The Top 50 Product Management Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2024
Overview
The way we acquire job knowledge has changed. We learn more from each other than we do at school. The Product Management Mentor List shows you the top 50 product management practitioners to learn from to develop your career. All of these leaders have contributed content that Sharebird users find helpful.
Methodology
Sharebird's algorithm ranks contributors based on how helpful our users perceive their product management - related content to be. We do not handpick people. To be considered for this list, mentors need to be current product management practitioners and in a leadership role. We look at the following factors with Sharebird content: views, saves, and followers. We then apply a proprietary algorithm to calculate content credibility and helpfulness. Views show us content relevancy, saves show us content quality, and followers show us content credibility.
Sharebird does not accept payment to be included on this list, which allows us to maintain objectivity and independence. We update this list every year. For any questions about this list, please contact [email protected].
About Sharebird
Sharebird is where leading executives answer your questions. Get easily digestible tips and insights from leaders at the fastest-growing companies, so that you can solve your hardest work challenges and reach your career potential.
In Alphabetical Order by Company:
Nicolas Liatti
Adobe Senior Director of Product Management, 3D Category
Career Path Tip: Here is the tip I usually give to my teams: The PM career is a late-reward career, so don’t expect to have recognition before years. You should work on how to improve your influence, and this doesn’t happen overnight. Focus on getting things done, and start small. Lots of small wins bringing impact to customers go way further than a big initiative that is a failure. Build your track record in order to get legitimacy towards teams and stakeholders.
Saikat Paul
Asana Head of Product Operations
Career Path Tip: Redefine success. It's not just about what we build, but also what we don't. In a resource-constrained world, making judicious choices matters. When we celebrate decisions to walk away from sunk costs or pivot, we remove the stigma of change and empower teams to embrace it as a driver of progress.
Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Agility
Career Path Tip: Learn to find joy in small moments and fine details; that will make you observant and help build a good taste, which will supercharge your career. Honor logic, but don't let it squash your curiosity. Be patient with others and yourself: great things take time. Help others discover their strengths, and be relentless in developing yours.
Paresh Vakhariya
Atlassian Director of Product Management (Confluence)
Career Path Tip: In product management, resilience during adversity is often undervalued, leading to an excessive focus on immediate, short-term successes. However, the emphasis should always be on developing a cohesive, long-term strategy and cultivating a team skilled in navigating the complexities of evolving technology, stakeholder input, and customer/market needs.
Vasudha Mithal
Care Solace Chief Product Officer
Career Path Tip: Product role and responsibilities evolve depending on your industry and specific company needs. Do not cage yourself in a dated, theoretical definition of a product role. Be ready to take on what it might take to solve critical problems and have fun along the way!
Anton Kravchenko
Carta Sr. Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: 1. Embrace child-like curiosity and frequently ask the question “why” to deepen understanding of your domain.
2. Focus on work that aligns with your passion, so it feels less like work and more like a hobby.
3. Once you find what you truly enjoy, perseverance will become your best friend.
Hiral Shah
DocuSign Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Be an active listener to your customers. The first step in developing any product or feature is to identify the user's needs. Hence, your goal should be to talk to as many users as you possibly can to understand what they say, do, think, and feel. This also helps you learn who you are solving for and who you are not solving for and create a problem statement
James Heimbuck
Doppler Principal Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Product Management is all about navigating the unknown and ambiguous. Oftentimes there are not concrete answers to your question or getting the answer would take so long the opportunity is gone. When I started to get more comfortable with saying "this is what I think, why I might be wrong and what we should do in either case" it was a real game changer for me.
Sam Friedman
Eventbrite Senior Director of Product, Strategy and Operations
Career Path Tip: As you grow as a company or in your career don’t let that growth create more distance between you and the problems you are solving for your customers. Stay curious, talk to customers, and celebrate the small victories the same as you would the big ones.
Pavan Kumar
Gainsight Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Know your customer - Often this can just be the investor in the company/company owner. Meet their basic expectations from the product first, and win their confidence.
Sailaja Kalle
Gainsight Director, Product Management
Career Path Tip: A good product manager always is ready to start Zero with clear understanding of Who( we are building for), What( we are building) and How( we are building and delivering). A great Product person is not building features but experiences / Journeys. Users are the key.
