Campbell Brofft loves being part of a team. Whether it’s leading from the front as the oldest of five children, walking onto the Squash team in college, or building products for millions of people Campbell keeps taking on big challenges and smashing them for winners.
She grew up in Connecticut as the oldest of five children. As part of a big family, Campbell had to get comfortable with where the car was going, eating what was on her plate, and from a young age taking on the responsibility of looking after her younger siblings. After years of commuting to Manhattan, her dad took the leap to start his own company, a move towards entrepreneurship that in many ways inspired Campbell’s career interests years later.
She left home earlier than most to attend boarding school in New Hampshire at St. Paul’s before moving diagonally West to attend Williams College as an Economics & Art History double major. Campbell has always enjoyed being part of a team so she tried out for the Williams Squash team and successfully walked on. Both her academic and athletic backgrounds were early, authentic representations of the skills needed to be a great Product Manager – the combination of analytical skills & artistic ways of thinking with a dash of competitiveness to deliver on time and above expectations.
All the while she was circling Boston. But first, she went back to the NYC metro to work at J.P. Morgan’s Private Bank. She helped C-suite executives of public companies with their concentrated stock positions as part of a customized approach to portfolio management. These clients were whip smart, ambitious, and direct. An incredible opportunity to learn from some of corporate America’s most impressive leaders. Her clients served as a powerful example to come prepared, communicate well, and have executive presence. J.P. Morgan was a formative experience in many ways but Campbell was drawn to the energy of the clients she served, the “builders”. She began to realize she would be best served in the next phase of her career by the energizing environment of building technology companies. John Pierpoint Morgan himself would be working on a tech startup if he were around today, wouldn’t he? She began to look for ways to reposition herself.
Business school made natural sense. She applied to programs with a more “generalist” curriculum and ended up at Harvard Business School. Located “in Cambridge” as they like to say. Campbell was excited for business school to help serve as a stepping stone to becoming more informed about the business world at large and help her chart a more intentional path. A consistent theme of Campbell’s we will be returning to.. Harvard absolutely delivered on those promises. Her classmates were people from all different types of backgrounds who were invaluable resources to helping her hone in on her next move. Yet it was the experience outside of the classroom where her new career came calling.
Campbell arrived at Spring, a Series B funded mobile shopping startup later acquired by Shop Runner, as an MBA intern doing general marketing. She helped clean up data sets, run LTV / CAC analyses, and other special projects. She had to learn how to beg engineers to get access to the data she needed, a valuable skill that any true non-technical startup employee needs to master. Quickly. Campbell entrenched herself on that side of the house and realized there was some really interesting work going on in the world of Product & Engineering. By the end of the summer she was attending every standup, going to sprint planning meetings, and essentially committed to a new career in Product.
After her graduation, Campbell sailed right down the Charles River to TripAdvisor as a Product Manager. She worked with the Machine Learning team and learned what it was like to be a PM for the first time. She got a real education from functional experts in whiteboarding sessions about the role machine learning plays at a public consumer tech company before later rotating through a B2B product group. Then, as Campbell has since come to learn about herself, she started to feel the startup itch.
She returned to New York for a Product role at Zola, the wedding registry startup. It was at Zola where Campbell felt like she really grew up as a product person. Their team was lean, they had just raised a Series D round of funding, and she walked in the door as the 3rd Product Manager on the team. She inherited their flagship offering, the registry product, built by Zola’s co-founders. Campbell describes working on registry as “the most incredible learning experience”. Over her four years at Zola she ended her tenure as the Director of Product running the Commerce business. This portfolio consisted of Zola’s revenue generating products – save the dates, invitations, wedding albums, & the home store which was launched during Covid. She detailed that it was a pretty wild experience to think about the roadmap impacts of a pandemic across their product portfolio. And she got married during Covid too! That’s some major dogfooding of the user experience right there.
