Products That Count holiday party featuring Uber early VC

Organizing product teams can often be the last thing on your mind, but the approach you take often impacts the success of the individuals, the teams, and the company. How do you create focus, adaptability, and resiliency when change is a constant? In this session, Jay Bergesen, fmr Etsy VP & Head of Etsy.com and current Artifact Uprising CPO, discusses iterating through approaches to organizing product teams at companies of varying scale and the patterns that have emerged and sustained over time.

Jay is a product executive with consumer technology and marketplace leadership experience at all levels of scale. He has two decades of experience building internet products. He’s currently the Chief Product Officer at Artifact Uprising, a Denver-based technology and consumer product company that helps people honor the meaningful in their lives through printed photo gifts, books, and more. Jay previously served as SVP of Product at Ibotta, the largest consumer tech company headquartered in Denver; VP of Etsy.com and other senior product management positions during a six year, high-growth period at Etsy; and Head of Product Management at Bloomberg.com. Earlier in his career, Jay served as Staff Interaction Designer at Yahoo and came into product management after holding several design and engineering roles.

Design Thinking is a powerful set of creative tools to learn more about your customers and design solutions to real problems. However, if your leadership team isn't bought in on the power and purpose of these exercises, it can be deflating and demoralizing. In this session, Robin Reynolds, Head of Product at uShip, discusses a time when design thinking worked well and when it didn't, making the case that product leadership plays an important role in its succes.

Robin Reynolds is the Head of Product at uShip, researching and planning their pivot into the e-commerce furniture space, while building up and mentoring our product and design group. She’s worked in product across several different industries from advertising, to internet of things, to logistics and has worked in four person startups to 11,000+ personal corporations. Robin is a two time University of Texas at Austin graduate with a Masters in Technology Commercialization. Outside of work she loves to dance and work with her co-founders on their education tech startup!

Too often, and before you know it, the situation surrounding your product will change. Your latest solution or feature will become irrelevant. How can you avoid this? In this session, Rob Newsome, stack.io Product Lead, discusses agile product management and how speed and failure can take you to success.

Rob Newsome is the Head of Product Management at stack.io - a Toronto based business for technology companies that seek DevOps expertise through modern, open-source solutions. He is passionate about the "people first" approach on both sides of customer and company with an aim to build promoters of the product both inside and out. Originally from small town Wales, Rob has been living in Canada for the past 10 years.

As Product people, we're accountable to everyone who uses our products. Our goal is to create the best possible experiences for them - retention is one of the most useful indicators that we are doing our jobs. In this session, Hiten Shah, FYI, KISSmetrics & Crazy Egg Co-Founder, discusses the three steps he uses to improve retention, and the benefits of incorporating customer obsession into your work

Hiten Shah is Co-founder & CEO of FYI. He’s been building software companies since 2005 and previously started Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. He is well known for sharing his knowledge about building software businesses with other founders and executives. He has personally invested and advised companies such as Automattic, Buffer, Clearbit, Envoy, Front, LinkedIn and over 120 others.

For many startups, the concept of process runs counter to moving quickly. Bad process feels like bureaucracy but the appropriate one for your industry can unlock insights sooner and get value to customers faster. In this session, Emily Wang, fmr Intercom Product Lead and current Bento Co-Founder & CEO, discusses three frameworks for three industries and how to focus not just on shipping, but on launching the right thing.

Emily Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Bento, a virtual war room for product launches. By integrating with tools like Slack, Jira and docs where work is already happening, Bento allows a product team to keep others up-to-date with minimal manual work. Prior to founding Bento, Emily was the Head of Product at askSpoke, and a former senior PM at both Intercom and Teespring.

Making great products is the outcome of making great decisions. As product builders, we base decisions on three pillars: intuition, analytics, and customer feedback. The best decisions are drawn from all three pillars, but striking a consistent balance is difficult. People, teams, and companies tend to bias towards one type of decision making. In this session, Ravi Mehta, fmr Tinder CPO and founder of Slidevana, discusses examples from across the industry to illustrate the three pillars of product decision making and why it’s so hard to get it right all the time.

Ravi Mehta is the founder and creator of Slidevana, a toolkit designed to help presenters create professional looking presentations in significantly less time. He’s also an angel investor and advisor primarily focused on consumer tech companies. Prior to doing that, he served as the CPO at Tinder and was a product leader at Facebook, TripAdvisor and XBOX. Ravi holds an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BS in Computer Engineering for Boston University.

Starting a new product role can be daunting regardless of industry or level of experience. And for those of us who aren't experienced in working remotely, there are now new challenges that we haven't navigated before. In this session, Tara Goldman, fmr General Assembly VP Product and current Electric VP Product, gives practical advice about how to set yourself up for success when starting a new remote product role, strategies for successful remote onboarding, and work, and ways to achieve outcomes quickly.

Tara Goldman is VP Product at Electric and has been building and leading product teams from growth stage startups to mature enterprise organizations for over a decade. Prior to Electric, she'd held product leadership roles at General Assembly, WW (formerly Weight Watchers), and The College Board.

