Vanta ($2.4B) CPO: "My Whole Org has v0 Licenses"

Product Growth Podcast

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Vanta ($2.4B) CPO: "My Whole Org has v0 Licenses"

Through his 16 years at Microsoft, to becoming a VP at GitHub, and now how he runs product at Vanta, this in-person episode with Jeremy Epling is a fun, informative chat between two product leaders.

Aakash Gupta

May 26, 2025

Transcript

Check it out on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

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Today’s Episode

Jeremy Epling grew from PM to VP of PM at Microsoft/GitHub, and now is the CPO at unicorn Vanta.

In today’s special in-person episode, we go deep on:

How he grew from PM to VP
Day in the life of a Microsoft VP
How Vanta builds product

Whether you’re an IC PM, or aiming for CPO, this episode will challenge how you think about product.

Check It Out

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Key Takeaways

Here were my favorite takeaways:

Big companies teach you how to scale. Great ones teach you how to focus. At Microsoft, Jeremy learned how to operate at massive scale - teams, systems, legacy complexity. But it wasn’t until GitHub that he saw what it meant to focus on developers, ruthlessly prioritize, and ship with empathy. Learning how to balance enterprise-scale thinking with startup-speed execution shaped his career.
“Strategy” isn’t about having a roadmap, it’s about knowing what not to build.
He learned early on that the best PMs aren’t the ones who ship the most features. They’re the ones who create clarity, say no often, and focus the team on why they’re building something, not just what.
Prototyping is the new PM’s superpower. At Vanta, every PM gets access to V0. Why? Because the fastest way to learn is to build. His philosophy: “If I can show it, I can test it. If I can test it, I can learn.” Seeing is believing and customers don’t respond to decks the way they respond to demos.
The lines between PM, design, and engineering are gone. At high-functioning companies, designers submit pull requests, engineers make design calls, and PMs prototype. Roles are fluid, and the best teams adapt to each other instead of clinging to old job descriptions.
Most PMs don’t understand GitHub but they should. You don’t have to be technical to learn GitHub. You just have to be curious. The best PMs at GitHub - even the non-coders - understood the dev workflow, knew what a PR felt like, and respected the architecture. That empathy changed how they built product.
Want to grow into VP-level roles? Improve your business acumen. Shipping features won’t get you there. Understanding margin, pricing, GTM, and how your product makes money will. He didn’t start out as a “business” PM, but he made a point to learn the mechanics of how things grow and that’s what unlocked leadership roles.
If you’re doing the same job after 4 years, you’re probably not growing. He kept switching teams every few years at Microsoft not because he was bored, but because growth requires friction. Every new domain forced him to relearn how to build, lead, and communicate.
Satya Nadella didn’t just save Microsoft, he redefined what it meant to build product there. Under Ballmer, the strategy was “build everything.” Under Satya, it became “build what matters.” He saw firsthand how Satya’s obsession with clarity and developer-first thinking rewired the org. That’s what made it the best place for PMs to work back days.
If your team is waiting for a spec, they’ve already lost momentum. He doesn’t believe in 20-page PRDs. Instead, he believes in fast cycles, shared prototypes, and cross-functional discovery.
Letting go is the lost art for PMs! One of the fastest ways to grow as a PM? Kill projects that don’t matter even if they were your idea. According to Jeremy, the PMs who get promoted are the ones who know when to let go and when to keep building on the idea.

Check out the episode on Spotify

Where to Find Jeremy

LinkedIn: Jeremy Epling
Company: Vanta (Get $1,000 off with our link)

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