once that happened, we started to allocate a percentage of our capacity to testing and learning. This allowed us to innovate incrementally and iterate on the product based on user feedback. This helped us maintain operational efficiency by creating space for innovation.

One of the things that I’ve learned and adopted as a part of my leadership style is to always frame innovation and efficiency as complementary rather than as competing priorities. This helps the team stay aligned on delivering immediate value while creating pathways to explore and innovate, and be agile and user-focused without compromising on performance or stability.

Celebrating tangible progress

How do you articulate a clear vision that rallies your team around a bigger cause? Can you share a specific example from one of your recent roles where you successfully inspired your team to embrace a challenging goal?

Articulating a clear vision starts with creating a narrative that connects the work to something that resonates with each team member. To do this, I break down the “why” behind the goals — framing our work as not just a project, but as a contribution to something meaningful to both users and the business.

In a recent role, I led a team that was mostly expected to be the enablers of a marketplace. I immediately recognized that there was a huge opportunity to bring major improvements to the consumers and the business. It would also make this marketplace a differentiated one within its sector, giving us a competitive edge. To get there, we not only had to do things completely differently at a foundational level, like completely revamping our technical foundation and user experience, but we also had to add many features. I gave an analogy of adding new cars to a train and changing the engine while the train is running.

I framed our vision around the concept of up-leveling payments, commerce experiences, and outcomes, as well as transitioning the company from being an enabler to a differentiator. We started by exploring other marketplaces to see which ones were doing this well, how they were making their users’ lives easier while being a top marketplace in their sector, and how we could do that too.

I translated this vision into concrete milestones with metrics so that the team could keep track of progress at every step. Throughout the process, I kept reinforcing how each person’s contribution was essential in reaching the milestones, celebrating their small wins, and iterating based on what they learned along the way.

We ultimately improved our foundation and launched all the product features that we wanted to build, which dramatically improved the user experience and business outcomes. It led the company to multifold revenue growth and created new revenue streams, which were very welcomed by users since we solved all the right problems for them. It also reinforced the team’s collective purpose and inspired them to approach future challenges with the same dedication.

You mentioned how you help your team see the progress toward each milestone and how you highlight the part that each person played. Are there any other tactics that you use to keep your team motivated and engaged, especially in a longer-term project?

The key for a long-term project is to, of course, always know what your goal is, but it is often the smaller milestones that are more meaningful. I was recently at a golf-related team event, and I’ve never played golf before. Somebody told me to not look at where the ball needs to go, but to look at where the golf ball is and just hit it in the right direction. I believe this is similar to what we should do when trying to motivate a team and keep them engaged in a long-term objective that may not have immediate rewards.

To get to 100, we first have to get to 10. Celebrate that 10, then 20, then 30, and so on. Cheer on those smaller wins — being able to see tangible progress helps maintain momentum and a sense of accomplishment.

Can you discuss a time when you empowered a team member to take ownership of a specific project or initiative? What was the result, and how did you support them throughout the process?

For context, marketplaces now need to collect taxes from buyers on sales on behalf of sellers and remit them to the authorities. Tax isn’t a very attractive area — it’s very much driven by regulators. They set the rules, and, as a product team, we’re translating them into guidance and trying to build that into the product.

When I joined the team at one of my recent roles, it was during COVID, and marketplace tax laws were getting stricter with newer and complex regulations coming in frequently. My team and I were constantly getting guidance to implement things, but we often had no say in the matter. It felt like there was little innovation, but we were under pressure to implement something. I realized quickly that the PM role on this specific team had the most churn within the organization.

After meeting with our main PM to fully understand these constraints, I strived to create visibility of his work and how it’s important to the business. I started working with the tax business team to understand what happens if we don’t do this work right now, and it turns out that if we do not collect the tax, we are still liable to remit it to the authorities, which would be money from our own pockets. It hurts the bottom line.

Our OKRs then changed from “implement these five tax projects” to “save the company multi-millions of dollars in out-of-pocket tax expenses.” That immediately helped our PM feel more empowered. He was now saving the company 12 million dollars. Eventually, he became the go-to person involved in other tax projects as well. If there were strategic projects happening across the company that would have tax implications, he became a stakeholder because of his subject matter expertise. That was a huge achievement and empowerment was the biggest tool in helping him get there.