The Ultimate List of Product Leaders You Must Follow (UPDATED)

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Product Coalition
Published in
12 min readFeb 5, 2019

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Who are the best product managers? Check out the ultimate list of famous product managers you must follow to get the latest product news and inspiration.

Everyone who ever wanted to leave a mark on the world had figures to look up to. The world of tech, which moves so quickly, can make idols out of normal people in a very short period of time. In fact, sometimes it seems that the latest, most popular solution; suddenly grows old. Which is why you need to be up-to-date 24/7.

In a world with such flows, you need some reliable figures to guide you: you need the best product managers. If you want to stay on top of all things tech and product, follow these famous product managers across networks. Remember that developing a public profile can be an asset for aspiring Product Managers: perhaps these profiles will inspire you to take a more active role. For sure, joining a group of product professionals in your town can help you start building your community.

Hey, maybe you even made it on the list! Can you find your name?

29 Product Leaders You Must Follow

Julie Zhuo is Product Design VP at Facebook. She studied Computer Science at Stanford and joined the company in its early stages, way back in 2006. Starting as a Product Designer, she then became Manager, Director and finally VP. Therefore, she provides a great example of a stable product management career path: staying within the company, and evolving both vertically and horizontally. She has recently written a book on her journey, “The Making of a Manager”. Check out her Medium profile!

Josh Fetcher is an author and business consultant. He is very involved in content marketing discussions on his blog. In particular, he is interested in successful launch strategies and growth hacking visibility across the key marketing platforms. He has also co-founded and is CEO of Squibler, an app which helps authors correct their grammar and finish their writing in a shorter span of time. He is also very interested in the future of automation for marketers and overall product practitioners.

April Underwood is Chief Product Officer at Slack. But, in her road to this position, she has actually spent substantial time in some of the top tech companies: beginning as an MBA Intern at Apple, she became Senior Partner Technology Manager at Google and Director of Product at Twitter. Before becoming CPO, she was Vice President of Product for almost four years. You can check out her investor page and her Twitter profile to learn from an experienced voice in the product community.

Alex Davis is Staff Product Manager & Growth at Mozilla. He is an interesting example of a product transition: he began as Growth Hacker across several companies, to join Firefox as Growth Engineer. After a year, he made the jump to Staff Product Manager for Firefox Accounts & Sync; and then moved horizontally to Application Services in the same role. He has talked about the advantages Growth Hackers have when switching to Product; check out his website, Medium and Twitterprofiles.

Gibson Biddle is a former Netflix/Chegg Vp/CPO. He is a fantastic source of knowledge to understand the transition to the contemporary tech economy. Already in the 90s, he was SVP and VP of Product Development and Management for Mattel and Sega. Then, he became a consultant and was recruited by Netflix as VP Product Management (during the period it grew from 2 million to 13 million members). After his role in Chegg, he has become Executive-in-Residence and mentor for various start-ups. Check out his website and Twitter!

Kimberly Berls is Senior Product Manager at Helix. Before, she spent a couple of years at Oracle as Senior and Principal Product Manager for their Social Cloud within the Oracle Marketing Cloud. She is currently running the “Product Popcorn” podcast and blog where she seeks to, in her words, “document [her] rants and share them with you”. Well, besides that, the podcast is the perfect place to hear the latest on product management theories and techniques.

Eugene Wei smoothed his Product Management skills when he became Amazon.com’s Group Product Manager in 1997. Two decades later, he has had executive product positions in Hulu, Erly, Flipboard and, currently, Oculus VR. On his “Remains of the Day” blog, he undertakes very insightful (and extensive!) business analyses drawn from his extensive experiences. You can also take a look at his Eugene’s Twitter profile if you want a shorter, up-to-date window into his vision of the current product scene.