Julian Dunn
GitHub Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Good product managers build a product that customers love. Great product managers know that the product is but one component of a successful business, and they own all aspects of that business. If you want to grow in your career, don’t just build an awesome product. Learn how to make your product even more successful by influencing its go-to-market, managing your financials, and incorporating real data in your prioritization.
Derek Ferguson
GitLab Group Manager, Product
Career Path Tip: Don't live in the echo chamber of your company, office, and team. Strive to always understand your customers and make your decisions from data. Once a decision is made, commit and execute, but don't be afraid to adjust if new data comes to light. Walking the edge between focus and agility takes practice, but is one of the greatest strengths you can develop.
Jacqueline Porter
GitLab Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Change is hard. Growth is harder. As you go into 2024, remember that opportunities, expanding your skills, and reaching new limits will mean going above your current thresholds as a professional or person. Recovery, balance, and perseverance will pay off as you seek the next big thing in your life: whether that is a product launch, a promotion, getting a new role, or accomplishing something major in your personal life!
Melissa Ushakov
GitLab Group Manager, Product Management
Career Path Tip: Product managers need to prioritize spending time talking directly with customers. Reviewing usage data, surveys, and insights from research is incredibly valuable, but personal interactions provide a deeper understanding of your user's needs, allow you to gain nuanced insights, and ultimately craft more impactful and user-centric solutions.
Mike Flouton
GitLab VP, Product
Career Path Tip: Never make the mistake of assuming your customers think the way you do. Speak to as as many of them as possible, deeply explore their problems and pain and then relentlessly pursue solutions to make their lives better.
Omar Eduardo Fernández
GitLab Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Work for managers that you respect and that show you respect in return. They should mentor you and push you to grow, but within the boundaries that you set to make your work sustainable and gratifying long term.
Urvi Chetta
GitLab Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Measuring not just on what but how: I measure PMs not just on OKRs they achieve and metrics they move but also on how they end up achieving their goals. Best ones create long-term advantage for the organization and company while collaborating across groups/departments.
Rapha Danilo
Gong Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Find ways to be "asymmetric". Product teams will continue to get lean and more will be expected of them. Find a growing company, and align yourself to the initiatives or product bets within your company that have the highest impact-to-effort ratio. Have a point of view on who the "rising stars" in your company are, even if they're on other teams, and find ways to work and learn from them. Be a true adopter of tools your company bought that make you more productive, and that others in your company are likely overlooking.
Ashwin Arun Poothatta
Green Dot Corporation Principal Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Consider your career (and life) a learning growth ladder instead of an org chart (titles!) ladder. Have sight of the next couple steps ahead and make sure you're always slightly out of your comfort zone, both professionally and personally. Hone your curiosity, success will follow.
Sharad Goel
Homebase VP Product & Design
Career Path Tip: Understand what business goals need to be achieved (which will most likely be be set top down) and then determine what product outcomes will help you achieve those business goals.
Katherine Man
HubSpot Group Product Manager, CRM Platform
Career Path Tip: Being a standout product manager is about saying 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the great. Your job is to focus the team on building the highest impact features that will deliver the most customer value. Saying 'no' is hard, but if you master that, you'll build great products that customers love.
Lukas Pleva
HubSpot Group Product Manager
Career Path Tip: At its core, being a good Product Manager means you can identify a painful customer or business problem, convince your stakeholders, including your team and executives, that the problem is worth solving, and partner with your team to solve it in a way that’s valuable, usable, feasible, and commercially viable.
Zeeshan Qamruddin
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Management, Flywheel
Career Path Tip: In certain scenarios, what a team may need is for someone to roll up their sleeves and do the work to keep the lights on for a product. It may be months before you can get the product to a comfortable enough place to think about weeks, months, or quarters ahead; however, that time allows you to gain knowledge of the product itself.
Orit Golowinski
Jit.io VP of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Make active listening your daily habit. Always be in listening mode, not just to fulfill your immediate responsibilities but to continuously grow personally and professionally. Whether it's engaging with the board, VCs, customers, or stakeholders, being attuned to their insights and needs not only enhances your ability to build successful products but also opens doors to new positions and emerging markets. By consistently practicing attentive listening, you create a foundation for ongoing personal and career development.