Strategy is a word that is thrown around quite a bit and often product teams have wildly different definitions of what makes-up a product strategy. In this session, Josh Platt, RetailMeNot’s CPO, discusses a few examples of product strategies from his time at Nordstrom.com and RetailMeNot with the intent of developing a shared point of view on what a good product strategy looks like.

Josh Platt is currently the CPO of RetailMeNot. He’s a product leader with an extensive history managing cross-disciplinary teams responsible for building digital commerce and omnichannel experiences with an emphasis on machine learning-driven innovation. Josh has significant experience transforming digital consumer experiences from his time at Nordstrom.com and RetailMeNot (mobile web, desktop, iOS and Android applications). He also has an extensive history building SaaS applications and enterprise software while at Microsoft.

There are challenges, risks, successes, and learnings that are par for the course in most startups. How can we learn from others and try to avoid their pitfalls? In this session, Roger Barlow, Diversys Software’s Co-Founder and CEO, discusses his experiences building software starting at the very beginning of Diversys. This talk includes how to navigate the unforeseeable, such as a global pandemic.

Roger Barlow, Diversys Software’s Co-Founder and CEO, has 25 years of wide-ranging experience with both start-ups and Fortune 100 global tech multi-nationals, including having lived in Japan for nearly ten years, resulting in a strong balance of technical knowledge in software and cloud architecture, strategic business acumen, and finance expertise. Named the 2016 CareerEdge Mentor of the Year while at Bell Canada, Roger is also a dedicated leader and visionary. Roger is a Licensed Professional Engineer (P. Eng) with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto and an MBA from McGill University.

How do you know that the awesome product you built solves the problem it was intended to and delivers on the customer benefit? Most product managers have an overwhelming amount of data at their fingertips but are quite in the dark on how to identify, define, measure and use meaningful metrics to evaluate product success. The key is to pay special attention to those metrics that help you make decisions that in turn make your product better. In this session, Meghna Misra, Pure Storage VP of Product, discusses an understanding of which metrics matter most in the context of your user base and gives you the best (and timely) indication of whether your product is really working.


This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.


Meghna Misra is the Vice President of Products at Pure Storage, where she leads product management, marketing and experience design for the as-a-service product offerings. She’s a business-focused product leader with a strong engineering background and demonstrated ability to build world-class products from the ground up. Over the past 16 years, she has led innovative SaaS and mobile products in early stage startups as well as large corporate environments like Microsoft and Intuit. Her compulsive customer-focus and strong people skills enable her to consistently deliver products that delight users while accelerating business growth.

Blockchain is one of the more intriguing emerging technologies around. What has developing a blockchain solution taught us about building products using emerging technologies? In this session, Ripple Product Lead, Craig DeWitt, discusses how to leverage cutting edge emerging technologies, such as Digital Assets, to bootstrap new multisided ecosystems from scratch. The talk begins with an overview of identifying the technological platform and moves on to deciding which of your stakeholders are customers vs partners. From there, we'll discuss leveraging all three (platform, customer, partners) as instruments to build valuable ecosystems.

This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.

Learn more at amplitude.com.

About the speaker: I have my undergrad from UC Berkeley and my MBA from Stanford - I met my wife at Berkeley, so in terms of loyalties I'm still a Golden Bear. In between educations I worked at Bloomberg on the core platform of financial analytics products. My most recent career has been the 5 years I've spent building the Internet of Value at Ripple where I've been responsible for the strategic development of RippleNet, the world’s only enterprise blockchain solution for global payments.

What do great tools have in common? How do you elegantly balance ease-of-use and power? How do you build a system incrementally when all the parts are interconnected and need to be considered holistically? How do you leave room for flexibility and the emergence of use cases you never dreamed of? In many ways the answer is to build tools similar to how we write code, modularly and iteratively. In this session, fmr Squarespace Product Lead and current Jobber Senior Product Manager, Asha Gupta, discusses designing and evolving creative products.

This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.

Learn more at amplitude.com.

About the speaker: Asha Gupta has 10+ years shipping products at early and mid-stage companies including Venmo, Squarespace, Etsy and Hopscotch. She specializes in building systems/tools that are easy enough for beginners and powerful enough for advanced users. She started out as a UX researcher, then moved into front-end dev/design and finally found her home mixing it all together in Product Management. She recently moved back to her home town in Edmonton, Alberta to help grow the local tech scene and join a local upstart, Jobber.

Whether we’re looking within our organizations or externally to our customers, it’s the people that are the most significant, and also the most complex part of the product management equation. In this session, The Design Gym Co-Founder & President, Jason Wisdom, discusses the questions, rituals, and behavioral norms we can put in place to make navigating people challenges a bit easier.

As a Co-founder and President of The Design Gym, Jason Wisdom has spent the last 8 years of his career coaching leaders and designing experiences that support greater human understanding. From redesigning global sales processes to focus on trust building, to pushing mental health into product roadmapping, Jason lives to connect the dots between supporting social needs and driving business metrics.

Creating a product roadmap is a delicate balancing act between building a product that maximizes revenue while being able to create an impact in the shortest amount of time possible. How can product managers accomplish this? In this session, Intersect Product Lead, Sam Kawtharani, offers a comparison between the traditional and feature-less roadmap. The talk also includes a brief discussion on why the feature-less roadmap could be a better fit for your product.