Ryan Hoover is the Founder of Product Hunt, where tech creators share their newest proposals with the community. Then, they are upvoted and commented on; this helps everyone find out about features or products they would not have heard abut otherwise. It is very useful for conducting product launches, or simply testing an idea with the wider community. As an investor, Ryan also shares his insights on Twitter on the newest additions and proposal in the product sphere.

You might know Jackie Bavaro if you are an aspiring PM: she co-wrote “Cracking the PM Interview” with Gayle McDowell. She is very active on both Twitter and Medium, but we forget the most important thing: she is also Head of Product Management at Asana. No wonder she knows so much about getting into product! She has worked as Product Manager for Google and Consultant and Program Manager for Microsoft, so she also knows what it takes to work at a top tech company.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, a software solution meant to organize teams around tasks in a smooth and centralized way. He has a substantial Twitter and Medium following, where he discusses all things entrepreneurship; he also writes a column on Inc. Magazine. He has published books with other authors, where his main emphasis is on making work simpler, better organized and “less crazy”.

Josh Elman began as a Product Manager Intern about two decades ago. Since then, he has worked across companies like LinkedIn, Facebookand Twitter in Senior Product Management positions. Now, he is VP of Product at Robinhood, a fintech app, and is on the board of various other companies. He is very interested in investment and innovations in the product sphere, writing on Medium and Twitter about these and other tech transformations.

Andrew Chen is currently a consumer startup investor, but in his long career he has been Director of Product Marketing, Co-Founder of a startup and then Growth leader at Uber. Currently, he is Board Member at Atrium and Envoy and General Partner at Andreesen Horowitz, the venture capital firm. On his personal website he has shared some of his most influential essays, where he has specialized on discussing consumer products, marketplaces and SaaS. For more, see his Twitter profile.

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He founded two tech companies since 2003 and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Stanford. Nir is also an advisor to several Bay area start-ups, venture capitalists, and incubators. He also enjoys blogging at NirandFar.com. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience.

Mariya Yao is the Chief Technology & Product Officer at Metamaven. She actually started as a Founder for Xanadu Creative, and after half a decade she was a published author at Forbes and Editor-In-Chief for TOPBOTS, an AI business publication. She wrote a book on Applied Artificial Intelligence, and tweets on all things connected to the sector. Follow her activities via her website and Twitter profile.

Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant, focusing on enterprise transformations — helping execs realize value from their agile transformations. He worked with companies like Hewlett Packard, Orange, Dell or IBM subsidiary Initiate, focusing on investment decision-making. He is also product management lecturer in both the Dublin Institute of Technology and Lviv Business School advanced degree-programs in product management and technology management. Follow him on Twitter.

Ken Norton is a partner at Google Ventures where he provides product and engineering support to more than 300 portfolio companies including Uber, Nest, Slack, Foundation Medicine, and Flatiron Health. Prior to joining GV, Ken was a group product manager at Google. In his years as a PM at Google, Ken led product initiatives for Docs, Calendar, and Google Mobile Maps. Ken has written extensively about the craft of product management. Follow him on Twitter and his personal website.

Don Richard is a New York-based Product Manager at Verizon. Don began his career as Legal Writer and Attorney for different companies. He then successfully transition to Business Development Executive for LiveNinja, moving up to Partnerships Lead. After that, he became Founder and Principal Consultant for Coin Labs, a payments and digital commerce consultancy. Thus, you can see that he managed a pretty successful transition. Follow him on Twitter and Medium to learn more about this product professional.

Roman Pichler is a product management expert specialized in digital products. He has more than 15 years experience in teaching product managers and product owners, and in helping companies build a successful product management organisation. Roman is the author of three books, including Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age and Agile Product Management with Scrum, and he writes a popular blog for product professionals. Check out his Twitter too!

Lewis C. Lin is an entrepreneur, tech executive, and public speaker. He’s the CEO of two companies, PeopleMaven and Impact Interview. Before Impact Interview, Lewis was Microsoft’s Director of Product Management. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at Google, leading new AdWords product launches. Lewis holds a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Follow him on Twitter for awesome advice on all things tech, or visit his website.

