ICYMI: Product Leadership Masterclass on Going from Seed to IPO
What does it really take to scale a product org from zero revenue to nearly half a billion—and stay customer-obsessed the entire way? Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer at Braze, has lived it.
In our latest Productboard webinar, Product Leadership Lessons: From Seed to IPO, Kevin reflects on his 13+ year journey helping build one of the world’s leading customer engagement platforms. From joining the company as one of its first 10 employees to helping lead it through 100x revenue growth and a successful IPO, Kevin shared the lessons he’s learned across every chapter of Braze’s growth.
In this conversation, Kevin offered candid insights on how product teams can evolve with the business—without losing sight of customer impact. Whether you’re a founder, a head of product, or a PM scaling your team, Kevin's hard-won wisdom will help you stay centered on what matters most.
Here are three standout takeaways from the conversation:
- Balance quality with speed as you scale. Early on, speed trumps everything. But at scale, customers expect both pace and polish. Learning when to prioritize which—and aligning the team around that decision—is a critical leadership skill.
- Stay close to the customer—always. As teams and orgs grow, the distance between product managers (PMs) and customers can widen. Kevin emphasized that the best product teams keep this connection alive, ensuring decisions are grounded in real user feedback.
- Look for product leaders who can do both: drive innovation and ensure consistency. As the product org grows, it's not enough to move fast. You also need people who can scale reliable processes. Kevin shares how he finds leaders who can do both.
Inside the Mind of a CPO: Kevin Wang on Scaling Product, Teams, and Customer Impact
From navigating the evolving CPO–CEO dynamic to knowing when (and when not) to hire your first product manager, here’s a snapshot of the most insightful moments from the session.
Q: Today you lead a 70-person product org. What’s top of mind for you as CPO at a public company?
KW: We are a bit shy of 2,000 employees. So at this scale, a lot of the job is about keeping the machine running smoothly—hiring the right people, aligning teams, and not being a bottleneck. I think a lot about how we balance quality and speed. Startups default to speed. Mature companies lean toward quality. But we’re in that in-between space where you need both. That balance is a huge part of what our customers expect from us.
The other big thing I focus on is making sure we don't miss the biggest product opportunities. Our team is really strong and surfaces a ton of great ideas, but I see part of my job as being the safety net. I’m there to catch the things we might overlook and ensure we’re not missing anything truly transformational.
Q: Braze has grown from $0 to $500M in revenue. Can you walk us through the major stages of product leadership along that journey?
KW: It’s been quite a journey. I think of the early stage as that time from zero revenue to finding product-market fit. It’s a hard stage—there’s not really a playbook. You’re trying a lot of things and moving quickly, and you have to be willing to let go of ideas if they’re not working.
The next stage is what I’d call the early scale-up phase—maybe a few million in ARR up to around $20M. This is where you’re really coiling the spring. It’s a really frantic but exciting time. You don’t have the maturity of a large company yet, but you’re under pressure to grow fast, especially if you’re venture-backed. You start getting your first major enterprise renewals while also building the systems to operate at a larger scale.
Then, from $20M to $100M ARR, you’re becoming a real company. You need to solidify your differentiation and start building the engine that drives continued growth. You’re extending your product moat and thinking more strategically.
After that, once you’re over $100M ARR, it’s about building a machine that builds more machines. You’re no longer just spinning up one great product. You’re creating a framework—teams, frameworks, cultures—that can continuously generate new opportunities for growth.
Q: What do you think helped you avoid the pitfalls at those inflection points?
KW: We hit a lot of pitfalls, to be honest. In the earliest days, I think we eventually got good at not being overly precious. There’s this idea I’ve heard called “playing startup house,” where teams try to set everything up as if they’re a big company before they’ve even found product-market fit. We had a little of that early on, but then realized—we’ve just got to make this thing work. So it became code, code, code—design, design—all day until we got to product-market fit.
Another thing we got right during the $20M to $100M ARR stage was finding balance—especially between vision and customer need. We didn’t just chase every big prospect request, but we also weren’t so dogmatic that we ignored them. That middle road helped us scale without losing ourselves.
Q: What’s your philosophy on when to hire PMs?
KW: Don’t hire a PM until you have something worth scaling. Whenever I hear of someone with $0 of revenue hiring a PM, I just want to tear my hair out. If you’re pre-product-market fit, hiring a PM is almost always a mistake. As a founder or early leader building out the organization, that’s your job. Once there’s a real product line that needs full-time focus and accountability, then bring someone on. But not to write Jira tickets—give them ownership.
Q: How has your relationship with the CEO evolved over the years?
KW: It’s one of the most important relationships a Head of Product has. In the early days, alignment on individual product decisions is critical. Who makes a call when there’s a disagreement? But what really matters is having a shared understanding of how you make those decisions. It doesn’t need to be rigid or consistently defined, but it should be consistent—maybe the head of product decides unless the CEO feels strongly, or maybe it’s based on who has the data. That clarity helps avoid friction.
Later on, it’s more about strategic alignment. Are we building in the same direction? My advice to Heads of Product is that you want to be proactive about this. If you and your CEO don’t have alignment, it’s not your CEO's fault. Eventually, the relationship evolves around market alignment. Do we agree on where the opportunities are? And if not, are we talking about it early?
Q: Let’s talk about customer centricity. How do you ensure your org is truly customer-first?
KW: It starts with incentives. The best definition of customer centricity is: your business can’t succeed unless your customers succeed. To do that, you need to deeply understand what success looks like for them. That’s why we stay close to support, customer success, and user research teams. And we use tools like Productboard to centralize all that feedback and surface trends.
Q: How do you encourage staying close to customers at scale?
KW: Honestly, we try not to overthink it. Everyone—engineers, PMS, designers—should be talking to customers regularly. That means hopping on calls, analyzing support tickets, listening to Gong recordings. If something’s important, you’ll hear it more than once. You just have to be paying attention.
Watch the Product Leadership Masterclass
Whether you’re building your first product team or leading through post-IPO scale, Kevin’s journey at Braze is packed with lessons worth bookmarking. From resisting the urge to overprocess in the early days, to staying relentlessly customer-focused as you scale, to hiring leaders who know how to balance speed and structure—this session is a masterclass in product leadership.
Want to hear it straight from Kevin? Watch the full webinar.
