I’m the CEO, founder, and head instructor here at Academy of Product Management®. I suppose you want to know a little bit about me, to find out if I know anything at all about product management. Good for you, checking your sources. 👏 I like you already. Ok, where should I start?
I graduated from MIT in 2007, with a Bachelor’s degree in Management Science, and started my career in tech as a data analyst at a startup. I worked my way into product management about 5 years later. I won’t bore you with the details of every company I ever worked at. Check out my LinkedIn profile for that.
I’ve been a product manager for over a decade. The big places I’ve worked at are Google, where I was a product lead, and two startups that became unicorns, which was incredibly lucky for me. Those unicorns were Upwork, which IPO’ed in 2018, and then Looker, which was acquired by Google in 2020, and that’s how I ended up at Google. But I have also worked for tiny companies, failed startups, big companies, and everything in between.
I’ve been a growth PM, a platform PM, a core PM, and an innovation PM (source: Reforge). I’ve worked on web apps, mobile apps, marketplaces, B2B, and B2C. I’ve specialized in a/b testing, data, infrastructure, security, privacy... you get the picture... I’ve been doing this for a long time.
Right now I work with early stage startups as a consultant, and I’m teaching product stuff here at Academy of Product Management. Stick around. It’s going to be fun. 🎉
.png)
New product managers face a giant problem. We know that in general, in-house training for product managers is weak. Some big companies have formal training programs for their product teams, but most companies don’t. In 2018, McKinsey research found that in-house training for product managers was surprisingly underdeveloped and in 2022 they reported again to say, sadly, it is still pretty bleak (source: McKinsey 2018; McKinsey 2022). This is no surprise to product managers.
When I got my first product job in 2012 I was lucky to have great mentors, but they were time poor, super busy, because we were at a unicorn startup that was moving and shaking. There was no formal training for me as an associate product manager. So I watched, I learned, and I figured it out, but I made a bleep ton of mistakes in the process.
Well, the cycle continues, because later when I hired associate product managers to my own team and set out to be the best PM mentor ever, I had literally 30 hours of meetings per week, plus actual work to do. I was busy, my team was busy, when the heck were we supposed to hold training sessions? 5pm on a Friday? No thanks, that’s wine time.
“Despite product managers’ central roles in software organizations, they are often neglected from a talent-management perspective.”
– McKinsey, The product management talent dilemma
And that’s the big problem with learning product manager skills. You don’t get enough from work, so you sign up for a bootcamp on your personal time, fork over 5 grand to sit in hours of Zoom sessions, after an already long day of meetings. And that’s great if you want live classes to learn, and if you are able to pay a lot of money for that live instructor, but what if you want the condensed version? What if you just want content from a super experienced product manager, that’s more fun than a PowerPoint, that’s more like a movie, that saves you time, and that’s a fraction of the cost? Better yet, what if a lot of it is free?
That is where the Academy of Product Management® comes in. This is the product manager training that I wish existed for me personally as a new PM in 2012, and for my team when I was a manager.
On our blog and YouTube channel I’m going to share the hard won lessons I’ve learned, because I’ve been doing this for a long long time. I’ll be super candid with you about the mistakes I’ve made, so that you can hopefully avoid those same pitfalls. And I’ll share tips and frameworks to help you be successful.
But we’re all busy, and we don’t have time for boring. Here, we want you to be edutained (educated plus entertained, get it?). Because I believe that if you’re bored to tears, the lessons will go in one ear and out the other. Lessons need to be memorable, and that’s on me to deliver... and my unpaid producer/husband. Here, at Academy of Product Management®, our lessons will be fun, packed full of insightful research and in-the-trenches, real-life stories.
If that sounds good to you, stick around. Subscribe to our blog and YouTube channel for the free stuff, and check out our courses to go more in depth and earn certifications.
You got this!
