Michael Linares

Another successful Product Leader Breakfast NYC is in the books ☕️   Yesterday, Prerna Singh and I were so lucky to partner with JJ Rorie host Product Leaders at the Chief Clubhouse to chat more about hiring and managing junior product talent. We covered… ✅ Whether the product manager role should be considered an entry-level role coming straight out of school… ✅ The old school mentality of "paying your dues" in product adjacent roles vs. getting hired with a growth mindset when hiring junior PMs ✅ Hiring from internal customer success, sales or research teams vs. hiring from coveted APM programs ✅ Empowering junior talent with business tools strategies, like pushing them to 1) develop business cases 2) review financial models and 3) foster interactions with customer success, sales, and finance teams  ✅ The importance of contextual sharing as a Product Leader who gets key insights from executive meetings that shape business / product goals Thanks to Omar Elorabi, Insia Fatima, Nita Sitaram, Cassidy Fein and Adam Thomas for bringing your perspectives and energy to the Clubhouse this month! Interested in joining or sponsoring a future breakfast? Sign up here to join us on June 10th. ➡️ https://lnkd.in/gPGYQDmQ Know someone great? Tag a product leader that you think should attend our next breakfast in the comments below! #productmanagement #productbreakfastnyc

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Short guide on how to turn every job into a #ClimateJob through employee advocacy using #Microsoft as an example from Drew Wilkinson #climateAction #climateAdvocacy

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I wrote Hiring Product Managers to show that hiring can be an agent of change. We need to stop thinking of hiring as simply 'ticking a box' - approaching hiring in a meaningful way can have a great impact on our personal growth, team dynamics & the shaping of our organisational culture. Get your copy!

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John Cutler - Thank you for taking about empowerment. As I see it, European individualism is dramatically different from American version of that. In product management, I see a lot of American influence that is a poor fit for the inherent social solidarity principles here, especially in Germany. While collective consciousness and narrative building remain relevant in both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the collective power dynamics are fundamentally different - A reason why some of the advice from Silicon Valley product gurus has to be interpreted with nuance here in Europe. USA , at least in the workplace, is more of a mono-culture. Europe is more heterogenous and the workplace tends to have more space for varied voices. This means balancing space for individual decision making and collective active does require more interpersonal investment. The 'mini-ceo' archetype is even less likely to be successful on a sustained basis in Europe. Europe is better at generating ideas and possibilities but it's diversity handicaps scaling; USA, on the other hand, is better at picking, adapting and scaling someone else's ideas. Tells us something about how empowerment works in varied ways within both societies championing the individual.

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I’m honored to introduce my passion project, now realized as my latest company that was announced on VentureBeat today: Empower Change. It's a nonprofit that navigates families through grief so they can start living a more fulfilling life. Acting as a guide, we inspire change and personal growth while cultivating essential life skills. Furthermore, we foster connections between those we assist and supportive communities who share similar experiences. Leveraging my 30 year career growing early stage companies and working at large companies, we’ll operate Empower Change with the disciplines and best practices of technology startups coupled with the passions found with causes. While our vision is to broadly address grief and trauma, our launch focus is on grief and bereaved caregivers (usually the surviving parent) whom we consider our go-to-market "customers." Our mission is to enable these caregivers to move their family’s life forward by constructively living with their grief.  To be clear, children are a major priority–they are beneficiaries from Empower Change; but, the most effective way to reach them is through the caregiver. Since we are operating the nonprofit like a startup, finding product market fit is a focus and metrics quantify our success. We are not about having a few “feel good” stories. Instead, our goal is to have wins at scale. Our primary KPIs are customer acquisition and retention: we’re focused on maximizing the number of caregivers and children we positively impact and we want to keep them engaged over the long term since the healing process usually takes years. Finally, we believe we can build and partner with programs, other nonprofits, services and brands that can aid us in generating revenue to scale Empower Change. At the end of the day, our vision is to become a self-sustaining nonprofit that broadly addresses grief and trauma. If you are interested in donating, we'd appreciate it. If you have ideas on how we might collaborate with your company as a way to mutually grow both of our businesses, I’d be thrilled to speak with you. This passion project—now my life’s work—is my tribute to mom and dad: they sacrificed and sent my four older brothers and me to private schools then college so we could have a better life; regrettably, they passed away before they could witness the full realization of their efforts. I want to thank my family—especially my wife Carin Bradley Alemania—for supporting and allowing me to take an extended break last year to explore my passions while recharging my batteries. I'd also like to thank (in no particular order) Jeff Kimball, Jennifer C., Mannie Rabara, Kathryn Shirley, Carter Lipscomb, Ann Marie Giusto, Shlomi Ronen, Mark Jung, Jennifer McLean, Hilary Wolfe and Karl Wagner for helping us get to this day. I’m excited to Empower Change and hope you will join us on this journey. #grief #empowerchange #nonprofit #startup

