ThriveDX empowers individuals, both B2C students and B2B employees, to thrive in the next age of digital careers through market-driven curriculumn and expert instructors. ThriveDX strategically partners with universities and busiensses across the globe to provide a next-level learning experience.
As a high-growth startup, it's easy to fall into Melissa Perri's concept of The Build Trap. At ThriveDX, we worked to constantly escape the trap of building for the stake of building. This meant being data-driven by identifying each topology's KPIs, measuring iteratively, and only building products that we are confident will push our outcome's needle forward. Additionally, I served as a key storyteller on our team, helping to share the outcomes we produced and prove that the product team is one of the most important and productive in the business.
As the product manager of instruction, I was responsible for the product experience of not only our instructors, but also for the instructor operations teams and for our students' experiences while receiving curriculumn. I used user experience research techniques and fail-fast methodology to validate hypothesis early and often, helping to preserve our engineering time and escape the build trap.
Our product team followed the beliefs of Marty Cagan and strove to build a product trio, including a product manager, one or more designers, and one or more engineers. When I first joined ThriveDX, I was a part of a shared engineering team and split resources with 2-3 other product managers across separate customer topologies. This meant constantly stack-ranking my priorities against those of others, communicating cross-functionally, and in parallel, working with leadership to build out instruction's first dedicated product team.