Be Unorthodox

Case study

Thomson Reuters

Product leadership across self-service, account management, and legacy modernization for one of the largest professional information companies in the world.

Ongoing. Enterprise product work.

My role
Manager, Product Management (current). Previously Senior Product Manager and Senior Product Owner.
Timeframe
Feb 2011 to present
Built with
enterpriseB2Bplatform

I’ve spent most of my product career at Thomson Reuters, currently leading product across self-service and account management platforms.

What I can say in public

The honest version: the most interesting work here is the hardest to write about openly. I won’t name products, numbers, or roadmaps that aren’t mine to share. What I can describe is the shape of the work.

The customers are lawyers, accountants, and other professionals who don’t tolerate downtime or guesswork. The systems are old, large, and load-bearing. A lot of people depend on them every working day. The work runs from modernizing those systems down to the unglamorous plumbing that makes the next decade of customer experience possible: billing, payments, entitlements, support, the parts no one notices until they break.

From law to product

I went to law school and practiced as a staff attorney before moving into product in 2011. I liked building what should exist more than arguing about it.

The training stuck, though. Reading a spec like a contract, where the ambiguity is the risk. Steelmanning the other side before I pick one. Being precise about what a word means before a team builds on top of it. Most of my useful product instincts are just legal habits pointed at a different problem.

What enterprise taught me that the startup didn’t

Two stints at Thomson Reuters, with detours through CPA Global and U.S. Bank in between. The enterprise work taught me the things bootstrapping can’t. How decisions get made when the blast radius is the whole customer base. How to modernize a system you’re not allowed to turn off. How to move a roadmap through an organization instead of a weekend.

Kindred Tales taught me speed. Thomson Reuters taught me what speed is for. I use both, and I switch on purpose.