Preethy Vaidyanathan
Matterport VP of Product
Career Path Tip: Always have clarity on the value proposition and impact created. Apply this when you are creating product roadmap, pitching strategy to your c-suite, board or investors and marketing your offering to customers.
Bhaskar Krishnan
Meta Product Leadership - Ads, Commerce & AI
Career Path Tip: Focus on solving problems for your customers rather than building features.
Maxime Prades
Meta Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Staying close to the users, the sales teams, the detractors and understanding the ins and outs of your product will contribute to make you a strong product leader.
Mike Arcuri
Meta Director of Product - Horizon Worlds Platform
Career Path Tip: Always stay rooted in your customers, their pain, and their experience with your product. This will lead you to clear priorities and problems to solve every release. As you advance in your career and handle more complexity and longer-term strategies, your deep customer understanding will continue to keep you centered and leading in the right direction.
Poorvi Shrivastav
Meta Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Writing and expression is a key part of most careers but especially product management. PMs use big words and bigger decks. Coach your team to use simpler language and plan wordings. It takes a deep understanding of problems and potential solutions to be able to explain complex ideas in a simple way. And as you become more senior, these skills are required even more.
Tom Alterman
Notable Head of Product
Career Path Tip: It's great to have a clear career plan but not essential. Often just focussing on the next most interesting thing yields opportunities you never even knew existed. You may be blind to them if you're too set on a single path.
Jonathan Gowins
Openly Director, Product & Design
Career Path Tip: Outside of the expectations set for you by leadership, never stop hunting for ways to make your organization or teams better. Growth often follows those who constantly offer to improve morale, processes, relationships, and anything else they come across that needs attention.
Robert Wunderlich
Oracle Product Strategy Director
Career Path Tip: Change is rapid and constant. There will be several players who will come and go, but there will be some exciting discoveries that could disrupt some of the mature products. PMs of mature products should pay close attention to the innovation in seeming unrelated areas to discover the potential for improvement.
Devika Nair
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Ensure you have a good understanding of your organization's (or investors) priorities. By aligning your products to these priorities, you can ensure your contributions are valued in your organization. This is in addition to the focus on the customers and the market, but one that will help your career, in addition to the success of your creations.
Yasmin Kothari
Peloton Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: It doesn't matter if you're the smartest person in the room if you're standing at the final conclusion alone. Product intuition is only half of the puzzle - make sure to also invest in how you communicate and bring others along.
Casey Flinn
realtor.com Sr. Director, Product Operations
Career Path Tip: When it comes to learning, don't just let other people feed you what they choose - take control of your own learning agenda. It's easy to create the conditions where the main sources of learning become our direct managers and our companies. This makes us experts in our current role and at our current company, but not much else. It's also easy to create the conditions where we are actively exposing ourselves to new content, people, concepts that bring us closer to relevant actions, and skills to drive our careers forward. Don't get stuck solely in the former; make sure you are prioritizing the later.
Deepak Mukunthu
Salesforce Senior Director of Product, Generative AI Platform (Einstein GPT)
Career Path Tip: 1. Start with “Why," 2. Focus on “What," and 3. Work with others on “How." Great product managers always start by defining the purpose/goals/problems (the Why); Then focus on what product/features to build (the What); And collaborate with Engineering and other cross-functional teams to deliver (the How). Using deep insights from customers and market to learn and evolve throughout the product lifecycle is their superpower.
Kara Gillis
Splunk Sr. Director of Product Management, Observability
Career Path Tip: When looking for your next opportunity, prioritize an organization going through tremendous growth. Specifically, I mean growth in rapid customer adoption, revenue generation, regional expansion, new product introductions, which will give you the exposure and opportunity to take on more responsibility, ascend quickly up the ranks, and deliver impact earlier on in your tenure or career. When you no longer feel yourself growing in any area, it's time to move on."
Richard Shum
Splunk Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Resetting expectations internally within your company will be much easier if you have already held conversations with customers. You can leverage these conversations to prove that the new direction has been validated by your customers.
