Are you aiming to drive meaningful product outcomes in a fast-paced tech environment? In this podcast hosted by Jonathan Ozeran, DoorDash former Senior Product Director David Jesse will be speaking on building high-impact product teams through disciplined leadership and customer focus. Drawing from his extensive experience scaling product teams at companies like eBay, Groupon, and DoorDash, David shares actionable insights on how product leaders can prioritize effectively, maintain team momentum, and deliver transformative results.
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Show Notes
- Prioritize customer orientation, outcome focus, and collaborative teamwork in product development
- Identify and obsess over key bottlenecks that can unlock significant product growth
- Practice fundamental product management skills consistently, regardless of company stage
- Break down strategic goals into small, measurable iterations for continuous improvement
- Develop a clear product vision with strategic pillars that can adapt to changing environments
- Focus ruthlessly on 1-2 key priorities instead of spreading efforts across multiple initiatives
- Measure and validate assumptions through frequent customer research and experimentation
- Recognize the difference between product activities and actual achievement
- Set ambitious but realistic goals, aiming to achieve 70-80% of objectives
- Build product roadmaps that balance innovation, optimization, and maintenance
- Involve engineering and design teams throughout the entire product development process
- Adapt leadership styles as teams and companies evolve through different growth stages
- Create a culture of mutual accountability focused on delivering measurable results
- Understand that high confidence in a feature doesn’t guarantee its success
- Develop structured approaches to customer research and problem definition
- Avoid the trap of building features based solely on stakeholder or sales requests
- Treat product development as an investment portfolio with balanced risk and potential
- Maintain frequent customer exposure to inform product strategy and development
- Embrace iterative development and be willing to change plans based on new insights
- Foster a product culture that values collaboration, learning, and outcome-driven thinking
About the speaker
Product executive, coach and transformation leader with twenty-five years of experience scaling startups up through global businesses. Proven success as CPO at Fetch (grew from 1.2M to 5.1M active customers), VP Product at Groupon (led product through hypergrowth prior to IPO), as well as product executive roles at DoorDash, eBay, and Gaia Interactive. As a coach and fractional product leader, David has guided dozens of companies from seed stage to Fortune 20, focusing on: Building high-performing product organizations Defining outcome-driven product strategy Scaling through critical growth phases Transforming product culture and processes Deep expertise in marketplaces, e-commerce, and consumer products, with successful advisory experience across SaaS, fintech, healthcare, and enterprise software. Available for leadership coaching, advisory roles, and fractional product executive engagements.
About the host
Jonathan is a product and operations leader, company builder, investor and advisor. He has assembled, scaled and led product, design, software engineering, hardware engineering and machine learning teams across numerous financing stages (pre-seed through Series G).