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If you are a LGBTQIA, BIPOC, or women-led bootstrapped pre-funding tech startup who could use free product and growth strategy consulting, read on! I’m a growth and product management leader that has worked with Medium, New York Times, GrubHub, and smaller startups. My expertise in growth includes: pricing + monetization as well as full funnel (acquisition, activation, engagement, retention) with a specialization in subscription businesses and marketplaces or platforms. I’m excited to offer pro-bono consulting to support ventures at the intersection of mission-driven work and technology, for a limited time. If you are interested in receiving help in any of these areas, please DM me! - Holistic growth strategy and long term vision planning: Evaluating business models, market size and total opportunity, product-market fit - Growth flywheel / funnel analysis: Finding areas of opportunity, modeling potential outcomes, and make recommendations for a tactical roadmap - PLG strategy: identify and implement product led growth tactics to support healthy unit economics - Product-market fit research and report - Voice of the customer: user research, persona development, UX research - Product management: understanding the problem space and customer, PRDs or briefings, opportunity analysis - Monetization and pricing strategic advisory - Product positioning, messaging, merchandising - Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Landing page or checkout optimization and experimentation: game plan and/or implementation - Organic growth or lifecycle: CRM, email, push, SMS, app downloads, other organic channels. Uncover and implement ways to move the needle with zero paid media spend - MarTech: Evaluate stack to fit your objectives and/or conduct RFP to bring in new tooling - Interim people leadership: process, structure, mentorship, feedback for your team - PRO-BONO (free): Up to 5 hours a week for up to 4 weeks To qualify for pro-bono services, the criteria is that you must be a BIPOC, LGBTQIA, or women-led bootstrapped tech startup or entrepreneur that has not yet received funding for your mission-driven tech venture. As a queer woman, I’m looking forward to meeting more folks from diverse backgrounds and building community in this space. #growth #product #PM #productmanagement #voiceofthecustomer #CRO #MarTech #CRM #productmarketing #lifecycle #consulting #fractional #probono #missiondriven

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If you have a YC interview coming up - reach out and our team of YC Alumni can help set up some mock interviews

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While moderating the incredible #INMA2024 last week a number of people told me how terrifying they thought it was to be on stage moderating interviews and panels. I used to feel like that too. But now I love it. Reflecting on more than a decade of conference moderation, here are my top tips if you are asked to moderate. Please share yours too. https://lnkd.in/gs4g5cnD

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Did you know that we spend one-third of our lives working? That’s 90,000 hours! Given that we spend so much of our precious time working, doesn’t it make sense that we'd want that time to be spent doing something that we think is worthwhile, fulfilling, and aligned with our values? Why wouldn’t we want to ensure that the time we spend at work is just as meaningful as the time we spend outside of work? Taking the time to understand your career motivations will help you to work in a way that resonates with you and is aligned with what feels right internally, which in turn, means that you’ll feel good while at work. And when you feel good at work and you’re happy, you perform better, you make better decisions, and you have a positive impact on those around you, all of which support your leadership journey. If you’re feeling like your current career trajectory isn’t aligning with your values or feeling right internally, take some time this week to reflect on a vision of your life that would be better aligned. What does it look like? What kinds of things would you do? Where would you be? How would it be different from what you’re doing today? Sometimes these answers aren’t obvious, but just starting to ask the questions will help you to understand whether you are living in a way that will ultimately help you to feel like those 90,000 hours you spent working were a good use of your time. Let me know how it goes! #limitingbeliefs #careerdevelopment #motivation #inspiration #womenempowerment #personaldevelopment

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This post is dedicated to my fellow recruiting community who are #OpenToWork in the Talent Acquisition function across Americas. Please share this with anyone who might benefit from it... 🤗 Inspired by the insightful posts of Steve Levy and Aaron Lintz, I wanted to provide a helpful resource for those in our community. You can check out their original posts here: Steve Levy's Post https://lnkd.in/eUhPZkCa Aaron Lintz's Post https://lnkd.in/e-kB5A5w I encourage you to duplicate the Notion page linked below and make a copy for yourself. If you haven't signed up for Notion yet, it's quick and easy to do so. The page includes job tracking templates to help you manage all your job applications in one dashboard, which is especially useful if you are a data-driven person. For those looking to automate their job search process, I can assist with tools like Zapier or Make while these tools have free versions, they do come with some limitations compared to the premium templates. Here’s your Notion jobs feed page: ATS Boolean Search Strings https://lnkd.in/ejP_k_g8 *Note - some search results returned ads and misrepresenting URL's, so be mindful with irrelevant results. I've tried to clean up as much as possible.

