It's that time of year when we highlight the up-and-comers and revolutionary leaders in product-led growth.
These are the best and brightest, with potential on their side and the hard work to back it up. Think the trailblazers who are making big moves to improve the industry.
Check the names out below, and congratualtions to everyone who made the list.
We're excited to see where you go.
Bill Davis
Senior Manager of Product Operations
Bill is recognized as a passionate and focused leader. He's renowned for his strategic foresight and adept navigation of both macro and micro aspects across diverse technical projects. He's also proficient in effectively managing timelines and adapting to scope changes while maintaining flexibility. Bill demonstrates a history of articulating precise business requirements and advocating for streamlined solutions that yield tangible value.
Chris Butler
Staff Product Operations Manager
As a chaotic good product manager, writer, and speaker, Chris plays a pivotal role in guiding teams involved in developing innovative products. With a focus on bias, uncertainty, and randomization, Chris endeavors to cultivate robust and resilient teams. Throughout his career, he has held product leadership positions at esteemed companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Cognizant, KAYAK, and Waze, where his expertise has been instrumental.
Gabby Peralta
Product Operations Manager
Gabby serves as a Product Operations Manager at Tealium, where she collaborates with high-performing product and development teams to construct the most trusted CDP on the market. Deeply passionate about enabling teams to excel, she finds fulfillment in various aspects of her role, including data collection, organization, fostering psychological safety, providing coaching, and optimizing processes.
Graham Reed
Product Operations Leader
Recognized as one of Europe's leading product leaders and named 'ProductOps MVP 2023', Graham is a multi-award-winning product operations pioneer, thought leader, speaker, podcast host, coach, and consultant.
Graham’s entrepreneurial endeavors and career influence span diverse sectors, including FinTech, Cyber Security, CommTech, EdTech, mobile apps & data analytics, across various business models. He is currently the host of PLA’s Product Ops Chronicles podcast.
Hari Dutt
Head of Product Management
Hari is passionate about addressing customer pain points by thoroughly grasping their needs and desires and prioritizing key outcomes in decision-making. Throughout his career, he has held diverse roles in product management, technical sales, solutions expertise, financial modeling, and customer account management, navigating various organizational stages and business models.
From these experiences, Hari has honed skills such as strategic execution, stakeholder consensus building, team leadership, rapid technical comprehension, and customer-centric focus. He thrives in collaborative environments, relishing complex challenges and exploring how technology and products can tackle user persona difficulties.
Lena Sesardic
Content Marketing and Sales Coach
Lena has transformed her social media presence into a personal brand empire, driving 90% of her business revenue. She prides herself on helping clients achieve remarkable results, including generating over $100k in sales through content and simple funnels. Notable successes include facilitating $54k in sales for a commercial banker and EOS coach with strategic LinkedIn profile adjustments. She's also secured five inbound leads in three weeks from a LinkedIn profile audit for a commission-based biz dev leader. Lena also orchestrated $6,400 in sales in two weeks from Instagram for a website designer utilizing her content strategy.
Melissa Perri
Founder and Lead Instructor
Melissa is an authority in product management, shaping the field through entities like Product Institute, Produx Labs, and CPO Accelerator. Consulting-wise, Melissa lent insights to Fortune 500 giants like Capital One, Vanguard, and Walmart/Sam’s Club. Melissa also serves as a board member and advisor for SAAS scaleups and late-stage startups.
Noteworthy milestones in her journey encompass catalyzing value for Forsta as CEO advisor, assuming a Senior Lecturer role at Harvard Business School, and authoring the acclaimed book "Escaping the Build Trap" on effective product management.
Michelle Joliat
Senior Vice President, Product and Delivery
Michelle is an accomplished digital and technology transformation executive boasting over 22 years of expertise in financial services and management consulting. For the past seven years, Michelle has concentrated on spearheading digital strategy formulation and implementation, driving product transformation and leadership initiatives.
You can find her speaking at PLA Summits in Toronto, providing insight into the product community with global representation.
