Few Questions for Eva Drago

Most of my relationships with people in tech start on Twitter. My relationship with Eva was no exception. She spent a few years as a consultant before jumping to product management roles at startups like Bond Street and Troops. She now works as an independent product consultant. We met at a coffee shop and had a conversation that I wanted to last longer than we had time for. While I was at Human Ventures, she attended one of our dinners for product people based in NYC. She has been very generous with her time and connections and is someone I highly recommend people in NYC tech to meet with.

Consulting and banking are two fields I had always been interested in growing up. I have spent copious hours understanding ins and outs of both the fields up until my sophomore year before deciding not to kickstart my career in either of them. I am still always curious to learn more about each of them and how they are changing in the light of tech disruption that’s ruthless and unrelenting.

I thought interviewing Eva would be great for understanding more about consulting and for getting her thoughts on her interests.

Increasingly, over the past 5 years, consultants have been moving to tech giants and startups as product managers. From a skills standpoint, it makes sense to break into product management for starting a career in tech. Among others, teamwork, analytical rigor and communication skill come in most handy. Do you think something that you were taught to do as an consultant works against you initially as you transition to being a product manager? Are they any instincts that you have to consciously resist or any heuristics you have to unlearn for becoming a better product manager?

Eva : My biggest challenge was letting go of perfectionism. As a corporate consultant, nothing is “shipped” to clients until it’s been reviewed with a fine-tooth comb and that takes a lot of time. As a product manager at a tech startup, moving at that pace would slow down the entire company. You have to move fast.

Being a product manager also requires becoming comfortable taking more risks than a corporate consultant. You are constantly running experiments and making decisions under uncertainty, as you try to discover how to build the ideal solution for your user.

One other change that I have personally loved has been moving to agile development processes. At Deloitte I worked on a big SaaS implementation using waterfall methodology and while it made sense for that client, that isn’t my preferred way to operate. Agile is way more fun.

Given your experience working at startups and your general interest in fintech & healthcare, can you name one space that’s most interesting to you from a product perspective and from a business perspective. They need not necessarily overlap.

Eva : From a business perspective, there is a huge opportunity for new debt servicers. None of the existing providers offer great service and when clients are charged the wrong amount, they place the blame on the parent company that hired the debt servicers, instead of the servicers who made the error. Plus, no one I know who works at a direct lender has ever been impressed by their debt servicer’s user experience or product design.

From a product perspective, I’m interested in the emergence of technology (both software and hardware) centered on mental health. Care services are cost prohibitive for most people, and technology is quickly lowering the barrier to entry. Off the top of their heads most people can’t think of a competitor to Headspace, and I think that will change soon.

We connected on twitter over a very brief conversation about how yoga and meditation have been massively commercialized in the US. What’s your general take on monetizing something that’s basically a common practice in India?

Eva : Such a timely question given YogaWorks’ recent attempts to IPO. Yoga is still relatively new to this country, but it is already a very large industry — around $17 billion in size in the U.S.

The commercialization of yoga isn’t something that is unique to just our country. If you look to places in Asia, where practices like yoga and mindfulness meditation originated and have developed for a very long time, it is easy to find people profiting by “selling” a version of these practices — usually in a way that promises to make the practitioners rich. That being said, there is something discomforting when you see this happening in the U.S., where these traditions aren’t native to most people in our culture and the depth of their meaning isn’t as widely understood and respected.

Yoga and meditation have really enriched my life, so I am excited to see them become more popular and benefit more people in the U.S. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with people paying money for something. (Studios have real costs to pay for rent, utilities, instructors, etc!)

For me, the most important thing is that these practices are accessible to anyone who is interested in them, regardless of how wealthy they are. This is why I teach yoga at a donation-based studio and why I’m so excited by meditation apps that help people practice anywhere for just a few dollars.

Who are some ladies in NYC you think are doing interesting things and who should more widely be known?

Eva : There are so many to choose from. In the product space, I really admire Caroline Hane-Weijman. She’s a director at Pivotal Labs, previously at LearnVest and McKinsey, and graduated from MIT in mechanical engineering. We met at the Voices of Product Meetup she co-hosts to bring together underrepresented people in product development. Many founders I know have sought her advice on building product processes and teams. She’s a brilliant tech strategist, extremely kind, and devotes a lot of energy to making tech more inclusive.

I’m also a huge fan of Sandra Hong and Melissa Wong who co-founded New Women Space, a community and project cultivation space in Williamsburg. They started it last year with the vision of creating an affordable place for self-identified women of all ages and experiences to gather, create, and connect through community-driven events. Their programs run the gamut: everything from financial literacy workshops to comedy nights to political activist meetings to coworking hours for entrepreneurs. As I’ve watched their vision come to life, I’m struck by how thoughtful they’ve been about creating an inclusive environment. As a result, they’ve enabled so many new ecosystems of women to form and grow.

Looking back, what do you think students getting into traditional consulting careers should do more of?

Eva : It’s important to build a network outside of consulting. Unless you want to become a partner, you’ll likely be ready to leave after 2 or 3 years, and it’s helpful to start creating options for yourself.

After 2 years at Deloitte, I took a 6-month sabbatical to figure out what I wanted to do next. I worked for a nonprofit in Bogota, a fintech startup in NYC, and the Aspen Institute. The relationships I built doing those things helped lead me to my first tech role, and many of the people at those organizations continue to be good friends.