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> you always have a strategy, even if it is implicit and not written down. Writing helps you sharpen it, have a shared understanding. > one of the simplest yet most powerful things you can do, is to write your strategy down.

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I talk to so many people weekly who are feeling stuck in their roles, careers or lives. Whether you... 👉 quit your job or been laid off, 👉 want to change jobs/careers,   👉 need product or business related advice 👉 help resetting your goals  👉 level up in product management I am opening up my calendar to those who need a little boost, or even a transformation in the way they do things today. 💡 I’ve been lifted by incredible opportunities and mentors, and I want to pay it forward. ⭐ So if I can help you at all → send me a DM 🙏 #probono #coaching

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We need to look closely at the number of pregnant tech workers being laid off right now Chelsey Louise Glasson UX Collective Chelsey Louise Glasson · Following Published in UX Collective · 4 min read · Feb 18, 2024 230 1 A picture of a pregnant woman’s stomach, with the woman’s hands resting on her belly. Photo by Heather Mount on Unsplash After spending nearly three long years entrenched in a legal battle with Google, fighting pregnancy discrimination I both witnessed and experienced, I never thought I’d be sitting where I am today with the perspective that I’m one of the lucky ones. But, as my LinkedIn feed is again saturated with heartbreaking stories of expecting and new moms losing their tech jobs in yet another wave of layoffs, that’s where I find myself today. According to 2022 research conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, 20% of working moms in the U.S. report having experienced pregnancy discrimination, which, based on multiple federal laws, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines as, “treating women differently, or less favorably, because of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” The tech industry was still thriving when I was pushed out of Google during maternity leave, pre-pandemic, and I easily landed another job at Facebook. Although the arduous path of suing Google came with many challenges, I prevailed and received a settlement that allowed me to go back to school and pursue an entirely new career as an employment attorney. That’s not a typical happy ending for the steadily increasing number of moms who have shared their stories of being laid off… https://lnkd.in/djcS9emc

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“It’s impossible to get better at anything without failure.” - Martina Lauchengco There’s often a lot of shame around failure, especially for women. But as Martina points out in her episode of Women in Product Marketing this week, she wishes she got the memo earlier- It’s not only ok to fail- it’s important to! So- what have you failed at lately? Link to the pod in comments. #freetofail #productmarketing #womensupportingwomen

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#womenwednesday The “She’s not Strategic Syndrome” Early in my career, I used to interview a lot of product marketing candidates and I’d always get the operational interview role. My male counterpart would get analysis. Women are shouldering too much at work and often overlooked for their strategic abilities and contributions. I see over and over again examples where a male leader got to do the “strategic” work while a very hard working female report is shouldering all the work preventing her from having the space to be in the clouds. What can we do about it? 💡Uplevel presentations and executive meetings 📈 Make your contributions know 🦹‍♀️Don’t let it define you, calling someone not strategic is a throw away statement. You know who you are and you’re capable of being strategic. 💭Thoughts on SNS syndrome? #womeninleadership #womeninbusiness Thoughts are my own 😊

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Take it from me, there’s no better way to learn excellent and practical ways to overhaul your experimentation efficacy! Erin makes critical thinking fun and highly accessible in this workshop, June 11:

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Re-sharing this - because I've made some tweaks, but mainly because I genuinely feel that the context I've included here and the style of communication really gives a peek at who I am and what I offer. And while there's certainly more context that lies between these sections and the bullet points they share, I believe that they are a small introduction and I'm hoping enough to make you want to learn more. Take a look, share, reach out, let me know what you think! https://lnkd.in/ezDQzx74

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Consider that Starbucks is a market leader in consumer technology and loyalty and is armed with data and insights to make strategic decisions that can mitigate the macro-economic impacts driving customer frequency down and they still can't hold the line. Restaurants that don't have those resources are absolutely suffering far worse, unable to understand why, and making guesses about what they can do to turn it around. Restaurant loyalty and top-notch apps in 2024 are a must-have to navigate such treacherous waters.

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You'd think that kids are growing up telling their parents: "Mom, I really want to be a Product Manager some day!" CMU, Boston University and Northwestern, to name a few, offer Masters programs in Product Management. Many others simply morph their business courses into Product Management. There are a raft of frameworks and tools for feature management, backlog management, UI design, and design thinking. There are about as many 2x2 charts as there are leadership and strategy courses. Throw in some accounting basics for good measure and wrap it all up with a capstone project that involves AI. But does it have to be this complicated? #productmanagement

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