My Career as a Product Journey: From Advocate to Platform Leader

I hadn’t thought about the story I tell myself about my career in a while, and there’s nothing like a layoff to make you think. What I found though, was I got caught up in what I’d said over and over again, not the full story. That changed when I went through the audit described in How I Used AI to Audit My Job Search. I came out of it with a fresh angle and a narrative that needed development. This post is my first attempt at putting that entire story together in one place.

The TL;DR for you – I’m sharing publicly for two reasons:

1. We all have a bigger story to tell – I hope reflecting on mine can help you reflect on your own
2. I’m still deciding on my next chapter – As of the time I’m writing this, I’m honing in on where my story heads from here. If you think it’d be best working with you, reach out!

My Story: The Short Version

My career has been a 15+ year journey driven by a single throughline: making complex technology accessible and more useful for the people who depend on it.

It’s a path that has taken me from support to engineering, from sales to marketing, from enterprise to startup and back again. Titles shift, my tactics don’t: I have a genuine fascination with infrastructure technology, developer workflows, and the operating models that get teams aligned.

This document is a reflection on the parts of my journey, tracing the evolution of my work through three distinct “acts” and examining the thread of product thinking that has run through it since day one.

Act I: Understanding Enterprise Users (And Finding Product Work Everywhere)

From enterprise to startup

The Focus: My early career was defined by finding and creating “product-shaped” work regardless of my title. It came naturally to me after I got hooked by my first gnarly question: why do people buy expensive and broken infrastructure?

I fell into a niche of storage technology where I had the time and curiosity to focus on the user’s journey and champion a better experience by obsessively seeking out their pain points and taking the initiative to solve them. But underneath it all, I was doing something more fundamental: I was mapping the shape of a business by palpating around my product. At EMC, I’d built a comprehensive mental model of how the entire organization functioned—not from an org chart, but by tracing how decisions flowed from engineering through field teams to sales to customers and back again. When I joined my first startup, it wasn’t just about the technology or the role. It was about testing whether that map held true in a completely different organism, seeing how a lean company moved from customer signal to product delivery without the protective layers that enterprise scale provides.

I had key moments in every role that made me who I am today:

• Designing for Empathy (Associate TSE): My very first program was designing an engineer swapping initiative between field and phone support. The goal was purely to build empathy and share context, which I now see was a simple form of user research.
• Obsessing over the User Experience (Solution Engineer): Mentoring under a PM for a new-to-market storage array, I volunteered to run end-to-end “out-of-the-box” experience testing. For months, I unboxed and configured the 3U array in a data center, over and over, documenting each way it failed unexpectedly. I was supposed to just report problems, but I couldn’t: I built a series of scripts for troubleshooting to help users succeed, wrote documentation to improve it, and started to use social media to learn more about the market. This was my first taste of usability testing, problem discovery, and solutioning.
• Owning Products without the Title (Sr. Social Engagement): I got in early on the Gamification trend. I led a deep integration of an early platform, Badgeville, into our JIVE-based community forum, designing the entire gamification system. It was really a dream come true: to think through every detail of a video game like experience. I effectively acted as the PM, managing the vendor’s beta APIs, running an early access group, and owning the feature roadmap, stakeholder management, and customer communication.
• Launching a Major Program: I later conceived of and launched the “EMC Elect” program, the company’s first international community recognition initiative, securing $10M in funding and making it central to product launches for 18 months. It was my first experience pitching an idea, then reframing it based on executive feedback, finding meaningful KPIs to warrant investment, and then leading with vision.
• Touching Every Edge of the User Experience (Startup): At Infinio, I owned demo environments from automation to customer trials, managing them through sensible infrastructure-as-code practices while prioritizing customer feedback to accelerate sales. This was my laboratory for understanding how companies work end to end. I could see the direct line from a customer’s trial experience to engineering priorities to revenue. No bureaucratic layers obscuring cause and effect. I was validating my hypothesis: the shape of a business reveals itself most clearly around its products, and the best way to understand that shape is to touch as many surfaces as possible.

This phase taught me that product management is more than a job title; it’s a mindset. I found clarity in my work by reading about and leveraging product practices that felt intuitive to me. The unrelenting focus on the user experience and taking ownership of problems, even when no one asks you to, is what I always do. I was building my product muscles in user research, usability, and even roadmap management long before it was my official role.

More importantly, I was developing a tactile understanding of how businesses create value. My approach wasn’t to read the strategy documents or study the org chart. It was to put my hands on the actual work—the demos, the customer conversations, the tooling gaps, the community dynamics—and feel how the organization responded. This taught me something crucial: the best product decisions come from understanding not just the user’s problem, but how that problem connects to every other part of the value chain. That systems thinking, born from literally touching every part of the business I could reach, would become the foundation for everything that followed.