Paulo Garcia
Senior Product Operations Manager
With a diverse background encompassing product operations, management, UX design, and software engineering, Paulo is driven to craft user-centric solutions addressing real-world challenges. Over the years, he has honed his skills in steering product vision and execution within cross-functional teams, fostering efficiency and timely delivery while staying within budget constraints.
Guiding multifaceted teams, Paulo has spearheaded the launch of successful products, prioritizing user needs and business objectives while integrating user feedback into decision-making processes.
Rosie Snow
Director of Product
Rosie is a driven and focused product leader. As director of Product, New Digital Propositions at Sky, she gracefully steers the direction of strategy. She was also the previous Director of Global Product at Naked Wines. In charge of Product Management, Design, Research, and the Product Analytics department, Rosie led the delivery of the Product strategy through cross-functional squads partnering with Technology, Marketing, and Operations.
You can catch Rosie at recent PLA summits, where she talks about structuring the organization and positive leadership.
Sai Nikhil Y
Senior Product Manager
In his role at Bizom, Sai Nikhil specializes in developing enterprise-level and innovative 0 to 1 products that transform supply chain and retail intelligence. His expertise spans various sectors, such as FMCG, CPG, Consumer Durables, Dairy, Pharma, and Alco-Bev.
Sai Nikhil adeptly oversees the lifecycle and roadmap of OMS, DMS, and SFA products, managing claims and gamification modules that engage over 100,000 daily active users.
Sam Crowell Richard
Head of Product Growth
As an expert in PLG, Sam helps developers get their apps online faster and with total security. At Ngrok, Sam simplifies services for developers, offering authentication, observability, and critical controls with just one line of code, eliminating the need for legacy proxies, load balancers, or VPNs. Its ease of use has made it a staple tool for developers, and is recommended by major brands like GitHub, Okta, Shopify, and Twilio in their documentation.
Sam also teaches a course on using data in PLG businesses, which you can check out on Maven.
Sean O'Neill
Chief Product and Technology Officer
A visionary leader with over 25 years of experience, including 11 years at early Amazon, Sean is adept at generating significant enterprise value across global tech, consumer, and retail industries. With a proven track record of delivery, customer obsession, and a whole-business view, Sean has delivered $500m+ in cash flow, orchestrated a multi-billion dollar PE exit, and secured 3 patents/filings.
Sean's Product Development Principles, designed to cultivate the right culture and velocity, encompass solving the right user need, ensuring measurable accountability to outcomes, and empowering decision-makers.
Teresa Torres
Product Discovery Coach
As a product discovery coach, Teresa has assisted product teams in making informed decisions regarding what to build, imparting knowledge on identifying clear business outcomes, and uncovering unmet customer needs. She also addresses pain points, desires and discovering solutions that provide both business and customer value. Her book, Continuous Discovery Habits, has garnered sales exceeding 90,000 copies.
Teresa has also educated over 13,000 students from 102 countries through the Product Talk Academy and has reached hundreds of thousands of product professionals through her free blog posts and social media content.
Tiama Hanson-Drury
Chief Product Officer
Tiama serves as the visionary and strategic Chief Product Officer at Minna Technologies. With over 15 years of global digital product P&L experience, Tiama is a respected figure in product leadership, board direction, and executive roles. At Minna, she oversees the Global Product, Design, Engineering, Marketing, and onboarding teams, spearheading the company's remarkable growth.
Tiama is dedicated to crafting product growth strategies and fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within organizations, contributing to both profitability and social impact. She is also the host of PLA’s For The Love of Product podcast.
Veronica Belmont
Director of Product
Veronica serves as the Director of Product, employing generative AI to enable creatives to swiftly prototype real-time 3D concepts without coding. Her previous roles include product management for Adobe Express and Disco, acquired by Culture Amp. As a podcaster, she hosted Mozilla's IRL: Online Life is Real Life, which explored technology's impact on global lives. She also co-hosts the Hugo-nominated Sword & Laser podcast, which discusses sci-fi, fantasy, and author interviews. Catch Veronica at PLA Summits in Toronto, speaking about all things product.
Congratulations to all those in our 2024 Ones to watch.
We're excited to see where these business pros drive innovation and push the product landscape to new heights.
Keep your eyes peeled for next year's list. You might just be on it!
