Products That Count holiday party featuring Uber early VC

Horizontal products have all of the challenges of regular product management, with an extra twist -- their value is only realized through vertical adoption or use cases. Many of the hottest startups today are chasing horizontals, and larger companies crucially rely on the same skillset to have product platform leverage across a broad portfolio. How can product leaders not only ship engaging horizontal experiences, but also maximize their uptake? Workday Sr. Product Director Katie Holden shares concrete examples of successes and failures from both startups and larger enterprises working with horizontal product experiences.

Established organizations with large business portfolios have product managers functioning at various levels including client-facing and internal products. Whether managing a large-scale product, managing parts of one, or launching new offerings, it’s up to product managers to push the envelope forward. How can product managers work within existing team processes and structures to successfully push the envelope forward? Royal Bank of Canada Sr. Product Director Arun Milton speaks on how product teams and their leaders can drive innovation within large organizations.

The promises that Cloud environments offer are plentiful, and nearly every Product Lead can find a cloud-based tool that is appealing. Yet, implementation sessions often turn quickly from enthusiastic brainstorming to a labyrinth of real-world challenges. With a fast-evolving technology landscape and a huge market, what types of products are helping customers make the journey from on-premise to Cloud? Splunk Product Management Director Siddharth Bhai speaks on the accelerating trend of transforming enterprises to cloud, and how product leaders can best facilitate cloud product adoption.

Join us in The Winners Circle with Airtable Product Lead Anthony Maggio to discuss how product managers can build better products, faster, by modernizing business processes and focusing product solutions.

Delivering a successful product is an outcome of collaboration, communication, and engagement between business, product management, and engineering. How can PMs be the balancing force between owners and engineers in order to achieve a successful end result within a shared vision? Beth Ligenza, fmr Transformco Retail Ops VP, presents three product deliveries and the successes and failures that occurred in each scenario, providing product managers with working takeaways for how to achieve balanced operations.

From matching algorithms that power a platform, to the user research needed to create beautiful UX, the challenges to creating a fully diversified product cannot be underestimated. Sometimes it can even feel like a new hurdle appears every week. How do product managers overcome the inherent constraints within the product lifecycle? LendingTree Chief Product Officer Sushil Sharma joins Products That Count to discuss engagement, user insights, and the challenges to building a financial services marketplace.

Moving from leading product improvements to leading product managers is a huge change and an opportunity that can be hard to make and then even harder to succeed at. The nuances can take time to grasp and then own. Alexa Maturana-Lowe, Director of Core Experience at Fivetran and former Product Lead at Pandora, joins Products That Count to speak on that transition from being a product builder to being a product leader. Join us to learn how you can get the promotion, then survive and thrive on the other side.

In 2020, the pandemic rapidly accelerated the delivery of digital products and shaped how companies packaged and priced products. The rise in subscriptions and demand for transparency is influencing the trend for value-based pricing models. How can product leaders drive larger profits from the new normal? ProfitWell strategist, Rob Litterst, shares his deep expertise in product packaging and pricing on how product managers can leverage different models as a strategic lever to drive monetization.

Navigating a career in product management means considering the possibilities from all angles. Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? In a new opportunity, do you begin completely from scratch or start with existing knowledge and dig deeper? Pulling from her extensive experience as a mentor and coach, STRIVR CPO Yelena Drabkin joins Products That Count to speak on the numerous dimensions of the product manager career journey and how to be a generalist in a world of specialists.

Product leadership requires extreme adaptability. Zooming out to think about the big picture and the product’s long-term path. Zooming in to complex problems or feature decisions that impact short-term business goals. How can product leaders seamlessly transition between the two perspectives? Peek.com CPO Navya Rehani Gupta joins Products That Count to speak on how to maximize your impact as a product leader by maintaining the right horizon and right focus in every situation.

Digital Transformation is critical to the ongoing success of nearly every company, however, the vast majority of these efforts fail. All too often, enterprises make the faulty assumption that digital transformation is simply about applying technology to existing processes, rather than fundamentally changing their strategic approach. As competition accelerates, how can companies de-risk the effort, while maximizing both business and end-user value? Cognizant Product VP Jeremy Horn joins Products That Count to share how product managers can be the driving force behind digital acceleration.

Campaign effectiveness has two performance levers: media & creative. To date, the ad tech industry has focused primarily on solving for the media lever, with hundreds of companies built to optimize ad budgets. But what about the creative side? How do you bring an ad tech lens to a subjective space, and how do you build a product around it? In this session, VidMob Product VP Bethany Gostanian speaks on how to think about “creative data” and the challenges faced when carving out a new category of ad tech.

User experience for online advertising isn’t something that's necessarily associated with the word exciting. In fact, it tends to be an arena that users try to avoid. So how did one company turn that dread for online ads into a fun, satisfying, and ultimately rewarding experience? Brave VP of Services and Operations Jimmy Secretan shares the challenges he faced when distilling a complex, technical protocol into a comprehensible UX, all while flipping the narrative on its head by rewarding the user.

Many teams focus on internal ownership of products instead of customer problems and delivering value across the business. This can lead to local maximums and small thinking. How can product managers adjust their thinking in order to deliver larger value at scale? Rev.com Sr. Product Director Barron Caster joins Products That Count to speak on how to break out of an internal mindset to get the most out of your product resources.

Experienced product managers are precious commodities with more than 75 percent of PMs having been in the role for less than two years. That means as you learn and grow within your role, the value you offer increases significantly. But how do you know when it’s time for the next challenge in your product career? In this session, Products That Count CPO and Microsoft fmr Product Lead, James Gray, reveals ways in which product managers can join, shape, and drive the product conversation and get that dream job.

Product managers come to the role from many different backgrounds and the demands on PMs are always high. With those challenges, it can be difficult to find a way to stand out internally at your company and get that promotion. So, how can PMs level up? In this session, Products That Count CPO and Microsoft fmr Product Lead, James Gray, discusses ways in which product managers can join, shape, and drive the product conversation in a way that will help them get noticed by the product leaders and executives and get their career on a fast-track internally.

Product management is a rapidly growing field. With that, there is a high demand for experienced PMs. So, how can you make yourself stand apart from your competition? In this session, Products That Count Founder, SC Moatti, and Executive Recruiter, Monica Bua, sit down for a fireside chat to discuss what product executives are looking for during the hiring process.

Building great products begins and ends with a strong foundation, be it in company and in self. In a relentlessly tumultuous year like 2020, however, it can start to feel like that very foundation is rocking and rolling. Though individual experiences may be unique, what are some ways product leaders can all adapt in order to weather the storm, and even come out stronger? Slack Product Director Ellie Powers joins Products That Count to share how products, teams, and product leaders themselves can adapt in strange times to build resilience.