Act II: The Product Owner (From Community to Code)

Maturing my startup and open source understanding: Basho, Intel, Sensu, Red Hat

The Focus: This act was about formalizing my product thinking. I transitioned from informally finding product work to explicitly owning products, roadmaps, and ecosystems, especially open source ones. I learned to treat everything as a product—a community, a set of plugins, a content platform—with its own strategy, features, and users. That includes:

• First Official PO Role (Intel): I was the Product Owner for the Snap telemetry framework. This is where I made my first major strategic product bet, advocating for a pivot from Mesos to Kubernetes because I saw it would be a better long-term experience for our users. I also designed the plugin ecosystem that grew to over 100 plugins and 50+ enterprise users.
• Community as a Product (Basho, Intel, Sensu): I treated each developer community as a product with its own strategic alignment, roadmap, and feature set. I also took technical ownership, using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and GitOps to manage 100+ community plugins each time, proving to myself I can be an effective community curator.
• Productizing the Value Stream (Red Hat): As I grew at Red Hat, I moved beyond just the content to productizing the value streams that created it. I led Digital Communities—Opensource.com, The Enterprisers Project, Enable Sysadmin, and Enable Architect—about 23 people reaching ~22.4M unique visitors, traffic on par with RedHat.com. These sites were judged on article output and page views, not growth. I applied principles from Team Topologies to a traditional marketing team to redesign four independent teams into one service-oriented org. I used SEO and persona analysis to rebalance content strategy toward high-intent topics that mapped to Red Hat’s offerings, rebuilt the contributor model (Correspondent program), and built a POC data pipeline connecting logged-in community behavior to Salesforce so Sales could see what prospects were reading.
• Stepping Up My Public Contribution (Kubernetes): I side hustled in the Kubernetes community, productizing marketing efforts in SIG Contributor Experience as a working group with its own frameworks and tools.

This is where I learned to scale my product thinking. It was no longer about a single feature or user problem, but about the entire system. My need to have all the answers shifted to asking the right questions. How do you design an ecosystem for plugins? How do you treat a community or a content pipeline as a product? This is where I connected the user empathy from Act I to the strategic and technical ownership required to build sustainable, scalable systems.

Act III: The System Builder (Platform Products & Product Operations Leadership)

Refining my story and scaling impact at Target

The Focus: My role at Target was the culmination of the previous acts. The challenge was no longer just a single product or ecosystem; it was the entire product development system for a major enterprise. My product became the machine that builds the products. The moments that stand out now:

• Leading a Platform Portfolio: As Director of Product, I owned a $200M portfolio spanning hybrid cloud infrastructure, core capabilities (CI/CD, observability, storage, streaming), and set the foundational developer experience for 5,000+ engineers.
• Driving Platform Adoption: I rewrote the product strategy that took our internal developer platform (TAP) from a pilot to 92% adoption. That began even before I led the team that delivered our IDP—the first time I was on the team was actually building a competitor. A different team had spent three years building a ServiceNow-centric “single pane of glass” to unify incidents. I ran a disciplined beta with Kano surveys and NPS analysis; the data contradicted the internal narrative that it was working. I used that evidence to force a VP/SVP decision to EOL the initiative—Target had no precedent for owning deprecations like this—and redirect 300+ engineers toward TAP.
• Aligning Value Metrics: Our culture was one of output over outcome, promising new versions or features but only showing aggregate value with output metrics (adoption and active users). I researched and pitched “developer capacity unlocked” as an aggregate value for anyone reducing friction for developers. I partnered with Finance and HR to define a shared productivity concept and associate it with time and cost, then workshopped this metric across VPs in four orgs. Saving 5 minutes for every user every day has incredible economies of scale—saving 1.25M minutes (over 20,000 hours) of toil a year. This framing later influenced how GenAI enablement value was calculated across Target.
• Building the Product Operating System (My Side Hustles): Recognizing that our biggest problems were systemic, I took on multiple side efforts to demonstrate that an intentional product operating model (POM) reduces friction in planning and delivery. The core development team for cloud platform became more effective as we adopted it. I also championed the effort to rewrite the PM skill matrix for all of Target’s 700+ product managers, drove the adoption of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and was a key leader in implementing POM practices across all of Target Tech.

The Product Learning: At enterprise scale, you cannot separate the product from the organizational systems. To succeed, you have to shape both. I thrive in the type of product leadership that acknowledges and influences the systems that define how empowered teams build great products.

Reflection: My Product Orientation

This journey provides a clarity I was seeking for myself: my career is a story of practicing product management, whether it was in my job title or not. I’ve been a product-leaning user advocate for 15+ years, but specifically by the numbers:

• Hands-on Product Management responsibilities for ~4 years (EMC to Intel)
  • 2 significant products, 5 vendors, 3 strategic partnerships
• Direct Product Marketing responsibilities ~10 years (Startups especially)
  • 3 product plugin ecosystems, 5 customer affinity programs
• Product Leader experience: 5 years (Red Hat, Target)
  • 2 product transformations, 1 operating model reinvention

With healthy overlap of those responsibilities across roles.

This exercise revealed that the threads of my career aren’t just an interest in technology; I’ve always been obsessed with making what I’m working on work better for people, and I have that bias toward action to take ownership of the problems that stand in the way of a better experience. That helps me see myself more clearly.

Future-Facing Questions for Reflection

The question is no longer “Am I product-oriented?” but “How do I best apply my product orientation next?”

• My product leadership has been proven with an internal enterprise customer. Do I know what changes or stays the same—navigating stakeholders, driving adoption, proving value—in an external B2B or even B2C customer context?
• I have a deep passion for the “meta-work”: improving the systems of product development. How do I ensure this passion is a strategic asset in my next role that stays in balance with direct product delivery of value?
• As a leader of large portfolios, I’ve moved further from the hands-on “gemba.” What specific, non-negotiable habits will I maintain to stay deeply connected to daily user problems and experiences?
• My career has a strong DevEx/platform bias. When I consider other domains, what are the first principles of my product thinking that I know will transfer, and what are the “unknown unknowns” I need to discover quickly?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I don’t have all the answers, but I have a better perspective on my work than ever.