Why I joined LaunchNotes as their first PM

Hi! 👋🏼

I'm Teddy, the newest member of the LaunchNotes team and the company's first Product Manager.

Why I chose LaunchNotes

As a PM I've felt the pains of managing change communication internally across teams my entire career. I've also experienced the headache of not having a dedicated channel to quickly and easily share updates and new features with users of my product and other external stakeholders interested in our work. In short, the pain LaunchNotes is trying to solve deeply resonates with me.

When I learned about this role, it immediately seemed like a unique opportunity for me to dive deeply into the world of Product Management - learning, living, and breathing product change communication best practices with teams everywhere. As LaunchNotes' first PM I couldn't be more excited to not only have access to and engage with the PM community in a new and unique way, but furthermore to help build a product that I would have loved to adopt and leverage throughout my own career.

First impressions

Reflecting on my first two months with the company, I would say I've been struck by three specific things:

1. The team has blown me away with the level of collaboration. Collaboration is happening constantly and constructively here.

2. My teammates are genuinely interested in solving this problem and helping our users succeed. To have palpable excitement coming from every corner of the business is bringing the best ideas to light, no matter the source.

3. LaunchNotes' culture values and celebrates the individuals building the product as much as the product itself. My colleagues care about one another's success and well-being, and it's an incredibly supportive environment for me as a new teammate.

My journey thus far

Since graduating university I have been passionate about Design Thinking and utilizing that process to identify and address real problems in the market and with users.

For the last six years I've worked with engineers, designers, and subject matter experts to create online experiences and tools. I am a huge believer in the value of cross-functional collaboration, and have seen the most brilliant ideas take shape as a team effort.

Three years ago I made a transition from creative project management to product management, and while developing and honing my skills as a PM I fell in love with forming insights from usage data, as well as user and usability research. You'll often find me obsessing over dashboards, talking to individuals experiencing problems we're hoping to solve, and asking prospects to give us feedback on cool new prototypes we're thinking about building.

Last year I joined the Reforge community, and have become obsessed with applying various frameworks from Reforge as a lens to better understand behavior. Applying these lenses focuses on problems that matter to our users, and thus to the growth of the business.

I'm very much looking forward to connecting my background, previous experiences, and various interests and applying them to a new problem space at LaunchNotes.

How I landed at LaunchNotes

I first learned about LaunchNotes when it was just a wild dream shared between Tyler and a couple of friends. Fast forward two years and I found myself meeting with Tyler, Jake, and the rest of the team about the possibility of joining as the first Product Manager. A few conversations in I knew I'd found a company where I would grow faster than ever before.

The more I learned about and dug into the product and problem space, the more I fell in love with both. And as I got to know the team, it  became clear that I would have the opportunity to work with truly incredible talent. I quickly realized LaunchNotes would be an amazing opportunity for me to work on a high value, high quality, and extraordinarily visible product for the world's cutting edge businesses. Who could turn that down?

I'm so excited to be a part of this team, and thrilled about my next chapter with LaunchNotes!

Join us 🚀

Are you equally passionate about the product change communication space and looking to work with a phenomenal team while you advance your own career? Great, because we're hiring for a number of roles across Product and Engineering and I'd love to work with you!

Check out our careers page for more info, or reach out to my directly any time: teddy [at] launchnotes.com.