When people think of influential product managers, big names like Marissa Mayer, Ben Silbermann, and Stewart Butterfield often come to mind. However, there are many other impactful product leaders whose contributions have shaped the tech landscape in significant ways, even if they aren’t household names. This article shines a light on ten influential product managers you might not know, but whose work has made a lasting impact on products we use every day.
Lena Reinhardt – Trello
As the first product hire at Trello back in 2012, Lena Reinhardt played a central role in developing the popular project management tool into the “remote work operating system” it is today. She joined when Trello was still a tiny startup with just five employees.
Reinhardt led the product strategy and roadmap that transformed Trello from a simple kanban board into a robust, globally adopted platform for teamwork and collaboration. Under her guidance, Trello expanded its feature set to include capabilities like Butler automation, rich multimedia support, and deep ecosystem integrations.
Her focus on user research, cross-functional collaboration, and design thinking helped make Trello incredibly intuitive and easy to use, even as it evolved into a powerful productivity suite. Reinhardt also prioritized creating delightful micro-interactions and a strong brand identity, contributing to Trello’s devoted user base.
After over six years shaping Trello’s product experience, Reinhardt went on to lead product management at Whereby, a video meeting platform optimized for remote teams. Her impact at both companies exemplifies how skilled product leaders can steer nascent products into category-defining success stories.
Ken Norton – Google
While he may not be a household name, Ken Norton is a luminary in the product management field. As a Group Product Manager at Google, he helped drive the growth of successful projects like Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Classroom.
Norton is perhaps best known for pioneering the “Discipline of Product Management” and evangelizing an approach that balances user needs, business objectives, and technical constraints. His seminal essays on hiring product managers, designing product strategy roadmaps, and fostering cross-functional partnerships have helped define modern product management best practices.
His work has elevated product management from a niche role into a strategic business function at the forefront of innovation. Norton’s teachings on opportunity assessment, customer research, and product discovery have influenced countless companies to build lovable products that delight users while achieving business goals.
Today, Norton continues to mentor rising product leaders and share his wisdom as a Senior Operating Partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures). His outsized influence on the product management discipline makes him one of the most impactful – if undersung – product leaders of his era.
Lulu Cheng – Spotify
Spotify revolutionized how we consume music and podcasts, and Lulu Cheng was instrumental in shaping the ubiquitous music streaming platform from its earliest days. As one of Spotify’s first product managers back in 2007, she played a key role in defining the product strategy and roadmap.
Cheng led the product development of Spotify’s core music streaming experience, from features like playlists, sharing, and search to handling the complex rights management required for the service. She was also an early advocate of the “freemium” business model that allowed Spotify to scale rapidly and outmaneuver competitors.
Under Cheng’s leadership as a product manager and then Director of Product, Spotify successfully expanded into new markets across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Her strategic product direction helped Spotify grow from a small Swedish startup into the global audio streaming platform we know today with over 400 million users.
After over a decade at Spotify, Cheng joined Google as a Vice President of Product Management working on Google Workspace. Her pioneering product leadership continues to influence how we discover and experience digital content and entertainment.
Linda Lian – Mockplus
Linda Lian may not be a famous name, but as the lead product manager at Mockplus, she’s helped create one of the most popular product design platforms used by over 1 million creators worldwide.
Founded in 2015, Mockplus is an all-in-one product design tool that streamlines workflows from wireframing to prototyping to design handoff. As a veteran product designer herself, Lian intimately understood the pain points of traditional design tools and aspired to create a better solution.
Under her stewardship, the Mockplus product team relentlessly focused on simplicity, speed, and seamless collaboration. The result is an accessible, cloud-based design environment tailored for cross-functional teams that resonate with companies of all sizes.
Through meticulous user research, smart prioritization of an ambitious feature roadmap, and continuous engagement with the Mockplus community, Lian has successfully navigated the transition from startup to scale. While not a celebrity PM, she exemplifies the impact seasoned product leaders have in building tools that empower creators and product teams around the world.
