Keynote Speakers

April Dunford is a consultant, author, speaker, and globally recognized expert in Positioning. April helps technology companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. Previously April has run marketing and sales teams at a series of successful technology startups and has launched 16 products into market. She is also a board member, investor, and advisor to dozens of high-growth businesses and is the author of the popular business book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it.

Elias Torres is the founder and CTO of Drift, the world’s leading conversational marketing and sales platform. Prior to Drift, he served as the VP of Engineering at HubSpot, growing their revenue to $100 million after the acquisition of his previous company Performable in 2011. Prior to Performable, Elias served as VP of Engineering at Lookery and spent the first 10 years of his career as an engineer at IBM.

In addition to starting, advising and helping early stage companies, Elias is passionate about building winning teams. He is also a community activist focused on supporting LatinX entrepreneurs across the US.

He has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur and TechCrunch.

Beginning his career in Client Operations and later pivoting to UX Research, Evan has a unique ability to identify opportunities to create fluidity throughout the business. Most recently, he's been working to create and scale a Client Success function at Prism.fm, while simultaneously making sure Product is plugged into user needs & behaviors. In this role, Pendo has been a keystone in building a data-driven Client Success foundation, all while unlocking deep insights into user behavior, and he'll be joining us at Pendomonium to tell that story.

Gib was VP of Product at Netflix from 2005, then in 2010 became the Chief Product Officer of Chegg, a textbook rental company that went public in 2014. Today, he is an adviser at multiple consumer tech companies as well as a guest lecturer for Stanford’s graduate-level entrepreneurship course.

Responsible for running all things product on g2.com. Marty is a computer nerd who loves the collision space of business and technology. A generalist by nature because his curiosity for new things runs unchecked; Marty brings horizontal breadth of experience with deep specialties in services and product management. He has been working in the web for over 15 years at companies ranging from start-up to enterprise and in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. If you meet him in person, conversations go smoother with coffee, sour patch kids, prayer and compliments on either his fohawk (sometimes mohawk), tattoos, or beard.

Ryan is a passionate builder of great products and teams. As a Product Manager at Procurify he is crafting smarter spend systems for rapidly growing organizations to keep them in the fast lane as they scale. Prior to Procurify he was an Associate Manager at Accenture. Here he helped lead a redesign of the global Accenture Consulting Approach and some of its earliest executions in the wild. When not exploring customer problems or musing about new ways of working Ryan can typically be found experimenting in the kitchen, running on the sea wall or savouring time with loved ones.

My name is Adam Siegel. I'm an Education and Training Consultant working with CareCloud, the #1 EHR for high growth medical groups. I use Pendo and other tools to design an onboarding and performance support architecture that guides and mentors users at every step of their user journey. At CareCloud I've been able to wear many hats starting in implementations, assisting product and customer success teams, and engaging with our customers at multiple levels before we established a dedicated Education and Training team. I was a US Army medic for nine years before transitioning to healthcare IT and I know that medical teams need every advantage they can get to provide the best quality care to their patients. Their technology platform is a critical component in doing that to the best of their ability. So far in 2019, my son was born in January, I got a new puppy in May, we implemented Pendo, and started putting our education strategy into action. Apparently I decided to do 2019 on hard mode.

Jodi McDermott is 20+ years into a successful career in product and often found herself as the only woman in the room early on in her career. When her male boss at USATODAY.com championed her development, she not only fast-tracked her career, but learned a valuable lesson: we all own diversity. Today Jodi is the Chief Product Officer at Dude Solutions and 1 of 4 women at the c-suite. While there is still progress to be made, today's room looks much different, proving that diverse teams bring perspective and ultimately build better products.

With over 30 years of experience in design management and design—as both a bricks-and-mortar architect and a UX designer—Leo drives highly differentiated and innovative solutions. At The Home Depot QuoteCenter, Leo leads a dynamic team of UX professionals in delivering engaging experiences for Home Depot associates. Previously, as Product Design Manager at Intel, he led UX teams on mission-critical programs. As Principal UX Architect for Tektronix’s Logic Analyzer product line, he filed several patents and spearheaded product vision and definition for the next generation of instruments. Leo is a Certified Scrum Product Owner. Over the past 20 years, he has served as Program Chair, Chair, Vice Chair, and Treasurer on the board for CHIFOO (Computer Human Interaction Forum of Oregon), the Portland Chapter of SIGCHI.

Leo is co-author, with Charles Lambdin, of the Morgan Kaufmann book Presumptive Design: Design Provocations for Innovation.

Alexa Maturana-Lowe is a product manager at Fivetran. Her career has spanned a variety of roles, from consultant to analyst and now to product manager. She loves gathering qualitative and quantitative data to inform product strategy at Fivetran to help analysts everywhere to answer interesting and important questions. When not building software, in her spare time she enjoys building furniture and tending to her garden.

Travis built and leads the In-App Assistance team and was a founding member of the Information Experience department at Khoros. They have over 15 years of experience in Support Services, in which time they've developed expertise and insights in how people think about and use software, leading them to become an advocate for intuitive and consistent user experiences.

Brian Crofts is the chief product officer of Pendo, a product cloud that helps teams build amazing products. Throughout a career in finance and product management, Brian has been responsible for building high-performing teams, achieving business results/growth, innovation, and change management. Prior to Pendo, Brian spent 12 years at Intuit, leading global expansion for QuickBooks, Intuit’s suite of accounting and payroll SaaS solutions.

Sophia is a product manager at Segment where she leads a team of engineers, product designers, and analysts in their mission of creating delightful and effective onboarding experiences for customers. When she's not making product, she's exploring new art and music or perfecting her favorite pasta dish.

