Micah Lanier, the childhood Founder of “Micahsoft”, is an analytical Product leader who took the long way around to build his career in Product. Today he serves as a Principal Product Manager at Jump, a fan experience platform for live sporting events, where he works to unlock the value of the startup’s data for colleagues and customers alike.
Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin Micah never imagined he would be living on the East Coast working in startups. His Mom grew up in Madison as well, while his Dad was born in Japan and came to the US as a teenager. His mom was the family communicator, working as a union organizer and authoring the organization’s monthly newspaper—a content marketer before that type of thing existed. His Dad was an engineer, a city planning (GIS) professional. Today, he would probably be called a data scientist.
Neither had college degrees but both taught Micah a lot about hard work and the intangibles needed to find success. Technology was an early influence in his life, from science fiction to even growing up with a computer in the house. Yes, Micah began life with a 1987 vintage Mac Plus and used later models in the 90’s to experiment with web design and software applications following the advent of the internet. He even published a few applications under his trade name, Micahsoft, where users as far away as Japan emailed him with support questions.
Micah met his wife Colleen in high school. She hails from a family of 6 that has a grand total of 18 or 19 degrees (he isn’t sure of the precise count) among them. Her family was an early driving influence in demonstrating the power of education and the doors it opens. Colleen recently submitted her doctoral dissertation for her PhD at Harvard on the topic of international chemical regulations. Her approach to education and success has shown him that there are all sorts of pathways for people to pursue interesting work.
Studying mathematical Economics with an emphasis on data analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Micah graduated in 2009. The bottom, as we now like to call it. He worked at a boutique consulting firm called OpenBI and fell into the world of “Big Data” just as that buzzword hit the scene. Micah focused on business intelligence implementations; working with databases and specialized enterprise software tools, he compiled reports and built analysis tools to derive insights for clients.
Micah immersed himself in the world of data. When staffed on a longer term consulting engagement with the New York Times, he knew the space was right for him. His wife was accepted into a graduate program at Columbia University, so the two moved to New York and he joined the media giant full time as they fully transitioned their business to digital first.
Landing in their data engineering group, Micah helped build out digital advertising databases and analytical tools, and then large-scale tracking and analytics solutions. Through a discussion with a manager and mentor, he transitioned to a newly formed data science team, getting exposure to the intersection of the digital world and the newsroom. He helped the NYT better understand what content was most engaging for their audience to drive subscriber retention.
When his wife started applying for PhD programs, he took stock of his career and considered ways to shift into a more business-focused trajectory. He was accepted to Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to pursue a Masters in Computational Science and Engineering. Through a less common pathway, he completed this one year Masters in the machine learning world before continuing on to get his MBA at Harvard Business School.
While in graduate school, Micah completed internships at Legendary Entertainment, a film studio with bleeding-edge analytical acumen, and then Wayfair here in Boston. At Wayfair he worked with large amounts of data in their Data Science group, using it to build the company’s first machine learning-driven direct mail targeting strategy.
Upon graduation, Micah joined Wayfair’s email marketing group to help drive better content recommendations and targeting using machine learning. Next, he moved to Wayfair Professional, the company’s B2B arm selling to offices, hotels, etc. There, he built customer lifecycle management and sales enablement tools for their sales force, helping account managers leverage data to reach customers most receptive to sales outreach.
Micah loved his co-workers and valued the opportunity—afforded by the somewhat smaller world of Wayfair Professional—to work cross functionally with a high level strategic view of the whole business. But, in early 2020, he wanted to dive further into Product and left Wayfair.
Micah wished he had pursued Product directly out of business school and soon joined the product team at Alignable, a Series A social network helping small business owners, as their Director of Insights & Analytics. Micah scaled Alignable’s data function and built data oriented product features like content recommendations, sporadically dusting off his technical skills and working directly in the product organization for the first time.
Covid’s impact on SMBs made this experience a rewarding one that veered in unexpected directions as Alignable built thought leadership around small business-owner sentiment. Micah even worked with Alignable’s Head of PR to gather and surface insights to journalists at Axios and the NYT; one US Senator even cited their data in public policy pronouncements.
