Cortney Jacobsen

Sr. Director of Product Management at Aduro

Kirkland, Washington

Hello! I am a 20-year veteran of the tech industry, specifically in Product Management. I have experience developing product strategies from the ground up for B2B and B2C products in my roles at Amazon, The Walt Disney Company, and Brightcove. I have managed UX/UI teams and mentored several product managers and product marketers in my career. My favorite part of the product development process is fine-tuning the target customer and the target customer experience, working directly with customers to get product feedback, and then translating this into detailed product requirements for engineering teams to build. I recently left the big corporate world to start my own company, GritLink. We connect endurance athletes with sports care providers so that they can get educated about their sports, learn to train properly, and avoid injury. Happy to be a part of the Sharebird community!

Content

What is a rare and valuable skill each marketer should develop?

Cortney Jacobsen

Aduro Sr. Director of Product Management • 7y

Data reporting and analytics. Having the ability to gather data (read: SQL skills are both rare and valuable for Marketers), cross-reference data, and - most importantly - draw insights from this data are essential for efficiency in your marketing experiments. A lot of marketers are masters in taking insights and developing a story or a plan, but having skills in the magic that happens before the plan is where a Marketers can stand out.

1,201 Views

How often is too often when it comes to launching a new product feature/enhancement publicly?

Cortney Jacobsen

Aduro Sr. Director of Product Management • 7y

Favorite answer: It depends :-) It depends on your target customer, the type of product, and the maturity of your product and business. Some examples for each - e.g. If your target customer is developers, it may be a good idea to spread features out so that you give your customers time to implement new features, launch them in their own products, and then gather data about how those features performed before you starting throwing more features at them. On the other hand, if your product is a co ...Read More

1,028 Views

For international product launches, how should HQ and local offices share responsibilities?

Cortney Jacobsen

Aduro Sr. Director of Product Management • 7y

I have a lot of experience with international product launches during my time at Amazon. Here's some lessons that I learned - HQ should create the playbook for how a product launch should happen, including a timeline of all the milestone activities (beta, translations, marketing assets created, legal review, PR, etc.). My role was at HQ and was to lead local offices through this playbook of launches, clarifying and constantly tweaking the playbook to help the local offices be more self-sufficien ...Read More

752 Views

Does anyone have tips for securing customer interviews when your customers are relatively unengaged very small businesses?

Cortney Jacobsen

Aduro Sr. Director of Product Management • 7y

That can be a tricky situation! Essentially, you need to develop your customer engagement in order to develop your customer engagement :-) Classic catch-22. I have been in this situation in my work at smaller companies and have found a couple things that work well - Adopt the mindset of "quality over quantity." It is fine that you don't have dozens or hundreds of customers to talk to - you only need a handful for interviews anyway. Don't worry about the numbers. Pick out 5 names from a custome ...Read More

524 Views