Aghi Nanavati – FitBit
Many know FitBit as a pioneering wearable fitness tracker brand, but not as many know the product leader behind its early breakthroughs in accessible health tech. That product visionary is Aghi Nanavati, who served as FitBit’s Senior Product Manager in the startup’s formative years.
Joining in 2010 as the company’s 13th employee, Nanavati helped shape the very first shipping FitBit devices and app experiences. She drove the product roadmap and UX strategy that demystified fitness tracking and motivated behavioral changes through simplicity, social accountability features, and smart gamification.
Nanavati’s background in psychology and human-computer interaction uniquely equipped her to understand and design for the core motivators of health, a space that requires combining hardware sensors with intelligent software and persuasive product design. Under her leadership, FitBit successfully found product-market fit and grew its user base from thousands to millions.
FitBit’s game-changing impact on normalizing self-tracking for better health outcomes wouldn’t have been possible without Nanavati’s vision and execution as a product leader. Her influence extends beyond wearables into the broader healthcare technology space striving to use smart devices and apps to nudge healthier habits.
Jade Woodard – Intercom
While Intercom may not be a household brand, the conversational support platform pioneered categories like in-app chat, chatbots, and modern help center knowledge bases now ubiquitous across SaaS companies. Much of Intercom’s product innovation can be credited to product manager Jade Woodard, who joined the startup in 2013.
In her nearly 8 years at Intercom, Woodward helped drive the product strategy and roadmap as the company rapidly grew from a scrappy messaging upstart into a sophisticated customer engagement SaaS suite. She led releases of groundbreaking capabilities like chatbots, mobile app inboxes, and advanced routing intelligence.
Woodard excelled at combining market research, user journey mapping, and strategic foresight to pinpoint what features would modernize support experiences and differentiate Intercom. Her product leadership helped the company expand up-market into enterprise business segments and continually evolve its offerings.
Beyond Intercom’s business success, Woodard elevated the role of product management and coached rising Product Managers on skills like strategic communication, user story mapping, and quantitative product analysis. Her career journey exemplifies how thoughtful product leaders can build entire product categories from scratch.
Cal Henderson – Slack
Anyone who’s felt the liberation of moving teams off tedious email streams and onto frictionless messaging platforms has Cal Henderson to thank. As a co-founder and chief product leader at Slack, Henderson was instrumental in pioneering and popularizing group messaging as the new command center for workplace collaboration.
In developing Slack’s core offering that broke through the enterprise messaging app landscape, Henderson advocated a conversational product philosophy centered on smart workflows, rich multimedia sharing, and delightful micro-interactions. He envisioned creating “a virtual workspace that brings together all the collaboration, information, and apps your team needs” in one seamless experience.
Under Henderson’s product guidance, Slack quickly gained a cult following and grew to hundreds of millions of users due to its intuitive UX, platform extensibility, and whimsical design flair. The product experience embodied best practices like thoughtful onboarding, in-context help, and deep integrations into existing tools.
Today, digital hubs like Slack that centralize teamwork are the norm. But when Slack first launched, its reimagining of workplace communication was revolutionary – thanks largely to Cal Henderson’s product vision and relentless focus on end-user experience.
Merci Victoria Grace – Dewey Square Group
While most of the names on this list are based in tech hubs like Silicon Valley or Seattle, Washington D.C.-based Merci Victoria Grace showcases the impact unsung product leaders can have beyond software products. As a Senior Vice President at political strategy and communications firm Dewey Square Group, Grace essentially functions as a product manager for critical national initiatives and advocacy campaigns.
Her role involves defining objectives, mapping stakeholders, crafting resonant messaging, and optimizing outreach and mobilization tactics – not unlike how a skilled PM would strategically guide a new product launch. Grace has applied this “campaign manager” mindset to drive impact on large-scale issues like healthcare reform, gun violence prevention, and climate policy.
