Business Development vs. Product Management

In a recent live stream from one of our mentors of The Product Mentor, Chris Butler, lead a conversation around “Business Development vs. Product Management”.  We are always looking for more product mentors from all around the world.  Signup to be a Mentor Today!

View the live stream…

 

About The Product Mentor

The Product Mentor is a program designed to pair Product Mentors and Mentees from around the World, across all industries, from start-up to enterprise, guided by the fundamental goals…

Better Decisions. Better Products. Better Product People.

Each Session of the program runs for 6 months with paired individuals…

• Conducting regular 1-on-1 mentor-mentee chats
• Sharing experiences with the larger Product community
• Participating in live-streamed product management lessons and Q&A

Signup to be a Mentor Today!

Throughout the program, each mentor leads a conversation in an area of their expertise that is live streamed and available to both mentee and the broader product community.

Meet the mentors…

Jordan Bergtraum
VP Product Management, ServiceChannel

Jordan is a Management level, revenue-driven, B2B SaaS Product Management and Project Management leader. He grows revenue and adoption, and ensures product by turning business problems into profitable, simple, easy-to-use solutions
Jordan works closely with his market, executives, and internal subject matter experts to develop roadmaps, and communicate these roadmaps internally and with clients. He translates complex business problems into solutions that are easily consumed by engineering, marketing and sales. Jordan has enterprise Software-as-a-Service experience within the facilities management, legal and pharmaceutical verticals, having most recently worked at ServiceChannel, Epiq Systems and Medidata Solutions.
Jordan has a BS in Biology from Union College and an MBA & MS in Information Systems from Boston University’s School of Management. Jordan lives in Manhattan and in his spare time likes to play soccer.

Ladislav Bartos
Chief Product Officer, UVIC Ltd.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci
Ladislav believes that success is in simplicity that’s why his aim is to help companies to make complex products simple for users. He lives in London, currently working as Product Manager at Gumtree.com, an Ebay company, previously led product at international startups and large organisations. Ladislav focuses on user centric product development, especially on brand, usability and revenue product challenges. He is passionate about Lean and Agile Product management, innovative business models and business and product strategies.

Dustin Levy
Director of Product Management, Gentex Corporation

Dustin Levy is a Director of Product Management at Gentex Corporation—the leading supplier of high-performance flight equipment for military, law enforcement, and rescue aircrew worldwide.  In this position, Dustin’s primary responsibilities include product portfolio management, new product introduction and product line strategy deployment. Prior to joining Gentex, he was a Senior Product Manager at Smiths Detection and in that role launched several new chemical identification solutions into the global security market. During his career, Dustin’s research efforts have been supported by fellowships from the National Research Council and National Institutes of Health and include a track record of several new product innovations, patents and publications. Dustin is a graduate of the doctoral program in Physical Chemistry at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and the MBA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Paul Hurwitz
Director of Active Analytics, ActiveHealth Management

Paul Hurwitz is Director of Active Analytics at ActiveHealth Management, a Healthagen Company and subsidiary of Aetna. He is responsible for the strategic roadmap and execution of the Active Analytics product suite, which is focused on providing standalone clinical analytic solutions and business intelligence modules to internal users and the payer/provider customer base.   Paul is an experienced product management professional with over 15 years of experience in technology management and 10 years in product management.  Prior to joining ActiveHealth, he led a cross-functional team at Medidata Solutions working on life sciences software for the design and optimization of clinical trials.  Prior to Medidata, Paul led product management and was head of technology at Centage Corporation, a budgeting and financial forecasting software company in Natick, MA. Paul is a member of the Boston Product Management Association, Boston CTO Club, the Boston-NY CTO HIT Club, co-founder of the Boston Jewish Outdoors Club and product management consultant. He is a graduate of Yeshiva University’s Syms School of Business with a degree in Marketing.

Amanda Ralph
Product Management Consultant

Amanda is an experienced product management leader with over 20 years of experience in product portfolio management and innovation generating significant revenue and market share growth. In a career spanning a range of corporate and not for profit sectors within Australia and the Pacific Islands, Amanda has championed organisations to embrace product and service innovation opportunities.
In her most recent role, Amanda spearheaded the Corporate and Overseas portfolios for Australia’s largest private health insurer, Medibank.  Amanda is passionate about customer led product design and in product prototyping to deliver best in market products and customer outcomes.
Amanda has a Bachelor of Economics and a Master of Arts (Asian Studies) from Monash University. She is a University of Melbourne Asialink Leadership Fellow and Asia Education Foundation Literacy Ambassador. Amanda lives in Melbourne with her family and in her spare time likes to explore all things cooking related (with a dose of the gym thrown in to try and work it all off!)

