If you’re reading this, you and I are probably contemplating some sort of collaboration. If we move forward, we’ll learn from and adapt to one another. But there’s bedrock—things we bring to the table and things we expect from one other—that won’t change and thus could make or break a collaboration. This document describes those for me. What’s here:
I’m a versatile, people-first product leader. Let me break that down:
Versatile: I wear a lot of hats: I’m a highly-skilled PM and product designer, an experienced people manager, a founder, a user researcher, and a competent full-stack engineer. It’s natural, fluid, and fun for me to switch among and combine these lenses.
Leader: I don’t actually want to wear all those hats by myself! I love when I can collaborate with and guide the success of others. Leadership is difficult and emotional; I’ve stayed with it because the rewards are so much greater for me than for IC work. (I’m including consulting and coaching work in “leadership.”)
People-first. Business is psychology: the success of an organization rests on its people and their relationships. The people I work with and the environment (culture) matter most, and I strive to create an environment that works for all of us. Vision, strategy, execution…they fall apart otherwise.
Product. I love creating products: the process of learning, hypothesizing, designing, building, and learning all over again. The malleability and tangibility of software. The fun of bringing something to life that people can use. All of it.
How does that fit together? Well, product and leadership feel natural to me because they embody synthesis—bringing ideas and people and perspectives together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I’m driven to build human environments—teams—in which a diverse group of people can enjoy creating together, and to lead those teams to build exceptional products. And those products are usually human environments, too.
⭐ Pragmatic creativity. I’m creative. I think outside the box. More importantly, I excel at facilitating creativity in teams. But I’m also a hacker and creator: creativity is only fun insofar as it leads to results. So I flip comfortably between creativity and pragmatic execution, the forest and the trees, blue-sky ideation and Agile backlogs, inspiration and evidence. Starred because it’s a strength and it’s rare.
⭐ Structured agility. I’m not afraid to transcend sunk costs, take a deep breath, and move forward in a new direction—to know when the experiment is over. But I’m not capricious: if I pivot I’ll pivot with good reason and in a structured way. And we’ll take a week to clean up the codebase first. Starred because it’s a strength and it’s rare.
⭐ Defining solutions. Starting from a problem or hypothesis, I can create a solution: use cases, information architecture, flows, fundamental objects, layouts, technical considerations, and with the system thinking to tie it all together. Sometimes we call this “product design.” Starred because I’m world-class at it.
Customer understanding. My career across UX, user research, founding, and product leadership provides a broad toolkit of qualitative and quantitative techniques—along with the experience to ensure we truly understand what users/customers do, how they think, and what they need rather than what they think they want, or (worse but all too common) what we wish they said they think they want.
No-nonsense Lean. (“Lean” seems out of fashion but its replacement, “Product Operating Model,” feels awfully vague.) At heart it’s simple: discover, hypothesize, test, learn, and repeat, with a focus on the hypothesis. In practice it’s a psychological minefield. I’m great at navigating that minefield, and at helping others do so if they’re willing.