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
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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.
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
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
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
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
VP of Product
Role: Create a product-driven company culture and lead the transition from a pure D2C ecommerce product to an advanced technology platform.
Key Learnings: Developing a product-driven company culture. Leading major product pivots.
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.
VP of Product
Role: As first product hire, built the product organization and strategy from scratch and launched 2+ products in new verticals.
Key Learnings: Product-driven transition, Productizing high-touch implementations for Fortune 500 customers, AI Product Management.
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
Role: As first product hire, built the product, analytics, and operations organization and strategy and managed a global team of 12 across 6 time zones. 0 to $1M ARR with <$1M raised.
Key Learnings: Early-stage product management, Platform product management, building analytics products, managing remote teams.
Mentor, SaaS Product and Enterprise Sales
Role: Resident Product Mentor for 500 Global (formerly 500 Startups) portfolio companies. Mentored 30+ startups at various stages of growth on Product strategy, Enterprise product development and launching new products.
Key Learnings: Early-stage product management, hiring the first PM, running product experiments, customer interviews and development.
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: 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.
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.
Product Design
User Research
Product Marketing
Technology
Customer Success
Sales / Finance
Data Science / Analytics
People / Operations
