About Us
Hello fellow product leaders!
We understand the need to transform product teams from good to exceptional.
Product Rebels was forged through decades of experience in product management and product leadership roles. Why do we call ourselves Product Rebels? Given today’s climate, it seems a bit dicey! Well, here’s how we see it: the best product leaders represent the voice of the customer. They are obsessed with the problem the customer faces, the impact decisions may have on them, and the pain points they experience. And sometimes, being that voice of the customer in your company can feel like rowing up stream…without a paddle. Sometimes you feel you have to fight to get that voice heard. This can make you feel like a rebel within your organization. That’s why we’re Product Rebels.
Our program & coaching are proven.
As are our coaches.
So Who Are We?
We are your rebel leaders and founders of product rebels.
We met in the early 2000’s at Intuit where we spent over a decade learning from customer experience and innovation pioneers while launching new products and leading product teams for some of the biggest businesses there at the time; TurboTax and Quickbooks.
It was at Intuit where we cultivated our passion for customer-backed decision making and how to connect the dots between customer experience and long-term growth. We learned what it takes to keep the customer at the center of the universe and to operate in a way that keeps our team outcome-driven vs. output-driven; leading to faster and more sustainable growth.
Since leaving Intuit, and over the last 2 decades, we’ve been in the product management trenches; in executive product management roles for companies big and small. Through that journey we’ve both encountered similar problems, repeatedly. We learned that if a few foundations weren’t established early on in a project, the likelihood of success, delighted customers and business growth, was low. It wasn’t until 6 years ago that we explored the root causes of those repeated problems to figure out how to address them in a scalable way.
Vidya Dinamani
Heather Samarin
Then what happened?
We wrote a book.
Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better Products
From this book, we developed a product management framework, called the Product Groundwork Method ™ that provides the blueprint to establish these foundations and addresses the major causes that lead to unhappy customers and poor product performance.
We’ve now coached hundreds of product managers on this framework and have evolved it and the way we coach around it based on their feedback.
That evolution had led to a key learning…Training is NOT durable; Coaching is NOT training…which has resulted in a unique and proven approach to permanently transforming product management teams.
Let’s break it down…
| How We’re Different | What that Means in Practice | What Problem this Solves |
|---|---|---|
| Your coaches are product management executives | Every coach has been or is a product management executive. That experience in the trenches ensures they can adjust their approach and feedback to meet your team’s unique make-up and needs. | Most training programs are taught by people that have never led a PM team nor have enough tenure in PM to truly impact varying businesses behind their own experience |
| We focus on your business challenges through the program | We partner with you, the team leader, to understand your business, your product, and your challenges so that every coaching session provides exactly the right examples and case studies. | Typical training is generic and case-oriented, making PMs skeptical about the likelihood that the content is even applicable to their industry, market, etc. |
| Everything is actionable immediately | Every coaching session offers practical, customized feedback on the team’s products that they can act on immediately. And our executive coaches have the vast experience that can work with the team to tailor the practices and techniques to your business. | Typical training is academic and often generic, making it hard for PM’s to envision how it might be implemented in their own industry, business, culture, etc. |
| We demand more from your team; ensuring durable transformation | Great coaching means we demand more from your team. We proactively push them to think differently about their customers, their problem space, and their role as a Product Manager. The benefit being long lasting change. | Trainers will generally focus on communicating the content vs. ensuring resonance and durability of that content, which often leads to minimal recall after leaving the training environment. |
| We are your eyes and ears in the transformation | We diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals and team as we coach, and provide guidance and feedback, giving you an additional objective lens to support the growth of your team. | As product leaders, we hardly ever get another product leader’s view on our individual team member’s effectiveness and potential opportunities for improvement. We often are too close to the situation to see potential challenges. |
Our foundations elevate standard PM processes and practices from good to great.
We know coaching is a big decision. You need to trust that the approach, methods, and mindset are aligned with your values. That’s why we offer a free 60-minute Groundwork: Get better at making better products talk. We’ll talk to your team/organization at absolutely no cost to you, and you can kick the tires to see if what we have to say resonates.