Our Mission

Elevate the craft of product management to help companies maximize customer, shareholder and social value.

Our History

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.
Prodify

July 2019

Foster Innovation becomes Prodify and launches Vision-Led Product Management.
Desk

35

Years of PM Experience

4

Startup Exits

55

Companies Advised

3,400

Hours with Clients

Our Founders

Rajesh Nerlikar

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.

Rajesh Nerlikar - LinkedIn    Rajesh Nerlikar - Twitter

 

Rajesh's Experience

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.

 
Prodify Co-Founder - Ben Foster

Ben Foster

Co-Founder and Principal Product Advisor / Coach

I am convinced Product is the single most important success driver for tech companies. I founded Prodify to share what I learned with companies like yours and help companies like yours realize their full potential.

Ben Foster - LinkedIn     Ben Foster - Twitter


 

Ben's Experience
GoCanvas logo small

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
Opower

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.
eBay logo

Senior Product Manager

Role: Grew cross-sell up-sell and feature ARR by $100M in 2 years, personalized item pages, contributed to nearly every part of the eBay e-Commerce app, led a small PM team.

Key Learnings: Fundamentals of PM (from Marty Cagan), product strategy, hard work & discipline, metrics-driven decision making, marketplace dynamics, importance of good design, constructive interactions.

 

Our Product Advisors

Matte Schneinker Prodify Advisor

Matte Scheinker

Senior Product Advisor / Coach

It’s thrilling to help businesses evolve to become product-driven and see all the value they unlock for themselves and their customers.

     Twitter

 

Matte's Experience
Lyra

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.
futureadvisor

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.
Hightail

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
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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.

     Twitter

 

Sarah's Experience
RTR logo

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
Marriott-logo

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
Weddingwire logo

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.
Prodify Product Advisor - David Jesse

David Jesse

Senior Product Advisor / Coach

Product management is at the heart of delivering innovation and great customer experiences for technology companies. It’s rewarding to help each client figure out the best product approach for their specific situation so they can be successful.

     Twitter


 


 

David's Experience
Groupon Goods logo

VP of Technology

Role: Led team of 85 including product, engineering, data science; improved customer satisfaction from 70 to 84/100 and gross margin by 5 percentage points.

Key Learnings: Transitioning a scrappy team to be strategic and results oriented; leading multi-functional and distributed teams; systematically addressing customer pain points; e-commerce end to end customer experience
Groupon logo

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
eBay logo

Group Product Manager

Role: Led team of six responsible for seller tools, listing formats and merchandising options, covering approximately 33% of company revenues

Key Learnings: Fundamentals of product management (with Marty Cagan -- and Ben!); marketplace and community dynamics; product strategy and roadmap planning
Prodify Product Advisor - Margaret Jastrebski

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.

   

Margaret's Experience

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 when creating highly impactful, highly trusting teams

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 
Nishal

Nishal Narechania

Product Advisor / Coach

What goes into building a great product? Simple solutions to real problems. Great products focus on customers. They are intuitive. No instruction manual needed. I love helping companies and fellow product managers get into this mindset.

 

Nishal's Experience

Senior Director of Product

Role: Transform Higher Logic into an agile product development company. Built out a revamped product organization to accelerate growth in new industry verticals.

Key Learnings: Product organization design and change management, agile transformation, PM-PO split responsibility.

Director of Product

Role: Owned the trip management product which allowed our customers to manage their bookings in an easy one-stop-shop application. Built out all new communication capabilities which gave travelers unprecedented omni channel access to travel agents.

Key Learnings: Product discovery techniques, growth experiments, unscalable MVPs, build vs. buy decision making, outcome-based product management.

Senior Manager of Product Strategy

Role: Owned all user-facing applications including web experience, native applications, and ops-facing CRM. Facilitated 500k+ loans through the funnel.

Key Learnings: Value of design for customer-facing and internal-facing users, scaling a digital product, building products in highly regulated or constrained industries.

Our Expert Network

In addition to product management advisors, we also have a trusted network of advisors and consultants who can be called into an engagement to provide their perspective in their respective areas of expertise, which includes:

Prodify Product Design
Product Design
Prodify User Research
User Research
Prodify Product Marketing
Product Marketing
Prodify Technology
Technology
Prodify Customer Success
Customer Success
Prodify Sales
Sales / Finance
Prodify Data Science
Data Science / Analytics
Prodify Operations
People / Operations

Our Design Principles

Proactive

We don't wait for you to come to us with a challenge. We proactively suggest the best ways to leverage our time and expertise based on the situation.

Honest

Sometimes the truth is hard to hear. But we'll share it anyways because we know it's important for you or your company, product or customers to address.

Responsive

We know some issues are urgent, and make sure we have time reserved every day for ad hoc client requests and calls. We aim to respond to all messages within one business day.

Actionable

We're not a think tank.  We built The Library of worksheets and templates to make our advice actionable.  We also share our war stories so you understand what's driving the advice.
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