Getting Acquired is Product Management

Lawrence Huang is Vice President of Product Management at Cisco Meraki.

Currently leading the product management organization at Cisco Meraki, Lawrence Huang has worked for some of the biggest companies in the technology world. He’s also been through two successful acquisitions, so he’s in a distinctive position to share his insights on what to do — and what not to do — to make it work.

“There are some things that are absolutely universal,” he says. “I think one of the things I've learned through going through this experience twice is you have to keep your eyes on that prize and maintain focus." 

Another challenge he’s faced is maintaining values and culture during acquisition and organizational changes: “When you're a small company, you intuitively know that the values are what they are, the culture is what it is, but as you're growing and scaling very quickly, you realize that you really need to be able to articulate it in a way that binds the organization together, especially as you're continuing to add new people to the team.”

One of the ways he handles can be traced to in the distinction he draws between culture and values: “Values should be distinct from culture, because culture is something that evolves with the folks you bring in, but values should be something that’s timeless.”

Learn more about Lawrence’s insights on managing through acquisitions and maintaining values, as well as his takes on promoting diversity and ingraining user feedback into the product management process, on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript of this episode here:

Here are the highlights:

• What’s Lawrence sees as key for PMs: 3:44
• Shifting from a startup mindset to a larger-company mindset: 6:16
• The difference between values and culture: 7:24
• What’s the Meraki closed loop?: 16:33
• How Cisco Meraki incorporates user feedback into product management: 18:31

Recommended Episodes:

• Scaling Operations is Product Management
• Hiring Diverse Teams is Product Management
• Relationships and Growth is Product Management