Reflecting 10 years in different roles and 20+ managers
Career highlights
Favorite Lessons I learned
Career highlights
• Attentive: Lead PM to Lead PM 2. Stayed heads down and hyper-focused on executing the most critical company project (self-service) at the moment.
• Amazon: L5 to L6 Senior PM. I took on “PM scopes” and projects at L5 to build and launch valuable advertiser solutions
• Horizon Media: 3 promotions from Search Analyst to Associate Director of Product & Analytics, which was a new function based on my aptitude to automate every spreadsheet process I could find.
• Organized a 20+ person offsite at Google for a globally distributed team, with moments of fun, connection, and collaboration.
• Designed and ran our first ever day-long, cross-team design sprint across eng, prod, and design at Attentive. Hosted fun sessions including the worst product ideas, rapid workshopping, and shark tank style pitching.
Helped 4 people transition to roles at Meta, Amazon, and Google for the first time to break into tech. Reviewed resumes, reframed talking points, and gave feedback in mock interviews.
• +35% increase in clients adoption of self service product from 0%, by launching our first marketer facing tools.
• +10X increase in our ability to support customers, by working with sales, client design, and account teams on customer segmentation and support / operational process for self-serve.
• +8% more subscribers for our top customers, by building custom text-to-join flows.
• 300X increase in avg. reporting granularity. Think “Amazon sales attributed to keywords or creatives, instead of channels like Google or Facebook.”
• X0 -> X00 ->X000 increase in customer adoption of Amazon Attribution, due to scrappy selling, then self-service product development, then securing funding for our public API beta.
• 80% decrease in effort to build a media plan (about 3 FTEs) with a simple excel tool connected which had the latest rate cards, placements, and error handling.
Favorite Lessons I learned
Have you spoken to customers?
Discuss then document, not document to discuss
Mockups can be way more descriptive than a 3 page PRD
UX improvements are hard to fund but make a world of a difference. Don’t ask to fund it, work with a passionate engineer to wow people with a prototype. Then say “we’re going to do this in a X days”
Bringing in an engineer to explain things to execs, when you cannot, will prevent headaches as a PM
Try to avoid the echo chamber. When everyone is saying yes to something, your +1 isn’t a value add. Instead, add a different perspective, or don’t partake at all
Start slide titles with the message, then the supporting evidence
Do this:
Our proposed solution is __
To the problem of __
Our supporting evidence is __
If you want to know more, our thought process was __
Not this:
For the problem of __
Our thought process is __
Our supporting evidence is __
So our solution is __
Not every interaction is an opportunistic coaching moment, sometimes a direct report just needs your direction.
The 2 most consistent prioritization frameworks I’ve used:
Eisenhower Matrix:
Urgent vs. important
You’ll do urgent + important, make time for not urgent + important
LNO (Leverage, Neutral, Overhead) - Shreyas Doshi:
Not all tasks are created equal. Neither should the amount of effort you put into it
You can generally set the stage for any excellent discovery call:
Get to know the other as a human; break the ice
Genuinely thanking them for the time, and what it means to you
Establish credibility on who you are and what this convo enables for your company
Ask if it’s still a good time to get through discovery and how you’re going to proceed
GO