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Top Product Leaders in 2018
Product School has selected the most influential Product Leaders responsible for building or helping others build digital products loved by millions of people
Andrew Chen
Best Product EssaysBest Product Essays
Andrew Chen
Investor at Andreessen Horowitz
Andrew is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focused on consumer and bottoms up SaaS. Previously, he led growth teams at Uber while advising and investing in startups in the Bay Area. His work has been featured and quoted in The New York Times, Fortune, Wired, and WSJ.
Ashok Bania
Best Product InstructorBest Product Instructor
Ashok Bania
Director Product Management, Headspace (ex-Spotify)
Ashok is the Director of Product Management at Headspace. He has over 12 years of experience in Product Management encompassing - Voice/Smart Speaker Products (Google Assistant and Alexa), Wearables, Machine Learning, and more.
Brianne Kimmel
Best Product Angel InvestorBest Product Angel Investor
Dan Olsen
Best Product SpeakerBest Product Speaker
Dan Olsen
Product Management & Lean Startup Consultant
Dan Olsen is the author of The Lean Product Playbook. An entrepreneur, consultant, author, speaker, he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product.
Deb Liu
Best Product Non-profitBest Product Non-profit
Ellen Pao
Best Diversity ProjectBest Diversity Project
Ellen Pao
Co-Founder and CEO of Project Include. Author of Reset. Angel investor.
Ellen K. Pao is a tech investor and advocate, the former CEO of reddit, and a cofounder of the award-winning diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include. She has earned an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and law and business degrees from Harvard.
Eric S. Yuan
Best Product CEOBest Product CEO
Eric S. Yuan
Founder & CEO @ Zoom
Eric is the founder and CEO of the popular online video conferencing platform Zoom, which unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, group messaging, and a software-defined conference room into one platform. Previously, he worked as VP of engineering at Cisco.
Gibson Biddle
Best Product AdvisorBest Product Advisor
Gibson Biddle
Speaker, Advisor, and Teacher. Former VP/CPO at Netflix/Chegg
Gibson has experience in product as VP of Product at Netflix, Chief Product Officer at Chegg, SVP Product at The Learning Company, and a Producer at Electronic Arts. He speaks, advises, and hosts product leadership talks & workshops worldwide.
Ha Nguyen
Best Product Non-profitBest Product Non-profit
Ha Nguyen
Product Partner at Spero Ventures
Ha is a founding Partner of Spero Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm. Ha invests in early stage, purpose-driven startups that have the potential to reach venture scale. She also advises portfolio CEOs and product leaders on design-thinking, organisation design, and product strategy.
Helen Sims
Best Product InstructorBest Product Instructor
Helen Sims
Product Manager at Airbnb
Helen is a Product Manager at Airbnb. She graduated from The John Hopkins University and is currently teaching Product Management at Product School.
Hunter Walk
Best Product VCBest Product VC
Hunter Walk
Partner at Homebrew VC (fmr YouTube, Google, Second Life product lead)
Hunter Walk is a partner at Homebrew, a Seed stage venture fund serving founders who enable individuals and small businesses to think big. Hunter previously led consumer product management at YouTube, having worked at Google since 2003.
Jackie Bavaro
Best Product CoachBest Product Coach
Jackie Bavaro
Head of PM at Asana
Jackie is the co-author of Cracking the PM Interview - considered a must read for Product Managers at the start of their careers. As the Head of Product Manager at Asana, she helps make it easy for any team to plan, manage, track, and complete their projects.
Jesse Owens
Best Product InstructorBest Product Instructor
Jesse Owens
Director of Product at Mastercard
Jesse E. Owens is a technology product leader with experience spanning across multiple industries including FinTech, Education, and Military Defense. Currently, he's a Director of Product at MasterCard building innovative Consumer and API payment products globally.
Joel Palathinkal
Best Product InstructorBest Product Instructor
Joel Palathinkal
Senior Director of Product: Northwestern Mutual
Dr. Joel Palathinkal is the Senior Director of Product at Northwestern Mutual. He has extensive experience in fintech on enterprise web & mobile cross platform solutions. Joel was previously the Head of Product Development at FactSet (a large financial technology firm), and lead product/technology strategy at large media giants like NBCUniversal, CNBC, CBS, and Cosmo. He also received his Ph.D in software modeling and simulation from the University of Central Florida while serving as a technology lead on flight simulation technology platforms for the Department of Defense and NAVY. He also holds a degree in finance and serves as an adjunct professor at Cornell University. He has been invited globally to be a keynote speaker at several technology conferences in the areas of fintech & emerging technology.
Josh Elman
Best Product CareerBest Product Career
Julie Zhuo
Best Product DesignerBest Product Designer
Ken Norton
Best Product NewsletterBest Product Newsletter
Ken Norton
Partner at Google Ventures
Ken is a partner at GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc. He has worked with hundreds of GV’s portfolio companies like Uber, Nest, Slack, Stripe, Gusto, Foundation Medicine, and Flatiron Health. Prior to moving over to GV, Ken was a group PM at Google.
Nir Eyal
Best Product BookBest Product Book
Nir Eyal
Bestselling Author of ``Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products``
Nir writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, tech, and business. Greatly known as the author of ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’. He’s also an active investor in habit-forming technologies.
Reid Hoffman
Best Product PodcastBest Product Podcast
Reid Hoffman
Founder of Linkedin, Partner at Greylock and Host of Masters of Scale
Reid is Co-founder of LinkedIn and Investor at Greylock. He’ s on product development, innovation, business strategy, and finance, but includes general management, operations, business operations, business development, talent management, and marketing.
Ryan Hoover
Best Product WebsiteBest Product Website
Saurabh Verma
Best Product InstructorBest Product Instructor
Saurabh Verma
Product Lead @ Spotify
Saurabh has 12 years of experience leading teams to deliver world class software products in the music, fintech, e-commerce, social media, and travel industries. He is Product Lead at Spotify and with his team they enable product partnerships and build the Spotify experience on new and emerging platforms (e.g Oculus, Tesla).
Best
The Proddys celebrate the best products of 2018
The Proddys recognize innovators and innovations. Given to Product Managers, visionaries, designers, creators and coders across the tech space, these awards are the industry’s way of saying thank you.