product-development
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Michael Sharon Turned Coffee Into a Product You Can Text
The former Facebook mobile product leader brought software habits to the beverage aisle: ship early, listen closely, fix the strange taste, and put a phone number where the logo usually goes.
Paul Harmon Makes the Invisible Materials Economy Legible
From software support to the C-suite, Paul Harmon's career is a study in translating complexity - turning fibers, films, customer needs and sustainability targets into decisions people can act on.
Brett Allcorn Built a Business by Asking Better Questions
From a street-side rock stand to a New York speaker series, Brett Allcorn’s career is a study in turning curiosity, copy, and repeated experiments into a durable company.
Adam Smithline Built a Smart Door. The Hard Part Was Learning When to Listen.
A ski-trip complaint became a smart pet door, then a long lesson in hardware, humility, and the expensive distance between a clean idea and a dependable product.
Tim Willis Keeps Betting on the Space Between Blinks
He built TearScience from a treatment idea into a company acquired by Johnson & Johnson. Then the engineer returned to the same tiny surface with a new question: can an eye drop learn to stay put?
Hal Eason Spent a Career Starting Companies. Then He Waited 12 Years for a Bottle
The Harvard MBA and former Bain consultant built a career around acceleration. At Momtech, his useful trick has been knowing what not to rush.
Lenny Vainberg Builds the Beautiful Thing - Then Builds the System Behind It
From a patented garage wall to a Baja factory, a public-company deal and a detergent capsule, Lenny Vainberg keeps returning to the same hard problem: making physical products scale without sanding away their character.
Peter Arn Learned to Make Growth Wait
The ROMTech co-founder built his playbook around unglamorous things: listening closely, testing early, raising patiently and knowing when more revenue is the wrong answer.
Brad Kifferstein Bet on the Mug You Already Reach For
Before VitaPerk became a stickpack, Brad Kifferstein sold carpet to college students, syndicated real estate and learned product development at Crypton. His enduring idea is equally practical: the easiest routine to build may be the one that borrows a ritual people already keep.
Thomas Bishop Wants the Humble Battery to Earn Its Keep
After building snowboards, headphones and connected hardware, the Paleblue founder chose a product people tend to notice only when it fails - and made reuse the convenient option.
Sidney Quitorio Left Software to Make a Better Smoke - One Difficult Leaf at a Time
A $400 cannagar sent a software engineer to his workbench. The mold became Purple Rose Supply; a customer request for the missing wrap became Native Leaf Co - and a lesson in following the awkward problem next door.
Laurel Myers Built the Grown-Up Version of CBD - Then the Market Grew Up Too
She helped turn a chaotic ingredient boom into a lesson in trust, standards, and the stubbornly unglamorous work of building a consumer brand.
Janet Conning Makes the Business Case for Better Bread
At Bäckerhaus Veit, Janet Conning works where old-world baking meets the modern deli case. Her public comments reveal a marketer focused on the small product decisions - from slice size to half-loaf formats - that turn craft into a useful customer proposition.
Jiri Trecak Spent Seven Years Teaching Design and Code to Speak
The Supernova founder learned that generating code was the easy demo. The durable company would have to understand everything around it.
Alon Cohen Built Houzz by Treating Friction as a Blueprint
A frustrating ranch-house remodel gave the engineer a problem worth coding. Fifteen years later, he is leading Houzz into its software-and-AI chapter with the same operating idea: make the complicated feel simple.
Aparna Sarin Is Putting the Customer Inside the Revenue Equation
After building products for small-business owners, the former Capital One and American Express executive has taken on a broader experiment at Hiscox: joining customer insight, product, distribution and growth in one job.
David Epstein
David Epstein is President and CMO of the Sportswear Division at Q4 Designs LLC, a New York apparel firm that designs, sources, and builds sportswear and outerwear for brands like DKNY, Reebok, Jessica Simpson, and Steve Madden. He climbed from a retail store manager on the sales floor to running a division inside one of the garment district's busiest design-and-sourcing houses, spending more than two decades learning apparel from the ground up.
Elizabeth Melley
Elizabeth Melley is the Chief Merchandising Officer at Gerber Childrenswear LLC, a New York-based apparel executive who has spent three decades designing and building product lines in retail. She started as a designer at Abercrombie & Fitch in 1993 and went on to lead product design and development at Mervyns, Sprockets Kids Clothing, and JCPenney before joining Gerber in 2022. At Gerber she oversees merchandising and product for a portfolio of baby and toddler brands, and has driven launches like the Livaeco-based 'Our Softest Edit' conscious clothing line and the expansion of the modern moments line.
Jenna Woodhull
Jenna Woodhull is Chief Merchandising Officer at Sendero Provisions Co., the Waco, Texas apparel brand that started with a single hat in 2014 and now sells a full Western-meets-outdoor line. She has spent close to three decades in apparel, beginning as a Volcom sales rep in the late 1990s, moving through Hurley as National Sales Manager and Director of Retail Marketing, returning to Volcom as global VP of design and merchandising from 2010 to 2013, then co-founding the Newport Beach brand agency and showroom Band of Martians. She spent roughly ten years at Brixton, rising to Senior Vice President of Design & Merchandising and later Chief Merchandising Officer, before a stint as global head of women's product at Liberated Brands overseeing Volcom, Billabong and RVCA. She joined Sendero in February 2025 to run merchandising strategy, product vision and category expansion. She is known in the industry for balancing creative instinct with commercial discipline, and she describes her own style as vintage classic, usually finished with boots.
