May 2014
Ben starts Foster Innovation soon after Opower's IPO.
January 2018
Rajesh joins Ben and they start capturing their best practices together.
March 2018
Ben joins GoCanvas as Chief Product Officer and Rajesh becomes Chief Product Advisor.
July 2019
Foster Innovation becomes Prodify and launches Vision-Led Product Management.
+
Years of PM Experience
Startup Exits
Companies Advised
Hours with Clients
Head of Product
Role: Built a professional product organization at this hyper-growth behavioral health company including establishing their first in-house design team.
Key learnings: Healthtech product management, employer-sponsored benefits, marketplace dynamics, building machine learning products.
Head of Product
Role: Reimagined and rebuilt their consumer robo-advice product into a white-labeled B2B2C suite of products.
Key learnings: Fintech product management, product leadership post-acquisition (by BlackRock), Agile transformation, B2B2C, design systems, algorithm product management, behavioral economics.
Chief Product Officer
Role: In addition to a complete rebrand, I co-led a product pivot that grew to become the company’s core business offering and was the foundation for its eventual acquisition by OpenText.
Key learnings: Complete rebranding, managing competing business models, product pivot, Enterprise product management
Sara Bial Zalowitz
Senior Product Advisor / Coach
"Product Management enables teams to have strategic alignment and make decisions that prioritize the customer needs and business outcomes. When I began my career in Product, I knew I had found my passion. I love working with clients to help them grow their passion for product by seeing the impact that Vision-Led Product Management can have on their business."
Chief Product Officer
Role: Built and ran the Product Management team at Rent the Runway, inclusive of product design (UX/UI), and user testing. Drove the product strategy and innovation. Key member of the executive team.
Key Learnings: Team development and change management of creating and integrating a product discipline into the company; product, engineering and design organizational alignment
VP of Digital and Tech Innovation
Role: Led Digital and Technology Innovation with a mission to deliver innovations that ensure the enterprise and brands are differentiated, relevant, and competitive.
Key Learnings: Hospitality Industry, Design thinking, Process in a matrixed organization, Voice technology
VP of Product
Role: Owned product strategy and user experience; key contributor to the corporate strategy. Led a team of product managers, product designers (UX/UI), and user researchers.
Key Learnings: Marketplace dynamics; Organizational restructure enabling strategic squads of product, engineering, and design; Global organization team structures and processes.
Head of Product, International
Role: Oversaw product management and localization for expansion into new geographic markets; enabled country improvements and partnerships across three-sided marketplace.
Key Learnings: Starting with first principles to understand customer problems before defining a solution; focusing on understanding and improving inputs in order to drive outcomes; balancing product and operational testing to validate ideas.
Chief Product Officer
Role: First company head of PM and design; grew team from four to 14 during period of 4x user and revenue growth; Fetch has a 4.8 rating and is consistently ranked in top 10 apps for Shopping in the App Store.
Key Learnings: Driving high retention via simple, frictionless experience and targeted incentives; applying behavioral design principles to reinforce product interactions.
VP of Product and Design
Role: First company head of PM and design, built combined functions from four people to 25 in one year; helped establish foundation leading to Groupon’s IPO.
Key Learnings: Scaling an organization, business and technology through hyper-growth; aligning team focus and ownership; importance of balancing speed and quality; personalization, funnel optimization and A/B testing
Margaret Jastrebski
Senior Product Advisor / Coach
"Product is the glue between strategy and delivery, and the rigor of the practice can make or break the success of an organization. Being a part of Prodify means I can help many more companies avoid common pitfalls and nail their in-market success."
SVP of Enterprise Product
Role: Built a 12 person product organization from scratch, which included the Retailer product vision, strategy, team, and operations of the function.
Key Learnings: Omnichannel Retail strategies and solutions; the importance of Forming/Norming/Storming
VP of Product
Role: Built and ran the Product Management team. Oversaw large-scale online identity data collection and matching products that spanned the US, Europe, and Japan.
Key Learnings: Marketing technology; management and leadership best practices; Product + Engineering organizational alignment and growth strategies
Director of Product Strategy
Role: Built and ran all of Orbitz' private label products to achieve over a $1b in travel transactions annually. Key clients were large brands like Southwest and Amex.
Key Learnings: Ecommerce; the function and fundamentals of product management and strategic planning; business development and consultative sales
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Rami Alhamad
Sr. Product Advisor / Coach
"As a startup founder, I am obsessive about driving focus and alignment between the product team and the customer. Everything starts with ensuring that every line of code or circuit board designed is informed by the end-user. At the same time, I know how to balance the strategic needs of the business with the customer discovery process."