Vikas Batra
Product Management Leader, Alcatel-Lucent

Vikas has over 15 years of experience in Telecom/IT industry with over 10 years in the field of Product Management. Vikas started his career as software developer with Siemens.    After doing IT consulting for some time he moved into Product Management at Lucent Technologies and held various roles developing and launching multiple telecom software and hardware products.  He led a large, multi-location product team in developing a new mobile technology that provides voice (VoIP) and data services over Satellite to phones of size comparable to traditional cellular phones.
Currently, Vikas is a Product Management Leader at Alcatel-Lucent bringing 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi capable Small Cells to marketplace.
Vikas did his Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Information Systems from XLRI  Jamshedpur, India.  He did his Bachelors of Engineering (Honors) in Electronics and Communications from Delhi Technological Institute (formerly Delhi College of Engineering) Delhi , India.

Jonathan Berg
Director of Product Management, Schoology

Jonathan is Director of Product Management at Schoology, a fast growing startup in education technology, and he is excited about how technology is unleashing the future of education. Prior to Schoology Jonathan held a variety of product roles in web and mobile. From head of product at an early stage startup to managing global web properties at American Express, his career has taken him to the UK, France and back to New York.
A hands on product leader, Jonathan relishes close collaboration with design and engineering teams. When digging into a new challenge, he starts by establishing a long range product vision, then ruthlessly prioritizes opportunities and features to find the sweet spot between customer needs and business strategy.
When he’s not building products, Jonathan enjoys rediscovering suburban life with his wife and two kids.

Felix Sargent
Product Manager, Bloomberg

Felix works at Bloomberg as a Product Manager for their Corporate Compliance suite. Having been a support person out of college, he transitioned into operations, then programming, then into Product Management. He finds the diverse background helps him communicate effectively to build good software. When he’s not doing product management, he trains for long distance cycling, and dreams of opening a tiki bar.

Krishna Madhuvarsu
Director of Product Strategy, Oracle Inc.

Krishna enjoys creating new products and works at the intersection of the technology, design and strategy. Krishna believes in “Mobile and Social eating the world” and helps enterprise customers to make use of technology to increase their productivity. Krishna spent several years in building Platforms and brought scalability to several products. Previously, he started his career as a software engineer in embedded systems and moved to application software before venturing into Product Management. Krishna has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an MBA in entrepreneurship and marketing. Krishna is an author, enjoys writing blogs and tutorials on anything technology.

Ian Multon
Product Manager, TouchTunes Interactive Networks

Ian Moulton has over 10 years of experience in digital product management. He began his product work at Broadcast Interactive Media, where he launched a video publishing platform for broadcast news sites. He later joined the Associated Press, where he managed AP’s Online Video Network, as well as AP’s YouTube channel. Ian is currently a product manager at TouchTunes, where he led a design engagement and development effort to create a new user interface for over 60,000 digital jukeboxes. Ian loves capturing learnings from users, even when they are proving him wrong. Ian has a BA in Economics from Wesleyan University. When not doing product management Ian enjoys playing the guitar, hiking and mountain biking.

Addi Regev
Director of Product, Outbrain

A passionate customer advocate and result-driven executor with deep mobile expertise, Addi is leading teams in creating consumer and business digital products, for startups and Fortune-500 companies alike, for more than a decade.  In her current role, as Director of Product at Outbrain, Addi is re-imagining a content-marketing platform. Previously Addi was theProduct Manager behind the redesign of the American Express mobile apps and before that she managed a startup that focused on mobile marketing and content delivery. She also provided strategic advice to Fortune-500 companies as a Management Consultant. Addi started her career trying her hand in customer support, QA, project, sales and marketing management before finding her passion in product management in startups that focused on mobile and its application in business settings. Addi holds an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a BA in Occupational Therapy from Tel Aviv University.

Marc Wendell
Director of Product Management, Worldnow

Marc Wendell currently is Director of Product Management at Worldnow where he oversees day-to-day product development and product strategy.  Prior to Worldnow, Marc held a number of senior-level roles in product development were he facilitated the execution of a number of different products across a broad spectrum of industry verticals. His expertise includes product development and customer experience across various platform experiences. His industry experience includes media, start-ups, publishing, financial services, interactive agencies, tier 1 research intensive academic institutions and the stock media industry.

James Alexander
Founder and Head of Product, Vizibility

James builds products and services which delight customers and differentiate companies. He recently sold his third start-up, Vizibility, an enterprise-class digital business card solution. Vizibility is a SaaS delivered service in the mobile wallet ecosystem and received outstanding reviews and recognition, including 4 stars by PC Magazine. As a successful technology entrepreneur of three start-ups (with two exits), and as a product management executive at Adobe for seven years, he has led cross-functional teams through every stage of the product life cycle. James has held responsibility for $100M+ productportfolios and managed both small teams and large organizations. He has worked on four continents and localized products and services for 27 countries. James holds an MBA from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and has been awarded 12 patents.

