Custom Made

This is episode #51 of Custom Made, and this week I’m excited to be sitting down with technologist, musician and public speaker - Christopher O’Donnell, Senior Vice President of Product at Hubspot. HubSpot offers a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM software - plus the methodology, resources, and support - to help businesses grow better. Christopher has built dozens of web and mobile products ranging from language learning for the US military to the most popular free CRM product in the world, recorded dozens of albums across a variety of musical genres, and spoken to audiences of over 10,000 people. His role as SVP of Product at Hubspot, a public tech company, makes him a staple in the product management community and frequent lecturer at MIT Sloan and major corporations. Outside of his day job, Christopher spends his time as songwriter and guitarist for the band The Providers who release music on a regular music basis - be sure to check them out a www.theproviders.com. During th

This is episode #50 of Custom Made, and this week I’m excited to be sitting down with Jonah Staw, President of Ultimate Ears, a disruptive new business group at Logitech. Ultimate Ears is an organization that pushes the boundaries of what premium, custom-fit earphones can do. Jonah has had an amazing career from consulting to start-up entrepreneur to board member to intraprenuer. A globally recognized executive, innovator and entrepreneur, here are just a few of his career highlights. In addition to his role at Logitech, which we talk about in more detail in today’s episode, Jonah serves on the Board of Directors of Lands' End and is the Chairman of S.E.E., an advisory group focused on disruptive strategies, product innovation, brand development, marketing, business launch, and multi-channel retailing. Prior to Logitech, Jonah was acting as a Business Unit President at Sears Holdings, where he led and started a variety of businesses inside the company. He launched brands with notable talent including Adam

This is episode #49 of Custom Made, and this week I’m sitting down with Rachit Gupta, vice president at integrated power company Vistra Energy. Based in Irving, Texas, Vistra Energy combines an innovative, customer-centric approach to retail with a focus on safe, reliable, and efficient power generation. Through its retail and generation businesses which include TXU Energy, Homefield Energy, Dynegy, and Luminant, Vistra operates in 12 states and six of the seven competitive markets in the U.S. Vistra’s retail brands serve approximately 2.9 million residential, commercial, and industrial customers across five top retail states, and its generation fleet totals approximately 41,000 megawatts of highly efficient generation capacity, with a diverse portfolio of natural gas, nuclear, coal, and solar facilities. At Vistra Energy, Rachit Gupta is a transformative people leader building high performance teams that leverage technology to increase employee productivity, and enterprise revenue and profitability with a

This is episode #48 of Custom Made, and this week I’m sitting down with Dr Lyndsey Harper, Founder and CEO of Rosy, the latest company to come out of Dialexa Labs. Dialexa Labs is the internal innovation and development engine here at Dialexa. Whilst the vast majority of our day-to-day work is focused on providing technology and product development services for our clients, Dialexa Labs provides a channel for creativity and ideas from within our organization. For those ideas that we see have high potential, we use our own resources, team, and The Dialexa Method we apply to our clients' business challenges, to create unique product offerings and spin out new companies. Other the past few years Dialexa Labs has produced a number of successful companies. This includes connected car platform and the first Dialexa Labs company - Vinli - who just recently closed a $13.5 million Series B round of funding. You can hear all about Vinli and their amazing journey to date in one of my earlier episodes of Custom Made w

Welcome to our second year of Custom Made. If this is your first time listening, make sure you hit subscribe on your favorite podcasting app to get our latest episodes as they are released every Sunday. And be sure to check out our episodes from last year once you are finished with this one. This is episode #47 of Custom Made, and this week I’m sitting down with Charlene Schwindt, Global Product Owner Manager at Hilti. Charlene is a product management professional with strong marketing emphasis. Her career has allowed her to have direct experience across industries such as healthcare, financial services, higher education, and technology. And Hilti is a global leader in providing technology-leading products, systems and services to the worldwide construction industry. In her role at Hilti, Charlene has built up a team of software product owners to manage global digital, SaaS, desktop, and mobile applications - twenty-three at last count. Charlene has worked across these teams to implement product owner bes