Dan Olsen is an entrepreneur, consultant, author, speaker, and expert in product management and Lean Startup. At Olsen Solutions, he works with CEOs and product leaders to help them build great products and strong product teams, often as interim VP of Product.

Dan has worked with a range of businesses, from small, early-stage startups to large public companies, on a wide variety of web and mobile products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Microsoft, YouSendIt (now HighTail), Epocrates, Medallia, XING, Financial Engines, and One Medical Group.

Prior to consulting, Dan worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit. He also led product management at social networking pioneer Friendster, and was the cofounder and CEO of YourVersion, a TechCrunch award-winning personalized news startup. Dan began his career designing nuclear-powered submarines.

Dan earned a BS in electrical engineering from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford. He also earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Virginia Tech, where he studied the Lean manufacturing principles that inspired Lean Startup.

Dan wrote the bestseller The Lean Product Playbook, published by Wiley. He lives in Silicon Valley, where he hosts the monthly Lean Product & Lean UX Meetup. A frequent speaker at business and tech events, Dan enjoys sharing ideas and comparing notes with as many people as he can. He also gives public and private workshops.

Todd Olson is co-founder and CEO of Pendo, a product cloud that helps product teams deliver software customers love. A three-time entrepreneur, Olson teamed up with fellow product leaders and technologists from Red Hat, Cisco and Google to launch Pendo in October 2013. The company has since raised $106 million in venture capital, landed nearly 700 customers and now employs 228 people across offices in Raleigh, San Francisco, New York and Yakum, Israel. It was named to the Forbes Cloud 100 and as an Inc. Best Workplace in 2018.

Amanda likes to watch what happens when people interact with tech. With a varied background encompassing things like making mix tapes for businesses, teaching stained glass to children, and making sure websites work...she's always been honing the empathetic craft that serves her in the world of UX today. You can now find her working hard on the UX team at Xenial where she and her teammates design, test, analyze, iterate and repeat to come up with the best cloud-based enterprise management software solutions around. She loves connecting her team with the rest of the business to foster design thinking culture and to better understand the motivations of their clients. She's also fascinated with how all of our minds are navigating modern life, and in our current tech revolution, she has a deep interest in not only how we shape our products but how they shape us.

Justin Dilley is the Head of Product at FullStory where he helps guide the engineering, design, and product management practices who are responsible for developing and executing on the overall product strategy and mission of FullStory. Prior to FullStory, he has led a number of product teams at The Home Depot and Amazon where he was responsible for products ranging from Home Depot's mobile app to Amazon's Fire Tablets, Amazon Dash and Amazon Payments.

Justin has a BS in Computer Information Systems from Indiana's Kelley School of Business and an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business.

Adam is VP of Platform at LaunchDarkly. He has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technical sales. He has worked in both enterprise and consumer companies such as VMware, EMC, and GitHub. Adam is driven by a passion for inclusive leadership and solving problems with technology. Adam is also an Advisor for a number of startups and nonprofits. His perspective on life has been shaped by a background in Physics and Visual Art, an ongoing adventure as a husband and father, and a childhood career as a fire juggler.

Ashley McIlwain is a Customer Success Leader for the New Business Concepts organization at Essity. She is particularly interested on the CS Operations and enablement functions of Customer Success and has responsibility for building the Customer Success toolbox within Essity for a global Customer Success team. She has been involved in the Customer Success discipline for b2b software applications for the last 6 years, and in driving excellence with
customers for many more.

Michael Harnum is the CEO of ESG, and an active contributor to the Customer Success community. He brings more than 30 years of experience in the Technology and Services industry, and has proven to be an influential leader maximizing employee productivity, improving customer satisfaction and helping businesses grow. He is passionate about providing world class customer care and is driven to help organizations succeed.

Shreesha Ramdas is SVP and GM at Medallia. Previously he was CEO and Co-founder of Strikedeck, the GM of the Marketing Cloud at CallidusCloud, Co-founder at LeadFormix (acquired by CallidusCloud) & OuterJoin, and General Manager at Yodlee. Prior to that, Shreesha has led teams in Sales and Marketing at Catalytic Software, MW2
Consulting, and Tata. Shreesha advises several startups on marketing & growth hacking. You can find him on Twitter, @Shreesha.

Kalley is a Business Intelligence Analyst at Rapid7. She joined Rapid7 as an intern during her Masters in Business Analytics program, and over the past 3 years has grown into a full-time analyst supporting various stakeholders and digging into projects creating an impact. She enjoys answering tough business questions backed by data and is excited to share how Rapid7 has used Pendo to help bring our go-to-market employees up to speed on how their customers interact with our products. When she is not analyzing data, you can find Kalley trying new restaurants, taking part in a dance class, or reading a new book.

Stephanie leads onboarding and adoption for Customer Success at Rapid7. These duties include strategic leadership and cross-functional partnerships across the company. She has over 10 years experience in account management and customer success across both finance and information security. Stephanie has been a key champion driving internal adoption of the customer health score at Rapid7.

Oji Udezue is the VP of product for Calendly where he oversees and leads all of product and user experience. He was formerly head of product for Atlassian’s communications products, and launched its first new product since their IPO: Atlassian Stride (subsequently sold to Slack). A product veteran with past roles at Microsoft, Bridgewater Associates and his own startup, InterMingl; Oji is passionate about bringing new unique and scalable products and ideas into the world. He mentors startups with a focus on companies with diverse founders, and drives startup investments in Africa as a passion project. As a 20+ year veteran of product management, he is very visionary and thoughtful about product craft and practices that lead to building great products. His ultimate goal is productizing functional telepathy, but for now will settle for transforming how teams and the people in them collaborate, and optimize their workflows at work. Most days you can follow him on twitter @ojiudezue or find his scribblings on medium.com.