And then, through a series of personal and professional events, Campbell found her way back to Boston. Her husband had graduated from business school too and landed a job offer he couldn’t pass up. Thankfully Zola was supportive of the move! While circling Boston growing up she always loved the city & local tech presence. She appreciated the livability and, if the suburbs ever came calling, they were a lot closer than New York City. In the meantime she loves the South End. She’s living in her 3rd apartment in the neighborhood and hopes to stay there until she’s dragged out! She loves spending time outside with her husband & one year old son. She takes advantage of the accessible public tennis courts with friends and sometimes shoots over to The Delux, a retro neighborhood dive, for the early bird special. Even life with young ones can’t stop an occasional cocktail hour.
With all the rapid growth and other changes she’s lived through the past few years, Campbell started to get that itch again as her learning curve sloped down ever so slightly. Coupled with the huge life change of having her first son, she decided to take another leap. She took 7 months off to recharge, adjust, and build her new family.
In a new city with some time off (professionally) to think through her next step, she wanted to be incredibly intentional about her next career move. She went through a period of introspection around what was most important to her over the summer months. She knew she wanted to be somewhere where she was pushed to learn out of her comfort zone, somewhere she could still grow her career in Product, and also aspired to join another fast growing startup.
She was aided by having the good fortune of looking at a time when most companies were still hiring but you could begin to see the macro shifting. It was a little easier to see leading indicators of which companies would be able to sustain themselves through the tightening economic conditions. This helped her vet roles & companies in a higher quality way than she might have been able to in 2021. Campbell looked critically at different business models to see how they’d hold up in a recessionary environment. She looked at fundraising history to see which companies had the balance sheets to live through the next couple of years. And she spent time getting to know interesting startups through educational conversations and backchanneling with peers & investors to determine company health.
This culminated in her move to Jellyfish, a role she’s been in for almost 6 months as a Director of Product. Her first SaaS Product role, she’s again been pushed out of her comfort zone to build products for businesses helping turn engineering teams into business leaders. As a product leader at Jellyfish, Campbell supports product development teams that drive continuous value delivery for the tool’s users – tooling that makes engineering management tasks such as delivery management, team effectiveness, strategic alignment, and capitalizing software far less daunting. Passionate about all things product development, she brings a consumer perspective to the way the org thinks about crafting a strong user experience.
Here are three insights Campbell shared with me that have informed her work and career:
Optimize for Always Learning – Campbell has learned that her intuitive source of energy is to continue to learn. She shared “at every inflection point of my career I’ve pushed myself to do something totally new. I went from being an analyst at JP Morgan to business school being an incredibly different challenge to learning Product at a consumer tech public company to learning how to manage and be a leader at a growth stage consumer tech company. And now I find myself at a SaaS company which is incredibly different on multiple dimensions. Living an entirely different challenge there”. Product is a purposeful place for her to always be pushing herself and learning
Don’t Be Afraid to Take a Leap – Change is inevitable. She’s found strength in taking leaps and figuring it out as she goes. Even if it’s not intuitive. “I get nervous before a big change but push myself to do it because I haven’t let myself down yet. Having the courage to take the leap is important”. With her intentional push to test the limits of her comfort zone, a reminder to fight the fear that comes with it is a good companion!
Be Incredibly Picky & Intentional – “Whether it’s an internal move, a job switch, or industry switch you’re playing the long game when it comes to your career. Another 3 months looking for the right thing to get to the place you want to be is nothing in the long run. It’s not a bad thing to turn down a job offer or to not have a job for a little while. If you give yourself the space and time to be intentional and invest your energy in the right things that will pay off”. Direct from Campbell, why would I add anything else??
Campbell sees herself working in Product for tech companies for a long time. After 6 months at Jellyfish, she’s really excited about the future of the company. She isn’t sure if eventually leading a product organization at a growth stage company or trying to be a part of something earlier stage sound more interesting as a later chapter. Tenets of both sound very exciting in their own way. Campbell is a builder in the truest sense!
For more about Campbell, feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ll catch her on the courts of the South End or taking in an early cocktail at Delux. Thanks for sharing. Can’t wait to see what limits you smash through next!