5-minute read • Product Leadership • Ownership
When an Idea Changes Everything
What is the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm?
An idea.— Inception (2010)
Once an idea takes hold in the human mind, it’s nearly impossible to remove.
Mine arrived during a company town hall. Our new CEO said, “We will be product-led. I want my product managers to be just a day day away from customers“.
A B2B sales-led business wanting to be product-led, but wants product managers to be a day away from customers for any conversation – in that moment, I knew my role as a remotely located product manager was over. What could have been a moment of defeat became a spark of realization.
The Short Lever of Employment
For 19 years, I’d worked across healthcare—designing platforms, data systems, and digital tools to help clinicians and patients. I believed I was helping change the world to the better. But that day, I understood something crucial:
As an employee, your lever is short. You can influence products – not the systems funding them.
No matter how creative or driven you are, if you don’t control where capital flows, your ability to steer change is limited. This is especially true when decisions flow from the top, leaving little room for strategic ownership. And even beyond that, external financial realities — market shifts, investor sentiment, or budget freezes — can reshape your role and influence as a builder overnight.
Archimedes, Capital, and Product Leverage
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.”
— Archimedes
In today’s world, that lever isn’t a physical one—it’s ownership and financial leverage.
- Product managers allocate resources to features.
- Investors allocate resources to futures.
One builds; the other shapes what gets built. If you want to influence healthcare or technology at scale, act from the ownership side.
Product managers allocate roadmaps. Investors allocate futures. Both shape the world—but one does it at scale.
From Product Manager to Portfolio Manager
As a nobody in the investing world, I needed to build-up capital. Why would anyone give me capital to manage and invest, given that I am not a finance professional, I haven’t managed finances for any entity in the past and I am not an “investor”/”VC”/”HNI”/Angel/LP?
I knew I couldn’t raise any capital to invest in areas I want as an investor. So I designed a simple plan to move from managing roadmaps to managing capital:
- Start with seed capital—small but intentional.
- Trade and learn daily—treat it as experimentation, not speculation.
- Compound results—let discipline, not luck, do the work.
- Reinvest in alignment—channel profits toward companies solving meaningful problems in healthcare, technology, and sustainability.
The Loop That Compounds Influence
Every trade became a micro-lesson in risk, psychology, and patience—skills every product leader needs. The process wasn’t about chasing returns. It was about building optionality—the freedom to decide where and how to create impact.
Because the ultimate product isn’t software. It’s the world we build through what we own and support.
The Takeaway — Build Your Lever
Every product manager wants impact. But impact compounds when ownership compounds.
- Are you only managing your roadmap, or also your ownership map?
- Are you allocating tasks—or capital?
- Are you optimizing features—or futures?
Archimedes found his lever in physics. We find ours in finance and ownership.
Shreyas Sastry 