🎨 📺 Sharon Roth is a Product & Design leader who’s built her career in the lab, across different modalities, to bring more creative product experiences to life 📺 🎨
It's W3 / Q3 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Sharon who serves as the Senior Director of Product Management at Quantified.ai, the AI-driven flight simulator for sellers. The app feels as real as your next video call, scales across teams, programs, and companies, and ramps reps 42% faster.
Sharon is leading Quantified AI’s Product & Design team after previous roles in Product leadership at Tamr & Honor Education. She’s excited to be back working in an Enterprise focused company, leading Design alongside Product, focused on strategic & execution based discipline.
❓Questions Are Your Roadmap ❓
It’s popular to encourage new hires to ask a lot of questions. But it’s always a good time to ask questions!
When a member of your team comes to you and says “we really need to build X feature”, they’re coming to you for good reason. Dig into the why to understand how often the issue comes up, when it happens in a customer conversation, and why they’re asking for it in the first place. Is there an even better way to build a solution?
Also, people are always excited about getting to a solution. By delaying the solution discussion to first get everyone to agree on the problem, you can coordinate a better response. Sharon has been in rooms where stakeholders can’t agree on the problem they’re trying to solve, which can sometimes be even more painful!
By asking better questions and articulating the underlying issues thoroughly, they can work together as an organization to chart a better path forward.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
🙋♀️ Seek New Challenges - “Trying new things is how you learn and grow. At a startup, there are so many opportunities to try new things. As startups evolve, you need to embrace all that’s going to happen and make it a positive thing. Otherwise don’t go to a startup!”
🤝 Act with Integrity - “Do your best, show your work. But also treat others with respect and kindness while doing it. How you treat people and how you show up every day will impact your work environment. You’re responsible for the energy you bring to the room, so be authentic and try to inject some positivity. It will help you build the type of network you want to have too”
🗣 Invest in Communication Skills - “It helps you ask questions well, advocate for yourself, have your ideas be heard. It also helps others understand your impact. It takes continuous practice to do well.”
If you’d like to learn more about Sharon’s career, the full post is linked in the comments.
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