Micah joined Connie Health in 2021 after hearing from one of their co-founders. Connie was building a Medicare brokerage startup to better match seniors with health insurance. He joined as their Head of Data, building out the team before their VP of Product departed the company, affording Micah the opportunity to serve in a dual Data and Product role—his first product leadership opportunity. Eventually he became Connie’s VP of Data, supporting their generative AI and machine learning investments. It was a fast moving, big thinking role that allowed him to build a product solving a problem that was important to him: supporting our aging population.
After 2+ years at Connie Health, Micah wanted to migrate fully to a Product role. He connected with Jump’s Chief People Officer—another HBS alum—when he saw that Jump was searching for an experienced product leader to focus on data.
Jump, founded in 2021 by Jordy Leiser, Alex Rodriguez, and Marc Lore, is building ticketing and fan engagement tools for live events. As Alex and Marc—now co-owners of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx—explored buying the New York Mets, they recognized an opportunity to help fans better engage with their favorite sports teams in a compelling way. Having built a sizable team of product delivery specialists, GTM experts, and experienced leaders in other functions, Jump is busy building its business and consumer offerings—an “operating system for live events” analogous to Toast or Shopify for a new vertical.
In Micah’s role as the Principal Product Manager for Data, he’s responsible for productizing Jump’s data—finding ways to make it valuable to internal and external customers with actionable analytics tools, sophisticated marketing and pricing algorithms, and close integrations with other products. Over the long run, he looks forward to ensuring that Jump effectively leverages cutting-edge AI and machine learning tools to make their customers more successful and delight fans around the world.
Embrace “MECE” problem-solving
“MECE” refers to breaking down problems into “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive” components. That is, when you frame a problem, break it down into pieces both distinct from one another (mutually exclusive) and that collectively represent the entire problem space (collectively exhaustive). It’s a common framework taught to management consultants that I picked up at Wayfair. I didn’t love the fact that so many people at Wayfair had similar management consulting and/or MBA backgrounds, but this lesson stuck with me.
This framework can be useful for many complex problems, but I have found it most valuable when applied to business problems that feature interactions among several teams, functions, or processes. I found this particularly useful as part of Wayfair Professional, where problems often arose among teams that did not share reporting relationships and we were often a minor “customer” of technology teams focused on serving Wayfair’s much larger consumer business. Every so often something would just…break, and tracing those problems though a complex chain of custody and isolating their causes helped us get back up and running quickly.
Granted, it isn’t a panacea. Some problems have complex components like interrelationships or feedback loops that cannot be easily separated. And many problems have more than one cause or solution, so it is still important to apply judgment when deciding how best to solve a problem. But it’s a great way to start the problem-solving process, and a tool that I frequently revisit.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Create and Embrace Serendipity – “Some of my most significant career decisions started with seemingly minor decisions or leaps of faith. Saying yes to conversations and engaging sincerely can pay off in unexpected ways and frequently only costs a bit of your time. At the very least, you’ll learn something new, figure out new ways to tell stories, or help someone else in need.”
Most Decisions are Two-Way Doors – “I think of this Jeff Bezos lesson frequently because of how well we use it at Jump and how poorly I’ve seen others make decisions elsewhere. Basically: most decisions are reversible and people often eschew the opportunity to make and learn from quick decisions in order to invest precious time in making the “right” one at the outset. We apply this lesson constantly at Jump—my manager and another product leader came from Amazon and have very much made it the norm. If you don’t frequently undo your decisions you aren’t making enough of them.”
Do Something You Care About – “Earlier in my career I joined a company thinking that the company’s sophisticated data skill set would be a great fit for me, only to find that I didn’t really care about the problem of getting people to click on more emails and buy more of their product. Ever since, I’ve looked only at roles where I’m solving a customer problem I care about; now at Jump I get to improve live sports and event experiences that I find delightful as a fan.”
Micah aspires to continue to grow in product leadership at growth stage companies. While his journey to the product world has been a bit more meandering, the zig zagging has given him clarity that he’s ready to double down and grow as a product leader. One day he aspires to become a General Manager, applying his growing product skills in that type of role.
If you’d like to learn more about Micah, you can find him deep in Jump’s data, spending time with his family around Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the waves you make in sporting and live events across the U.S. (and beyond) in the years to come!