My career has never fit neatly into one industry. That is a strength.
I went from protecting digital media to helping people find something worth watching, modernizing a bank’s websites, untangling aircraft sales workflows, and making Xbox Rewards more useful to players. The products changed. My curiosity about how things really work did not.
At Xbox, I was not just looking for another place to show Rewards points. I wanted to know whether showing their value at the point of purchase would actually change behavior. We tested it. The eight-week experiment showed a verified 0.62% Store revenue lift.
At Boeing, I learned that the most valuable product work is sometimes invisible to the customer. Cutting stored CRM data by 48% helped performance and reduced estimated annual costs by $3M–$5M. No flashy launch required.
I do not believe a strong product manager needs to have the answer in the first meeting. I do believe they need to ask the questions that get the team to the right answer, make the call, and own what happens next.
Follow the actual workflow
I want to see where people get stuck, what they work around, and what the data says. A feature request is a starting point, not the problem statement.
Say what we are trading off
Time, engineering capacity, customer trust, revenue: there is always a tradeoff. I would rather make it explicit than hide it in a roadmap.
Make the first change count
A small, well-chosen change can teach us more than a large launch. Xbox Points Preview was an experiment before it was a business result.
Do the math afterward
Did behavior change? Did the business benefit? Did we make someone’s day easier? If not, I want to know why.