Sam Kawtharani is an experienced product leader who specializes in driving vision and roadmap for businesses from startup to IPO. He focuses on collaboration between customer and company, with cross-functional partners to launch cutting-edge business solutions, driving greater operational efficiencies, engagement, and revenues. Sam is passionate about combining the best of technology, data and product, and design to execute a successful product vision.

When creating a product strategy, one common practice is to look at other companies who have executed them successfully. What can you replicate or improve upon? In this session, fmr Netflix VP Product Management, Gib Biddle, discusses five different strategy frameworks to enable product leaders to define their product strategy. In this webinar, Gib brings all five frameworks to life, as he presents a mock 2020 product strategy for Netflix. He then shows how strategy influences day-to-day decision-making through two modern Netflix cases, including a special COVID-19 question: Should the company launch “Netflix Party” to enable worldwide members to engage in shared viewing experiences? Gib’s webinars integrate Google Slides and Slido for a highly interactive, highly engaging experience.

About the speaker: Gib Biddle is the fmr Netflix VP Product Management and is currently the NerdWallet Board Observer and Executive-in-Residence for Product. He joined Netflix as VP of Product in 2005. In 2010 Gib became the Chief Product Officer of his next startup, Chegg, a textbook rental and homework help company that went public in 2014. Today he’s an adviser, speaker and guest lecturer at both Stanford and INSEAD.

Our dear little craft is finally coming of age and we're seeing more and more companies elevate product leaders to the exec team. But all too often those leaders get booted out or marginalized at the exec level due to a lack of awareness of how the job changes as you go from functional leader to exec. In this session, Teachable VP of Product, Tommi Forsström, discusses how to earn and keep your seat around the executive table as a product person. He shares his experiences —both 1st person and observed through his time in consulting—on the dos and don'ts of not only getting to the top of the ladder but also thriving in it with your new teammates that don't give two hoots about your velocities, engagement metrics or scrum processes.

This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.

Learn more at amplitude.com.

About the speaker: Tommi Forsström is the VP of Product at Teachable. He’s been on a journey from a university math major in 1999 through engineering and product to executive roles in the software industry, completely unsure of where this all leads. Passionate about growing product people into the cross-functional leaders they don't know they are yet.

As we have more and more freelance and remote developers and designers, most companies are very much supportive and accepting of those types of roles. However, there is still a lot of stigma and objections to having a remote/freelancer product manager. In this session, Toptal Product Lead, Johnny Chao, discusses driving the movement of remote freelance product managers and how Toptal has accomplished it. He covers the Toptal story, and what the main challenges they had/still have to overcome, and the situations where it works to have a remote product manager, and those when it's not ideal.

This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.

Learn more at amplitude.com.

About the speaker: Johnny Chao is currently the Head of Product Management Vertical at Toptal, a global freelancer platform. Before joining Toptal, Johnny led product/data teams at Transunion, RBC, D+H and other companies. He started his career as a software engineer and became a PM at MSN Messenger.

A great product manager reaches beyond specs and features and drives alignment throughout the organization. Having a data literate culture and practicing data-driven product management is probably the best way to do this in a company while avoiding management by opinion. In this session, data.world Co-Founder and CPO, Jon Loyens, goes beyond typical A/B testing talks and presents on how to align a company and its products effectively through data-driven product management. The talk starts with goal setting and value alignment and goes through process, tools, and strategy to create a great data-driven product management organization.

This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.

Learn more at amplitude.com.

About the speaker: Jon Loyens is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of data.world. In a past life, he was the VP of Engineering for Traveler Products at HomeAway, and before that, a VP of Engineering and Director of the Labs group at Bazaarvoice. As a long-time technology executive in Austin, he has seen the rise of data and analytics as a democratizing force. Jon brought A/B testing and data-driven product management to Bazaarvoice and massively expanded the data programs at HomeAway. Jon introduced GitHub to Bazaarvoice and made OSS contribute a major part of their culture. He’s seen the benefits of openness and transparency in software development and, at data.world, is bringing the same benefits to data and analysis work.

It’s an extraordinary time in which the entire world is having to respond to a crisis that we didn’t anticipate (or didn't want to anticipate). How might we create products and services that are resilient in the face of change? In this session, Substantial VP of Strategy, Sheryl Cababa, discusses principles for how designers and product managers can align design with societal outcomes, the importance of systems thinking, and the ability to anticipate and respond to change.

This webinar is sponsored by our partners at Amplitude. Amplitude is the market-leader for Product Intelligence. Their platform's powerful combination of product analytics, data management, and behavioral targeting empowers teams to use customer insights to drive conversion and retention. Over 30,000 teams use Amplitude to grow their digital business.

Learn more at amplitude.com.

About the speaker: Sheryl Cababa is VP of Strategy at Substantial, a Seattle-based digital design and development studio. Her background is in UX design and research, and she has previously worked for companies such as Artefact, frog, and Microsoft. She lectures at the University of Washington’s HCDE program and is currently a board member for Design in Public.