Founders
Prime Product Management has been on hiatus while I’ve served as the software marketing team for a division of a medical device company — a fun and exciting role that has now run its course. I’m once again offering founders my Product Management (PM) and Product Marketing Management (PMM) expertise in a fractional capacity. If you’re part of a founding team who is not quite ready to hire full time staff in these areas, I’d welcome the opportunity to discuss where I can help offload Product and go-to-market (GTM) tasks.
I’ve been fortunate over the course of my career to work with some exceptional founders. Liz was a thoughtful, kind, and brilliant woman who knew there had to be a better way to manage sales compensation than spreadsheets. Brooke was charming and engaging and wanted to help customers put their best foot forward in the request-for-proposal (RFP) responses, proposals and other selling materials they provided to their prospective customers. Olivier was a brilliant and charismatic engineer who could get on a call with a customer one afternoon, understand their latest requirements, and have the basis of a solution added to the product before daybreak the next morning. Don was a genius with data and how to use it to find insights, who understood the value of sitting down a table with his teammates and bonding over a meal. Andy didn’t believe in PM per se, thinking this role belonged to Engineering leaders — to me that was an issue of semantics, not whether there was a need. He was an intense yet empathetic engineer able to dig deep into technical topics in one breath, deliver an inspiring pitch at an all-hands meeting the next, then pick up a guitar and jam with colleagues ‘til sundown.
They were all among the smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of working for; interesting, inspiring leaders who were product people at heart. They were all subject matter experts in their domain, deeply vested in an understanding of the markets they were pursuing and the business and technical challenges they were trying to solve. Unsurprisingly, each of them were the people in their organizations most passionate about solving those problems. In some cases they had or have since started multiple businesses aimed at solving the same fundamental problems, each time with a different approach. They were all inspiring to work for, and inspired me to do the best work I could on their behalf.
They all had limits, of course — they were finite resources operating at or over capacity and often at the edges of their areas of expertise. None of them knew everything there was to know about running a growing business. They needed help and hired people who could offer expertise they lacked in Sales, Finance, Marketing, Services, Support, or elsewhere. And though each of them was an outstanding Product leader themselves, each eventually brought in help on the Product side under a variety of titles. At some point in the growth of their businesses they realized they had to give up the day-to-day management of even that function. In so doing, with me and with others, they tapped into additional capacity, different skill sets, new perspectives and fresh ideas — all of which helped carry their products and their businesses forward farther than they could have managed on their own.
Today I’m working as part of founding team to shape the business plan, product roadmap, and GTM strategy for a sports-centric wellness venture. The founder in this case is smart, attuned to the needs of her customers, and has a gift for identifying how a customer can change things up to make substantial improvements in both their wellness and proficiency. She sees more market opportunities than can be serviced at once, so prioritization has been a core part of our engagement thus far. We have narrowed our focus to three opportunities, and are in the process now of defining our solutions, building operational and financial plans to pursue them, and planning our approach to bringing these products to market. She is figuring out where to spend her time and where not to, and we are collectively organizing and planning for success.
How can I help you achieve your goals? Let’s discuss how I can help expand the PM and PMM disciplines within your organization, to help you focus where your business needs your leadership most.
As always, thanks for reading.
J
