Innovation and the Digital Enterprise

Imagine you are a founder developing a physical product with incredible potential, but the space and resources to advance your product are out of reach and cost-prohibitive. Haven Allen witnessed this hurdle to introducing life-changing HardTech into the world and co-founded a solution: mHUB, a hyper-resourced innovation center in Chicago.

With a growing family, Tony Newcome took a major risk in returning to his software engineering roots after years in leadership—pay cut and all. Ultimately, the risk was rewarded. During his two decades of experience in the industry, Tony has held significant roles during critical growth moments at ExactTarget and Salesforce, and he currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer at ActiveCampaign, where he specializes in product development and software engineering. 

Not many people are willing to call up their competitors and dive into discussions on improving the industry. Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at G2, talks about viewing competitors as partners and building trust internally by being transparent. With these strategies in mind, leaders can better collaborate with customers and vendors to help industries evolve.

In this episode, Sara talks about how she approaches product management at G2. She mentions the use of artificial intelligence to personalize data, moderate, and validate reviews to meet customer needs. She discusses her leadership style of providing frequent, direct, and actionable feedback and the importance of supplying context. Sara illuminates the key to her success in product management and how companies can remain competitive by staying curious.

Rand McNally’s Chief Technology Officer, Steve Caudill, joins Patrick and Shelli this week to talk about building and maintaining the culture of a startup inside a well-established brand with a 165-year history. They cover a range of topics including recruiting talent in a highly competitive market, creating tight feedback loops between customers and engineers, and structuring product development for the shortest path to revenue.

Product managers are visionaries. They are uniquely able to marry engineering knowledge with customer useability in mind. Dustin Kirkland, Chief Product Officer at Apex Clearing, has been in the product space for more than 20 years. During that time, he has developed a deep knowledge of technical processes paired with a desire to help customers achieve the outcome they want.

Dustin joined Patrick and Shelli to discuss what it takes to develop a product manager mindset, why he wishes he would have stuck with controversial ideas early in his career, and the current landscape of product design in IT. Tune in for his story and wisdom.

Arrive Logistics is one of the fastest-growing freight brokerages. Logistics, perhaps more so than many other industries, is seeing a big shift toward technology beyond traditional IT. Michael Senftleber, CTO at Arrive Logistics, is one of the people leading this charge.