Zach O'Neal spent five years running the subscriber experience as a Product Marketing Manager across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. He now leads the same function at a B2B SaaS startup, at a fraction of the headcount.

Most PMs have never worked with a product marketer who sees the role through his lens. Zach gets specific about why, including the four years it took him at Disney to find a real stride with the product team, the hiring filter he uses that has nothing to do with copywriting, and the question he asks instead of running a blame-game post-mortem.

Plus why he describes himself as "the voice of the product to the consumer, and the voice of the consumer to the product," and what breaks when no one fills that role.

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Most PM content is the highlight reel. This episode is what gets said after the camera turns off.

Alyx Priestley is a Product Director who came up running her own creative agency before someone called her "the product person" and she had to go figure out what that meant. She now writes some of the sharper PM essays on Medium and is rebuilding her consultancy alongside an in-stealth sports brand in the golf space.

This is the conversation PMs have on their own, not on LinkedIn.

A few things this episode gets into: what Alyx actually says to PMs drowning in imposter syndrome, what to do when leadership doesn't respect the function they hired you to lead, and the bluntest one - what not doing the thing is costing you right now.

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Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn
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He has a spreadsheet. 350+ contacts and still emails 30–40 of them every couple months.

It didn't land him a PM job. What it did was keep him in motion long enough to take the advice that actually worked: stop waiting for the title.

Kartikeya Shah is now Project Manager II at RozieAI, where he's been handed a product to manage about a year into a job he took instead of holding out for a full PM role.

We get into the two questions he asked at the end of every networking call, why he stopped only reaching out to PMs, and what to do when the books and frameworks don't fit your actual reality.

If you're trying to pivot into product right now, don't skip this one.

Support the show

Connect with Santiana: Santiana's LinkedIn
Connect with Meagan: Meagan's LinkedIn
Checkout Prodfolio: https://prodfolio.io/