Founder
Role: Took a hardware wearable startup from vision all the way to a market leader with over 150+ pro sports teams as clients including the SF 49ers, Cleveland Cavaliers, USOC, Tokyo Giants, Stanford, Ohio State, and others. Evolved the business from one-time purchase to a hardware-enabled subscription model. PUSH was acquired by WHOOP in 2021..
Key Learnings: Enterprise product management, hardware development, coordinating product with marketing and sales, product discovery and roadmapping. Strategic partnerships.
VP of Product, Hardware & Sensors
Role: Managed the hardware development of next-gen WHOOP devices. Mapped out the R&D roadmap for internal development as well as key labs and external research partners. Coordinated closely with the CPO on all matters tied to software and hardware development post-launch of WHOOP 4.0
Key Learnings: Consumer product management, research and development management, strategic partnerships
Jenny Wanger
Product Consultant & Coach
"Improving how you build product through ProdOps is one of the most effective ways to start building better products. Every organization has product operations; the only difference is if they acknowledge the work as an explicit responsibility or if it's baked in to the day-to-day work of the team."
Co-Founder, LF Public Health
Role: Founded an open source community providing technology to public health agencies around the world.
Key Learnings: The only time you can say that your total addressable market is "everyone" is when working in government.
Senior Product Manager
Role: Led the consumer product team through a 22% conversion rate increase, the addition of several new lines of business, and introduced a new level of rigor around A/B testing practices.
Key Learnings: Get as close to your customers as you can and bring your team along with you.
Innovation Management Office
Role: Worked across the corporation to educate and enable best practices in design thinking and problem solving.
Key Learnings: Innovation can come from anywhere when people are given the right environment.
Laurie Cordova
Senior Product Advisor / Coach
“There is nothing more rewarding to me than unlocking the potential of a great Product leader or team. No two product teams or companies are the same, and my role is to help customize the best approach to maximize the value my clients can deliver to their companies.”
VP, Product
Role: Led Product Management, Design and Innovation function; responsible for rebuild and key user experience improvements for core platform; oversaw Product due diligence for IPO
Key Learnings: Reducing feature and function waste of rapidly expanding product portfolio, the importance of including data science in planning and evaluation earlier than you’d think, and the high value and low risk option of introducing low/no code tools to productize services.
Chief Product Officer
Role: Led Product Management and Design; established a User Research function; Rebuilt customer portal designed to increase customer retention; Introduced Buy/Build/Partner model to team to encourage only building differentiating IP/assets
Key Learnings: Behavioral science dynamics of retaining customers for “invisible” service, Establishing and running pilot programs for IoT hardware, funnel optimization, best practices for effective quarterly planning.
VP of Product
Role: Led Product Management and Customer Support; Built and introduced new product line, CurrentMD, to market in less than 6 months
Key Learnings: Creating the model for production when user experience and content are being created at the same time, understanding the best blend of primary and secondary market research, and discovering best practices to keep adult learners engaged with the product.
Rajesh Nerlikar
Co-Founder and Chief Product Advisor / Coach
"I'm lucky to have learned product management from Ben and my startup / enterprise experiences. I started Prodify with Ben to share my learnings because, as I found, there aren't a lot of great resources for mastering the craft of product management."
Director of Workplace Products
Role: Managed $40M product portfolio with team of ~20 (Product Managers, Product Operations, Technical Project Managers)
Key Learnings: Enterprise product management, replatforming best practices and financial services
Senior Product Manager
Role: Led a team of 3 and helped grow revenue of a 3-product suite by over 500% in 2 years, launched a product that won Best in Show at Finovate.
Key Learnings: Encouraging a product culture of constant learning, using data science / machine learning strategically, transitioning a team and product suite through an acquisition and a divestiture.
Product Manager
Role: Improved the core Home Energy Reports product by increasing operational margins by 30% to prepare for IPO.
Key Learnings: PM best practices (from Ben), behavioral science, operational efficiency, how important design is to product success.
Chief Product Officer
Role: Expanded the team 10x and the company valuation 15x, hit record high retention, established a strong product vision, and groomed new leaders to inherit the team.
Key Learnings: How to balance the day-to-day (defense) with visionary leadership (offense), expanding the definition of "Product" to include pricing, engagement services, and more.
Chief Product Officer
Role: Created a product-led company culture, evangelized product vision, established strong leadership, championed customer focus, led M&A and pricing strategy.
Key Learnings: Vision-led product management, modeling financial impact of product dev, organizing around customer outcomes, scaling to support hypergrowth, executive mentorship
VP of Product & UX
Role: Built the product organization from 5 to 30, customized a product-driven culture and process, helped grow revenue 10x and take the company public.
Key Learnings: Applied behavioral science, strategic UX, how to drive user engagement, the keys to operating as a successful executive and product leader.
Product Design
User Research
Product Marketing
Technology
Customer Success
Sales / Finance
Data Science / Analytics
People / Operations
