Product Management Career

I’ve worked for more than a decade in product management with Fortune 500 companies and startups, and I realize I’m seeing a scary pattern.  Product managers are only hired after the innovation or startup teams get concepts or funding approved.  This means that product managers are thrust into developing a product or service concept they Read more »

Michelle Chu began her career in publishing as a sales assistant at Backpacker, before working in advertising, layouts, and packaging design. She then moved to digital products and eventually to her current role as Senior Product Manager and Head of Design at Alpha. Start-up Alpha is a user insights platform for use as a tool Read more »

I have been the CPO/VP of Product for four startups as they scaled to thousands of employees. Because of these experiences — and the many challenges of growth — I’ve become obsessed with different tools and tactics that creative leaders can use to keep fast-growing companies pointed in the right direction. Having a clear, well-defined Read more »

Last year I marked my fifth year of working with private equity firm Better Capital and its portfolio companies. Today, however, I’m the Chief Product Officer of a small digital advertising startup, making difficult product decisions and helping the company to grow. This is the story of why I traded private equity for product. I Read more »

I recently came across a piece by Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design, titled Design’s Lost Generation, in which he makes the case that designers should require a licence to do their job. Mike got me thinking; should product managers also require a licence do their job? After all, we’re a sizeable Read more »

There’s a lot of confusion around product management job titles, seniority, and hierarchy. This makes it hard to compare jobs, plan your career, and attract the right talent to your team. In this post, I’ll walk through the product manager levels, providing overviews for each product role, and some useful content to refer to. Product Read more »

From the outside, product management can seem like an attractive, simple role. In reality, it’s so much more than deciding what to build. It’s so much broader than people expect. Read more »

In 2013, before Shared Parental Leave was a thing in the UK, I decided that I wanted to change my work-life balance from full-time to a four-day working week with one day of childcare. Here’s how it made me a better product manager. Read more »

I recently read a write-up of what looked like a very interesting roundtable discussion with product leaders in London. The last of the four topics particularly caught my eye: “how do you increase the commercial acumen of product managers?”. The article suggested that “product people (especially those in Europe) are weak commercially”, which “can lead to Read more »

Vivek Bedi is the Head of Product at LearnVest. He has over 15 years’ product management experience, working for companies like Goldman Sachs, Sterling Backcheck, and now LearnVest. In his presentation, talks about LearnVest, the role of a product manager, and what he’s learned from his years as a product manager. A Great Product Manager Read more »