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Product Management Lunch & Learn

The Digital Future Initiative is pleased to announce the Product Management Lunch & Learn series.

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Product Management Lunch & Learn

JOIN US AT THE SERIES!

The Digital Future Initiative is pleased to announce the Product Management Lunch & Learn series. Each academic year, we will bring industry experts to campus to share their perspectives on topics relevant to aspiring product managers, covering career guidance, PM best practices or timely hot topics. Grab some lunch and participate in the discussion!

2024 - 2025 Speakers

Philong Duong

Philong Duong '17, September 17th | 2024

Founder and CEO, NODA AI

Philong Duong, CBS MBA '17, is the Founder and CEO of NODA AI where he is building the largest algorithm nexus for heterogeneous, vendor-agnostic agent orchestration. Prior to founding NODA AI, he was the first Federal Product Manager at C3.ai. He was charged with designing and developing products and GTM for C3.ai, which was previously only serving the commercial market. He helped C3.ai IPO at the end of 2020 and scale its Federal practice from <$1MM to nearly $100MM in ARR in less than four years. Philong went from Product Manager to General Manager in this period and was responsible for Products, Engineering, Data Science, and Customer Delivery organizations.
 
During this discussion, Philong will share insights on unique product considerations PMs should manage when designing, developing, and delivering successful AI/ML products. He will reinforce the importance of still maintaining a strong foundation of Product 1st principles, but will also highlight the additional considerations when looking to deliver performant AI products and user experiences.

2023 - 2024 Speakers

Photo Image of Angie Hanna-Bugueiro

Angie Hanna-Bugueiro '22, March 26th | 2024

Product and Digital Strategy Consultant & Advisor

Angie Hanna-Bugueiro, CBS MBA '22, is a seasoned product leader for both high-growth startups and established companies in the DTC, Retail, and Food industries. She has successfully led product teams and practices for highly recognizable brands such as Macys, Gap, Glossier, and Food52 and for the Food-tech startup, WoodSpoon, a NYC based food delivery marketplace for home chefs. Currently, she is building a digital product and strategy consulting practice and is an advisor at the Founder's Institute, a pre-seed accelerator program.
 
During the discussion, Angie shared the struggles of finding product-market fit, setting customer expectations through UX, avoiding the temptation of becoming a feature factory, and what having a leadership role in a startup entails from her time as the SVP of Product for the food-tech startup, Woodspoon.
Photo Image of Allen Yang

Allen Yang '16, March 19th | 2024

Executive Director, JP Morgan Chase & CO.

Allen is an executive director at JP Morgan Chase with over 16 years of experience in the financial sector, spanning from management to sales & trading. Raised in New York, Allen's educational journey took him from NYU to Columbia Business School, where he earned his MBA in 2016. Prior to joining JP Morgan, his professional career commenced at Bear Stearns, followed by roles at JPM and ICAP, where he worked in FX Sales and then transitioned to Product Management, focusing on the US Treasury space. His expertise has further expanded during his time at JP Morgan, where he has focused on building out data analytics for Sales and Trading as a Product Manager within the Digital Markets group. Currently, he spearheads the Business Automation program for Global Financing and Global Securities in the CIB - Markets division, emphasizing technology and innovation in financial services.
 
In this talk, Allen explored and described the current role, group, and changing dynamics within large bank trading floors. He discussed the importance of product within the Corporate & Investment Banking Division as well as how Product teams are structured in developed banks and the reason why. 
Photo Image of Nikita Miller

Nikita Miller, February 20th | 2024

SVP, Head of Product Management, The Knot

Nikita Miller serves as Senior Vice President, Head of Product Management at The Knot Worldwide. In this role, Nikita leads the global Product Management team, focusing on product strategy and growth, across all wedding brands.

Nikita has spent her career in product management building great teams and creating products that users love. Most recently Nikita was VP of Product at Dooly and prior to that she led product teams at Trello and Atlassian for five years. Nikita’s experience ranges from early stage startups to multinational companies and from EdTech to Enterprise SaaS. Nikita is also an active startup advisor, angel investor and board member. 

Nikita received her B.S. from Cornell University and her MBA from NYU Stern School of Business. She lives in upstate New York with her family.

In this event, Nikita led a presentation on the evolving role of product managers and the increasing relevance of data science. She discussed the evolution of cross functional product development teams and discussed navigating roles and responsibilities in high functioning teams. 

 

Photo Image of Jill Cohen

Jill Cohen '20, December 5th | 2023

Product Developer & Manager, ex-Snap

Jill Cohen, CBS '20, has built her career thus far launching mobile apps for companies large and small. Before coming to business school, she worked as a software engineer at Snapchat, where she developed and launched the Snap Map in 2017. Prior to that, she majored in Engineering at Dartmouth and learned how to create apps for the iPhone just as the App Store was taking off and every company began thinking about its mobile strategy. After graduating from Columbia in 2020, Jill was hired onto the founding team of a startup funded by NYC incubator AlleyCorp, where she led Product & Mobile Engineering and built a team and product from the ground up, followed by a startup focused on building a healthier social media app. Now, Jill is starting a product strategy agency to help companies and early-stage founders level up their consumer mobile experiences.

