Sharon Roth is a Product & Design leader who’s built her career in the lab, across different modalities, to bring more creative product experiences to life. Today she serves as the Senior Director of Product Management at Quantified AI, the AI-driven flight simulator for sellers. The app feels as real as your next video call, scales across teams, programs, and companies, and ramps reps 42% faster.
Sharon grew up just outside of Boston, dreaming of becoming a veterinarian. She loved art, drawing, and exploring her creativity. Sharon set off to the University of Pennsylvania to study Bioengineering and experience a multi-disciplinary curriculum. It taught her a lot about working under pressure and high stress. Each week they had intensive 6 hour labs where their group would have to set up an experiment, conduct it, and then write a report all in the same session. Their mandate was to come prepared, learn, and execute. It was grueling but she looked forward to it every week.
Beginning her career in healthcare consulting, she learned data analysis and experienced a number of different cases and working styles from managers & peers alike. Sharon took pieces from each experience and built strong connections, gravitating to experiences where she could learn technical & strategic skills from smart people.
There, she experienced a variety of leadership styles and was able to learn how to be a stronger leader herself. There isn’t just one way to lead!
Sharon had also started a medical device company based on her senior design project for her major. The device helped surgeons complete medical training and she navigated the patent filing process to license their technology. It was a crash course on the opportunities, challenges, and perseverance needed to succeed in the world of medical devices. She learned a ton from the experience but ultimately decided to pursue a more software focused career.
On her own time she completed self taught coding classes & front end web development to prepare for a pivot into tech. Boston based data unification platform Tamr was hiring for a Product Designer and they took a chance on Sharon.
At Tamr she applied machine learning and, over five years, grew from a product designer to eventually leading Product Management. What stood out was working with smart people on a cool problem. As a Product Designer, she got her hands dirty in the details of understanding how to ask great questions and work with lots of people cross functionally. Next, she leveraged her consulting & product design skills to help scale out their product team as a Product Manager. Andy Palmer, one of Tamr’s Co-Founders & CEO, encouraged her to take the leap into product management.
One of Sharon’s big wins was finally getting a patent approval, this time as part of Tamr’s IP, on Generating and Reusing Transformations for Evolving Schema Mapping. It helped to work with mentors who had written patents before!
As Tamr’s product management team continued to grow and their offering expanded from on premise to hybrid to SaaS, Sharon got to help tackle challenging problems across a wider use base between different modalities.
Next, Sharon went to Honor Education to try working in EdTech. Their education software ran across native mobile apps as well as webapps, and their founding team was incredibly talented, led by CEO Joel Podolny who worked with Steve Jobs at Apple University and Pooja Brown from DocuSign and StitchFix.
At Honor Education, Sharon learned to be a strong communicator, adding to her technology & people skill sets. She leveraged everything she learned about AI & ML at Tamr and brought it to Honor, accelerating her existing learnings through new use cases.
Now, Sharon is leading Quantified AI’s Product & Design team. She’s excited to be back working in an Enterprise focused company, leading Design alongside Product. They are a small, driven team creating “the flight simulator” for sales.
Quantified is an early stage startup so Sharon is focused on strategic & execution based discipline. Version 2.0 of their product is coming soon, incorporating a better design experience for users. Their unique approach to incorporating LLMs into their tech stack, scaling in a way that can’t be replicated, is an opportunity that was too good for her to pass up!
Questions Are Your Roadmap
It’s popular to encourage new hires to ask a lot of questions. But it’s always a good time to ask questions! When you work with smart, talented people it’s a blessing to be able to ask them about themselves and the problems they’re working on to be able to build better solutions.
When Sharon started working in UX Design, she quickly learned how important it was to ask questions in the right way to get to the core of understanding a problem. Whether you’re experienced or new to a Product role, Sharon encourages her team to “keep asking ‘why’ until you get to the bottom of it.” Having humility and admitting you’re not the expert so you don’t make assumptions is paramount to building a better product roadmap.
Sharon also adds that when someone proposes a solution as part of a line of open ended questioning, the key is to ask more by digging into the solution they initially surfaced.
When a member of your team comes to you and says “we really need to build X feature”, they’re coming to you for good reason. Dig into the why to understand how often the issue comes up, when it happens in a customer conversation, and why they’re asking for it in the first place. Is there an even better way to build a solution?
Also, people are always excited about getting to a solution. By delaying the solution discussion to first get everyone to agree on the problem, you can coordinate a better response. Sharon has been in rooms where stakeholders can’t agree on the problem they’re trying to solve, which can sometimes be even more painful!
In order to build a better process, Sharon and her team goes through a phased roadmap building process. Before any design docs or requirements are scoped, they complete a discovery phase where they define what each problem means for the business. Through their research they will diagnose whether each problem is important or not to prioritize, giving people proper space to ask questions.
By asking better questions and articulating the underlying issues thoroughly, they can work together as an organization to chart a better path forward.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Seek New Challenges – “Trying new things is how you learn and grow. At a startup, there are so many opportunities to try new things. As startups evolve, you need to embrace all that’s going to happen and make it a positive thing. Otherwise don’t go to a startup!”
Act with Integrity – “Do your best, show your work. But also treat others with respect and kindness while doing it. How you treat people and how you show up every day will impact your work environment. You’re responsible for the energy you bring to the room, so be authentic and try to inject some positivity. It will help you build the type of network you want to have too”
Invest in Communication Skills – “It helps you ask questions well, advocate for yourself, have your ideas be heard. It also helps others understand your impact. It takes continuous practice to do well.”
Sharon wants to build great products that make an impact on people’s lives. She wants to have fun doing it too! In her view, work should be hard but also enjoyable. Having people that believed in her has been a huge accelerant to her success.If you want to learn more about Sharon, you can find her scaling up on AI & product management at Quantified, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see all of the questions you ask and thoughtfully scoped products you build in the quarters ahead!