Product Happy Hour
Product Happy Hour
Episode 14: Lisa Roberts! Product Management at Startups, Leveling Up at PM & Marketing vs. Product
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Episode 14: Lisa Roberts! Product Management at Startups, Leveling Up at PM & Marketing vs. Product

Learn the best stuff on how to be effective from Ajay's first boss as a PM.

🍻 Join us for happy hour in your sweatpants! In this episode, an interview with Lisa Roberts, Chief Marketing & Product Officer at FloorFound and Ajay's first boss as a product manager! She has over 25 years of experience in start-ups and now large companies that are some of the best in tech. We discuss her advice on how to get into product management, what makes PMs great, different types of product managers, what you should learn as a PM and so much more!

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👩 Lisa’s Bio

Lisa Roberts is Chief Marketing & Product Offer at FloorFound, an end-to-end Recommerce platform and marketplace for oversized retail items. Lisa has almost 25 years of experience working in product and marketing with some of the best in tech. She started her career at Garden.com, one of the biggest properties from Dot Com Bubble in 1998. From there she joined the product team at Dell, where she more officially learned product management (her words not mine!).

After Dell, she found herself at nFusion as an Interactive Product Manager before joining the Austin rocketship Bazaarvoice as an early employee, eventually Director of Marketing. Post Bazaarvoice, Lisa embarked on a journey into consulting before landing at Starmount, which is where she hired me as an Associate Product Manager, my first ever PAID PM gig! (definitely going to discuss this one.)

Post Starmount was a tour of some of the hottest start-ups in Austin including VP of Marketing at Adlucent, VP of Marketing at Edgecase.io, VP of Marketing at Civitas, and Chief Marketing Officer at Yonder before joining us back again (at least 50% of the time?!) in Product Land at FloorFound where she runs FloorFound’s product and marketing teams. And if that’s not enough, she founded Great Catch Consulting to consult with start-ups and is a board member at the Andy Roddick Foundation.


✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

01:14 Lisa's Bio

03:04 Welcome Lisa!

03:44 What's That Drink?!

05:12 "How did you get into product management?"

13:17 "What do you look for in those entry-level product manager roles?"

17:07 "What makes a product manager great?"

26:03 "What are things product managers do that drive you crazy?"

32:20 "What skills and knowledge should product managers acquire early on?"

35:38 Tech-Heavy vs. Business Heavy PMs

44:52 Up-level by shadowing great people you work with

46:10 How Lisa kills it at saying no, her secrets to the process

48:42 Start-Up vs. Large Company Product Management

01:04:09 Commonalities & Differences between Marketing & Product Management

01:13:06 Moving from Marketing to Product Management

01:17:51 Parting Advice: Ask for What You Want

01:20:48 Thank you, Lisa!

01:21:27 Outro


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Product Happy Hour
Product Happy Hour
🧐 New to product management? Considering becoming a PM? Miss happy hour in our new remote/hybrid work world? Join us for Product Happy Hour 🍻🎙, where you can do happy hour in your sweatpants! 🎉 Drink with your favorite product people, Ajay Waghray and Era Johal, while learning more about building great products. Support this podcast at producthappyhour.com