In her talk, Jill discussed lessons learned from her varied startup experience, from designing products for the first beta-testers, for public launch, and for the millionth Snapchatter. She discussed the different mindsets that are called for when building products in the seed-stage, when a company is looking for its first customers, compared to when a product already has retained users and is creating to sustain its advantage. Jill shared from personal experience when intuition gained in more corporate settings can lead entrepreneurs astray, the unexpected iterations (and iterations and iterations and iterations!) while getting to product-market fit, and why team cohesion is most important to her above all else.

Photo Image of Jessica French

Jessica French '19, October 24th | 2023

Product Manager, Google

Product Manager at Google (and CBS ’19), with expertise building developer tools at Google and Amazon Web Services. Prior to entering product management, she worked in consulting and with non-profits. Jessica is passionate about supporting women and underrepresented groups in STEM.

For this event, Jessica led an open discussion on transitioning into tech. She explored the importance about finding your place at Big Tech, balancing technical and non-technical skills in different roles, and influencing without authority.

Photo Image of Jon Alferness

Jon Alferness, October 3rd | 2023

Chief Product Officer, Walmart

On an event held on October 3rd, Jon Alferness, Chief Product Officer of Walmart U.S., spoke at Columbia Business School to future product managers with his team from Walmart. He shared his experiences and insights on prioritization. 

In this fast-paced world of technology, deciding what to build and when is one of the most crucial decisions for product managers.

Watch Jon's Talk

2022 - 2023 Speakers

Catherine Vollgraff Heidweiller, Quantum AI Product Manager, Google

Catherine Vollgraff Heidweiller, April 25th | 2023

Quantum AI Product Manager, Google

What is quantum computing and why does it matter? Catherine explored certain kinds of problems traditional supercomputers can't manage, why Google is investing in quantum and how to manage a product and build the ecosystem at the same time.

Alex Hardiman, Chief Product Officer, New York Times

Alex Hardiman CC '04, April 18th | 2023

Chief Product Officer, New York Times

Alex Hardiman is the Chief Product Officer at The New York Times where she oversees the company’s News, Cooking, Games and Audio products that power The Times’s subscription and digital advertising businesses. She has dedicated her career to amplifying high quality, independent journalism through technology. Alex previously spent a decade at The Times in a number of senior product roles before leaving for Facebook in 2016 where she served as Head of News Products, overseeing news experiences for Facebook’s two billion monthly users. Alex also spent a year at The Atlantic as their Chief Business and Product Officer where she relaunched the company's subscription business.

Tiffany Dockery, Director of Product Management, Etsy

Tiffany Dockery, April 17th | 2023

Director of Product Management, Etsy

Tiffany Dockery is a Director of Product at Etsy. She leads a team of product managers building out new visual discovery experiences to bring Etsy's mission of Keeping Commerce Human to life. Previously, she worked at Instagram leading personalization for the Explore tab, one of the world's largest unconnected discovery surfaces, and helped launch new content formats, Guides and Reels. Prior to Instagram, she worked at Spotify where she launched a first-of-its-kind ranking model to personalize Spotify's Home screen.

Paankhuri Gupta, Principal Product Manager, Amazon

Paankhuri Gupta '19, April 4th | 2023

Principal Product Manager, Amazon

Paankhuri Gupta (CBS '19) is a Principal Technical Product Manager at Amazon where she defines the strategy and leads a team of 30+ scientists and engineers to build 0 to 1 Advertising products. With no technical background, she started an ambitious journey at CBS to land a technical product role.

After her personal hustle to land a technical product role, she not only understands what it takes to get the role, but also the skillset needed to become a top performer at a leading technology company to be entrusted to lead the vision and execution of a multi-million dollar business. One of the most common questions an aspiring product manager asks is "how technical does a PM need to be?" In this talk, Paankuri demystified the different types of product managers and how the best often draw on a diverse set of skills.

Owen Davis, General Partner, Contour Venture Partners

Owen Davis, February 28th | 2023

General Partner, Contour Venture Partners

Owen Davis is currently a General Partner at Contour Venture Partners, a early-stage, technology focused venture capital fund based in New York City. He is the past Managing Director of NYC Seed, a seed stage venture capital fund in New York City. He also founded the NYC Seedstart accelerator and Overlap, an artificial intelligence software company for scheduling.

Are you interested in launching or joining a tech start-up? Or working for a VC that invests in tech companies? Owen led a discussion on what VCs look for when investing in technology related companies? What matters more, the product or the team? Or something else?

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