Merci Victoria Grace was Head of Growth at Slack, where she helped grow the product from 500,000 Daily Active Users to over 5 Million in just two years, earning her a spot on Fast Company’s MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE IN BUSINESS list. Prior to Slack, Merci focused on engagement and paid conversion at Couchsurfing and Gigwalk. She is now a Partner at Lighstpeed Venture Partners. You can follow her latest takes on tech on her Twitter and website.

Itamar Gilad is a veteran product manager, speaker and author with over 20 years’ experience at Google, Microsoft and other companies. At Google Itamar worked on Gmail and YouTube. Among other things he launched Gmail’s Tabbed Inbox and lead Gmail’s growth team resulting in 1Bn monthly active users. Itamar writes a popular product managements blog and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including GIST planning and the Confidence Tool. Follow him here and on Twitter!

Matt Lemay has developed and led global data strategy and digital training workshops for companies like GE, American Express and Pfizer, including the foundational materials for McCann Worldgroup’s award-winning pxl program. Previously, he worked as Senior Product Manager at New York-based music startup Songza (acquired by Google), and Head of Consumer Product and Platform Manager at Bitly. Read him here, on Twitter and Medium.

John Cutler is keenly focused on user experience and evidence-driven product development. He mixes and matches various methodologies — jobs-to-be-done, Lean UX, Lean Startup, customer development, and design thinking — to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. He is currently Senior Product Manager for Search and Relevance at Zendesk. He is a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach. Follow his Twitter and Medium profiles.

Ha Nguyen is a founding Partner of Spero Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that supports founders building a future that belongs to everyone. Ha invests in early stage, purpose-driven startups that have the potential to reach venture scale. She also advises portfolio CEOs and product leaders on design-thinking, org design, product strategy and also helps with product recruiting. Ha leads the firm’s marketing, branding & network building efforts. Follow her on Twtiter.

Sebastien Phlix is currently in charge of the respondent experience at Typeform. He is into well-designed, simple products that improve people’s lives. He thinks that if we focus on the customer, all the rest will follow. More than 1k people follow his Medium to read his posts about product management. He has also been featured on sites like Hackernoon and top product newsletters like Product Manager HQ. Check out his Twitter too!

Wyatt Jenkins is a product and business leader with a passion for building things that customers love. After working in product for Shutterstock, Optimizely and Hired, inc.; he is currently VP of Product at Patreon. He has a strong interest in metrics driven product strategy and execution. Management duties in the technology & media space include leading design, development, research, sales and customer service teams. Follow his Twitter and Medium profiles.

Deborah Liu is a Silicon Valley Product Manager with specialization in cutting edge consumer technology products. She has 15 years of experience leading teams of product managers and engineers delivering high quality and innovative features for consumers at successful companies such as Facebook, PayPal and eBay. Proven leadership in understanding markets and customer needs and delivering features to profitably meet those needs. Follow what she’s up to via her LinkedIn profile.

Dan Olsen is an entrepreneur, consultant, and Lean product expert. At Olsen Solutions, he works with companies to build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product. His clients include Facebook, Box, Microsoft, Medallia, and One Medical Group. Before consulting, Dan worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team. Dan wrote the bestseller The Lean Product Playbook, published by Wiley. Follow him on Twitter and on his website.

Brienne Kimmel writes about the future of work including workplace productivity, distributed teams and new classes of work including creators, influencers and streamers. Brianne previously worked on the go-to-market team at Zendesk focused on self-serve revenue growth, technology integrations and built a program for startups. Prior to Zendesk, Brianne worked on growth teams at Expedia including building and launching a new product in China. Follow her on Twitter and her personal website.

Do you think you have what it takes to make it on this list of famous product managers? Let us know! Who are the best product managers out there?

I’m Carlos González, CEO at Product School, and I enjoy sharing weekly tips for Product leaders!

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This article was also published on The Product Management Blog.

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