Abhiroop Basu
Square Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Your customers are going to come to you with a litany of pain points, needs, and requirements. As a product manager it's important to view these opportunities from the perspective of your customer and not your company. For example, no one is asking for "subscription-based ink delivery for your printer", they just want to print out their documents without worrying about the ink or paper.
Carrie Zhang
Square Product Lead
Career Path Tip: If you want to transition into product management, it's a good idea to try internal transfer. Learning the craft of a new discipline is not easy. You are more likely to set yourself up for success if you minimize other variables like new company, new product, new team.
Rishabh Dave
Stripe Product Lead, Financial Infrastructure
Career Path Tip: As product managers work closely with stakeholders, designers, engineers, marketers, and other team members, fostering strong relationships is key in facilitating effective teamwork and cross-functional alignment.
Ashka Vakil
strongDM Sr. Director, Product Management
Career Path Tip: 1. Know your target customer in and out: In order to be successful in product management, it is critical to have a deep understanding of your target customers and their needs. If you don't know the customer base you are building a product for and what their pain points are, you are almost guaranteed to fail. You and your team should be spending at least 30-40% of your time on user research, talking to customers, and gathering feedback on your products.
2. Develop strong collaboration skills: Product managers have to work closely with stakeholders from across the company and it requires strong communication and collaboration skills to succeed. Knowing what each stakeholder is responsible for, and what their goals are and catering communication accordingly will help build trust and partnership. This solid relationship is essential for product managers to operate and succeed in their roles.
Aleks Bass
Typeform Vice President Product Management
Career Path Tip: At the heart of developing products are people: customers, shareholders, and internal stakeholders. Understanding people and their motivations, honing strong collaboration skills, and communications expertise are 3 elements of the Product focused professions that are critical to success. Negotiating your way through the opposing motivations (at times) of these various groups is the true test of product leadership.
Sirisha m
Uber Director of Product
Career Path Tip: Always be “an advocate for your customer”. Lead with bias to action but continue to dream big and strategize on how to get there. Take your people with you on the journey - it takes time but increases the value of the outcome and makes you an impactful leader.
Boris Logvinsky
Vanta VP Product
Career Path Tip: The most successful Product Managers are those who can adeptly interpret data, understand its implications, and also know when to question its suggestions. They balance the art of intuition with the science of data, using each to enhance the other. This holistic approach allows for innovation and creativity, driving product decisions that resonate with customers and succeed in the market.
Ojus Padston
Vanta
Staff Product Manager
Career Path Tip: Develop high conviction that the work you are doing will be materially impactful to the business. It is easy to assume that the people above you or before did this diligence, but circumstances change and it is critical as the PM and leader that you truly understand the path to value and totally believe in it. Otherwise, you're just executing on behalf of others and will inevitably lose faith from your team.
Chris Omland
Workiva Vice President Of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Stay curious. Each day gives you an opportunity to learn from your users, your peers, your leaders and all those around you. Treat each day as a learning opportunity and take the time to reflect on those learnings and how you can apply them. Doing this will ensure that you are continually learning and growing.
Farheen Noorie
Zendesk Senior Director of Product Management
Career Path Tip: Real careers are not straight upward ladders, unlike levels/roles in an organization. More often than not, individual career paths seem to go up->down->lateral->up again if you evaluate them strictly from a level/role ladder perspective. If your learning is always going up and you have a compensation you are comfortable with, take that leap of faith even if the new designation is not 1+ your current designation.
C. Todd Lombardo
Co-author Product Roadmaps Relaunched
Career Path Tip: Really get to know all the nitty-gritty details of your product: technical and beyond. Know how it works and how it's built. I'm not suggesting you need to be able to read the code repo line-by-line, but know how it works and everything comes together. We hear plenty about getting to know our users, and any good PM will already be good at that. Also learn the mechanics of your product as much as possible. Is it REST API or GraphQL? And why did the engineering team make that choice? There's a story (urban myth?) about how the CEO of a toilet manufacturer made his kids work for a few years as licensed plumbers before they could take any leadership role in the company. This way they knew how to install and repair every aspect of the company's products when they arrived in a leadership post. Further, this approach will build credibility across your organization because you truly know the product's ins and outs.