Jade Watson
Jade Watson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Fit & Fresh Inc. (trading as Fit + Fresh), the Providence, Rhode Island company that helped invent the fashionable insulated lunch bag category more than two decades ago. She joined in April 2018 after a long run in global brand management at Hasbro, where she climbed from associate manager to Director of Global Brand Strategy and Marketing. At Fit + Fresh she oversees marketing, digital and consumer strategy for a catalogue of lunch totes, coolers, bento boxes, storage containers and reusable ice packs sold through Target, Walmart, Amazon and a Shopify Plus direct-to-consumer store, inside a business that is roughly 85% women and describes its purpose as helping women eat well without giving up style.
Jim Johnson
Jim Johnson is the CEO of Gembah, an Austin-based product development and manufacturing platform that helps brands and entrepreneurs design, prototype, and source physical products from a vetted global network of factories and experts. A veteran hardware and technology operator, he earlier founded and ran uControl, a pioneer of interactive home security and smart-home platforms, then became a leader at iControl Networks after the two companies merged - scaling the business to more than 300 employees and deployments in over 3 million homes before its 2017 acquisition by Comcast and Alarm.com. An electrical engineer by training, Johnson pairs deep technical fluency with a track record of building, merging, and exiting technology companies.
Brian de Haaff
Brian de Haaff is the co-founder and CEO of Aha!, the world's #1 product development software, which he built past $100 million in annual recurring revenue without taking a dollar of venture capital. Fully remote and profitable from the start, Aha! now serves more than a million product builders. A three-time software CEO, de Haaff is the author of Lovability and the originator of ideas like the Minimum Lovable Product and The Responsive Method. He writes prolifically for an audience of hundreds of thousands, arguing that great companies chase value, not valuation.
Jay Jandrain
Jay Jandrain is the president and CEO of Butterball, the largest turkey producer in the United States. A Cornell-trained food scientist who joined Butterball in 2002 running product R&D, he climbed through sales, strategy and operations to take the top job in 2018. In 2025 he was elected chairman of the National Turkey Federation, and each November he becomes the country's most quoted voice on the price and preparation of the Thanksgiving bird.
Benjamin Arnold
Benjamin Arnold is the co-founder and CEO of COR Medical Ventures, a Solana Beach medical-device venture studio that partners with surgeon-inventors and corporations to push the next generation of orthopedic and spine devices to market. A Cornell-trained engineer who has shepherded more than 25 devices to launch, he sits at the 'center of rotation' the company is named for, running a portfolio of roughly a dozen companies spanning surgical robotics, spinal fixation, fracture hardware, and wearable rehab tech.
Arun Ramchandran
Arun Kumar Ramchandran - known as 'Rak' - is the Chief Executive Officer of QBurst, a global product development and consulting firm backed by Multiples Private Equity. Appointed in April 2025 following a $200M investment, Rak brings 25 years of leadership experience spanning Infosys, Virtusa, Capgemini, and Hexaware Technologies. An IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta alumnus based in Palo Alto, he is driving QBurst's transformation into an AI-first engineering services company with his 'High AI-Q' framework - embedding generative and agentic AI into every layer of software delivery.
Ankit Kumar
Ankit Kumar is a software engineer and technical leader at Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based fintech building payment operations infrastructure for companies moving money at scale. With a Master's in Computer Science from Syracuse University, he built the foundations of Modern Treasury's full-stack Payments product - an integrated payment service provider (PSP) handling fiat and stablecoin payments across ACH, RTP, FedNow, and wire rails. Before payments, his career ranged from AR helmet prototypes for BMW's CES 2016 showcase to Android apps that earned the title 'The Ultimate Camera App' from the tech press.
Chandra Singh
Chandra Singh is the CTO and Co-Founder of Rescale Technologies, a Thane-based technology firm helping global enterprises navigate digital transformation through cybersecurity, IT staffing, M&A support, and product development. An IIT Bombay graduate, Singh co-founded Rescale Technologies in 2022 alongside Pawan Kumar and Gaurav Meena, positioning the company at the intersection of creative strategy and technical execution.
Liam Casey
Liam Casey is the Irish founder and CEO of PCH International, the supply chain orchestration company he named after California's Pacific Coast Highway. Built from a Cork dairy farm upbringing and a decade in European fashion, PCH became a billion-dollar operation linking Silicon Valley's most ambitious hardware companies to a network of over 1,200 Chinese factories. Known as 'Mr China' in tech circles, Casey is renowned for carrying three phones, living out of hotels across two continents per week, and never once learning Mandarin — a deliberate vulnerability he credits for building deeper factory relationships than any fluent speaker could.
Mikael Carlsson
Mikael Carlsson is the CEO of Forte Group, an AI-native product development partner with 900+ specialists and 25 years of history. A Swedish-born technology executive with 20+ years in digital engineering, he scaled Lohika 5X before joining Forte in October 2022. Under his leadership, Forte Group closed 2025 at an all-time financial high and has positioned itself around AI transformation, data engineering, and outcome-driven software delivery for Fortune 500 and mid-market clients across North America, Europe, and Latin America.
Akhil Seth
Akhil Seth is the CEO and founder of Advanced Engineering Services (AES), a San Jose-based engineering design, automation, and product development firm with technical centers across India. A University of Utah-trained mechanical engineer, he has consulted to Apple, NVIDIA, Intel, Dolby, Stryker, Lam Research, Thermo Fisher and others before building AES into a ~70-person multi-discipline shop spanning CAE, embedded systems, robotics and industrial automation.