For example, Grace served as the Strategic Events Lead for the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), responsible for the planning and execution of over 150 affiliate events. This role required managing complex logistics, budgets, risk mitigation, and cross-organizational collaboration not unlike a major new product rollout.
Grace exemplifies how strategic and analytical product management skills can elevate any sphere and drive successful outcomes for ambitious missions. Her career also showcases the diverse range of domains where talented product leaders can make an outsized impact.
Stephanie Rivkin – Warby Parker
While Warby Parker is renowned for disrupting the eyewear industry with affordable, stylish frames and a pioneering home try-on program, few know about Stephanie Rivkin’s role in defining the company’s customer experience from its earliest days. As Director of Product Management at the DTC brand, Rivkin was instrumental in translating Warby Parker’s mission into seamless end-to-end buying journeys.
From developing the virtual try-on iPad app and slick e-commerce checkout flows to masterminding the at-home “Home Try-On” box program, Rivkin created an eyewear shopping experience that combined convenience with a fun brand experience. Her product roadmap introduced initiatives like virtual vision tests, subscription renewals and even brick-and-mortar retail experiences designed to surprise and delight.
Rivkin embraced customer-obsessed product development long before “delightful UX” was a common mantra. Her human-centered mentality, rooted in anthropology studies, made Warby Parker an early exemplar of DTC brands prioritizing seamless omnichannel journeys and community building. Even as the company scaled aggressively, Rivkin ensured the product experience stayed true to the customer-first DNA.
Today, Warby Parker’s category-defining buying experience is rivaled only by giants like Warby. But over a decade ago, Rivkin pioneered what retail product innovation could look like in shaping frictionless end-to-end experiences tailored for modern shopping behaviors.
Daniela Crivilon – Uber
As one of the earliest hires and product leaders at Uber in its hypergrowth startup phase, Daniela Crivilon faced the ultimate test of building a revolutionary product at a blistering pace. Her strategic roadmap played a key role in transitioning the ride-hailing service from a novel concept into a mainstream transportation platform used by millions worldwide.
Joining Uber in 2011 as a product manager, Crivilon defined the early workflow and UX for how riders requested rides and drivers received assignments. She pioneered concepts like location-aware services, ETA calculation engines, and upfront pricing that became industry standards. Her team was also responsible for developing the core safety and compliance features that ensured trust on the platform as it expanded globally.
Even more impressive, Crivilon needed to build scalable infrastructure and processes for the product team itself as Uber exploded in growth and geographical footprint. Her ability to establish product operations, metrics, and tooling enabled a large-scale product development engine to rapidly iterate on new innovations like UberPool, UberEats, and autonomous vehicle initiatives.
Crivilon embodies how visionary yet pragmatic product leadership is indispensable to ambitious startups navigating hypergrowth. Her ability to execute a product roadmap while also building organizational capabilities enabled Uber’s rise into a multi-service mobility super-app that reshaped urban transportation worldwide.
Conclusion
While these accomplished product managers may not be household names like Steve Jobs or Evan Williams, their innovative work has shaped many of the apps, platforms, and digital services we rely on daily. From spearheading the creation of new product categories to propelling hyper-growth for disruptive startups, their product vision and execution have impacted millions of customers worldwide.
These behind-the-scenes Product Managers showcase how strategic product leadership is essential for translating bold ideas into wildly successful, customer-centric product experiences. While their names may not be famous, their influential approaches to user research, road mapping, cross-functional collaboration, and product execution are well worth emulating.
The best Product Managers let their products do the talking. By spotlighting these unsung masters of the craft, we surface insights on how skilled product managers can build innovative solutions that seem obvious in hindsight yet were revolutionary in foresight. Their stories prove that influential product leadership can come from all backgrounds, domains, and corners of the globe. So next time you use a product that “just works”, there was likely an impactful PM you may not know driving that seamless experience.