Nis Frome
Content and Product, Alpha UX

Nis handles content / product for Alpha UX to help Fortune 500 product teams generate user insights throughout the product lifecycle. His articles have been published in Forbes, UX Mag, and Content Marketing Institute.

Chris Butler
Product Management Consultant

Chris has over 15 years of experience in leading product, BD and strategy. His product experience includes lead and director positions at Horizons Digital Group, Complete Seating (founder), Dash Navigation and Microsoft. He has also held BD roles (with product responsibilities) at KAYAK, Waze and Zvents. He graduated from Boston University with a Computer Systems Engineering degree.

Marc Abraham
Senior Product Manager, NotOnTheHighstreet.com

Starting his career as a corporate lawyer, Marc made the transition into digital technology, initially as a project manager and then as product manager. Marc has been managing products for the last 5 years, working on a range of successful digital products/services, at companies such as 7digital, carwow, YouView and currently at notonthehighstreet.com. He also works closely with organisers of ProductTank events in over 25 countries to ensure deliver the highest quality events for a global community of product people.

Sarah Varki
Product Owner, Sonicbids

Sarah is passionate about making people’s lives easier, faster & better with technology. After completing a BA in Psychology with a minor in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Sarah’s introduction to product management began with Intuit’s Rotational Program. With a few more companies under her belt and earning her MBA at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, she has worked on over 25 products in various stages of the product lifecycle across almost every industries. When not leading product at Sonicbids, she fosters kittens, tries to find new mixology spots, enjoys boxing, and travels as much as she can (29 countries and counting!).

Cameo Doran
VP of Product & Project Management

Bennett Morrison heads product management for SecurityScorecard. Bennett has a wide-ranging background in product management, marketing, and strategy. Prior to SecurityScorecard, Bennett managed Software-as-a-Service products for Oracle and Collective[i]. Prior to that, he was Director of Strategy at American Express OPEN where he worked on strategic planning and marketing. He holds a BA from New York University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Rishi Kumar
Senior Product Manager, TEN: The Enthusiast Network

Rishi Kumar is currently a Senior Product Manager at TEN: The Enthusiast Network, the world’s premier network of action/outdoor brands such as GrindTV, SURFER Magazine and SLAM Magazine. With almost 10 years of digital media experience, he has a proven record of building compelling online consumer experiences and launching major consumer-facing, content driven websites.
He has been instrumental in transforming The Enthusiast Network into a leading digital media publisher. He helped develop GrindTV.com into the #1 action and outdoor sports website in the world, was awarded 6 UI patents for client work with MSN, and led the Ozzie-winning redesign of SurferMag.com.
Rishi holds an MBA from The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.

Melissa Hatter
EVP of Product and Client Services, Frankly Media

Melissa Hatter is the EVP of Client services and Product at Frankly Media (formerly Worldnow)– a media technology company that serves the broadcast television industry.  Her focus in on developing client inputs within a SaaS strategic roadmap process. Prior to Worldnow, she held senior account management roles at UGO Networks and the NBC Television Network.   Melissa won an Addy Award for Excellence in Interactive Media from the Tri-State Advertising & Marketing Association.

Jen Bornstein
Product Manager, Attract TV, TouchTunes Interactive Networks

Jenn got her break into the digital industry back in 2005 when her boss walked into the office and asked her to ‘figure out this whole digital download thing.’ Since then she’s worked for a ton of premier media and tech companies including CBS, Nielsen, Direct TV and most recently TouchTunes.
Starting as a project manager and GM eventually working her way over to becoming a product lead after realizing that ‘Dagnabbit! I’m a product person!’. Jenn has not looked back since.
Recently at TouchTunes, she has been leading the social TV program, focusing on both understanding the way device users multitask and the idea that a true Second Screen experience can be done. She’d like to thank Kanban & Agile development for all of their support.

Vasu Vadlamudi
Product Management Consultant

Vasu is a product leader with over 9 years of experience in B2C startups and business strategy. Previously, he lived in San Francisco and ran product at Delectable, a venture-backed wine technology startup. As a Director of Product at Zynga, Vasu led the pod that increased FarmVille’s revenue 10x, created CastleVille’s product management organization, and ran the entire company’s Central Product team. Vasu got his start as a consultant with Bain and a BA in economics from Harvard. Currently he advises startups on product strategy, process, and analytics.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy