My Product Philosophy

You don’t become a good Communist Product Manager by going to meetings or memorizing the Manifesto. You do it on the streets. You do it with your fists. The rest is bullshit and you know it.

Gregor Anghel

What I Do

The theme of my professional life has been:

  1. working at the intersection of people and technology,
  2. usually in highly-regulated industries,
  3. to build the foundation for the next stage of the organization.

It’s about getting to the type of place you can’t reach by improving business as usual; the place you can only get by getting a lot of knowledgeable people in the room, describing a target, and learning why we can’t achieve it today.

Inevitably, a constraint fundamental to how the company works will be uncovered, and my job shifts to eliminating that constraint. This usually takes the form of building a modern platform to replace something that hasn’t been touched in years, if not decades.

It’s slow, exhausting, and game-changing. And I love it despite myself.

Experience

Capital One
2023+
Confidential initiative, developing modern platforms deep in the company’s tech stack to productively standardize and utilize tremendous amounts of data in a safe way.

The Federal Reserve
2016-2023
Figuring out how we take the Fed to the cloud, think in products over projects, and invest in our workforce. Checking all the digital transformation boxes in order to deliver FedNow.

The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis
2014-2016
Grew a team of policy analysts into end-to-end campaign owners. Scored legislative victories (e.g. expanded Medicaid, increased public education spending) and improved how the media reported on state spending with a new budget explainer.

Tumblr
2012-2014
Ran the Support division, which served as the connective tissue between users, sales, engineering, and product. Involved in the acquisition by Yahoo, with mixed feelings in retrospect.

Mesmir
2010-2012
Independent consultant, helping non-profits and candidates for elected office figure out how to make digital work for them. If you can imagine it, I probably did it.

Education

Master of Business Administration
2022
University of Virginia
Darden School of Business

Bachelor of Arts, Political Science
2009
Virginia Commonwealth University
College of Humanities and Sciences