My plan for this blog

Let me explain what these mean in a little more detail:

Building Products and Product Companies

I’ve spent more than five years working with an awesome team that’s grown the company ten-fold from just under 20 employees when I joined to our current total of over 210 staff. When I started at Vendasta it was a seed-funded startup with one main product, one product manager, one designer, one pivot already under its belt, and a scrappy team that helped out wherever help was needed to release features and capture market share in the emerging industry of online reputation management for small businesses before our competitors did.

Today we have full departments of people — working on things like Marketing, Sales, Success, Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Analysis — all focused on strategic goals, another round of funding, a somewhat pivot to sales & marketing automation, a new board of directors, multiple revenue streams, hundreds of customers, thousands of users, several products, and multiple product development teams.

That’s a lot of change and a pace of growth that is rare and valuable to have experienced. I won’t get far into my experiences here because I want to save that for several full blog posts. I’ve learned a lot through this experience and I’d like to share that with you all.

Product Design

As a product manager I’m always investigating and trying out new products across a wide range or industries. I’m constantly researching the newest trends — things like conversational message bots, how Amazon cracked the code on the recommendation engine, which is customer life cycle management — and I plan to share my analysis and thoughts. My hope is that you’ll chime in with your own thoughts and opinions and we can generate a discussion.

Corporate Governance

In additional to my “day job” building products I also sit on a few boards of directors and this year I completed a professional designation in corporate governance from the Institute of Corporate Directors. Talk about differing professions! Corporate governance touches all types of businesses and is a profession that’s changing dramatically (think Enron). Sitting on a board is no longer a cushy placement for friends of the CEO. More and more shareholders are demanding professionally trained directors, which is great because legal responsibility of directors is also rising along with it.

I’m especially interested in discussing how boards of directors can or can’t harness today’s emerging technologies to do their job (or not do their job). Most directors are at least 45 years old (hence why they’re on a board — for their experience) but how many 45–70 year old’s do you know that are experts on utilizing social media? When I graduated from the Institute of Corporate Directors ICD.D program they told me I was the second youngest person to have completed the program in Canada (and the youngest sat on the board of her parent’s company so I don’t count her :).

Modern Life Observations

And finally I plan to share many of the observations that I note about things around me everyday. This will probably be the shorter posts, but you’ll learn to consider them little golden nuggets of things to ponder and potentially spark up a conversation with your spouse or coworker about.

Here’s your first one: boarding flights and lining up to get on as soon as you can. Why do people do this? Why would I rush to get into a cramped sardine can so I could spend an extra 20 minutes squished alongside the person beside me while being bumped by every person walking down the center isle (I always pick an isle seat for the extra leg room)? The only reason I can think of is to ensure you can fit your carry-on in the overhead storage compartment, but I’ve been on a lot of flights, and I can count on two fingers the number of times that I’ve boarded (almost last every time BTW) to find every storage space taken. It just doesn’t make sense!