Kate Makrigiannis

@katemakrix
Product Leader
San Jose, CA
She/her

Product Strategy

Mentor

Coach

Investor

Advisor

Speaker

Product Manager

Design Thinking

User Research

Workshop Facilitator

Early Adopter

Archivist

Product Design

UX Design

UI Design

Prototyping

Product Research

Qualitative Researcher

Documentation

LGBT+

ADHD

Actor

Women in Tech

Remote Worker

Culture Builder

Traveling

Game Player

Process Improvement

Fitness

Consultant

Traveler

College Graduate

JAMstack

CI/CD

Content Strategy

Fitness Addict

Agile Methodology

Seen Some Sh*t

Product Management

I’ve been working in the Product space for nearly 10 years! That feels wild to say - but with that experience I’m at the point where I love to share and promote product techniques, processes, and mindsets that are proven to help teams ship great software well.

I’ve worked across a diverse spectrum of industries: early-stage healthcare startups and food security nonprofits, enterprise retail and finance giants, even the US Department of Defense. I've seen great ways to manage high-performing product teams, and I’ve observed some less-successful techniques...

I've coached product folks, including agency consultants and their clients, and I’ve also taught 0-1 Lean Product courses on my own as a freelance mentor, curating PM curriculum and workshops myself.

I'm hoping to tell stories using clear missions/visions for product teams to ship great things. I love to have customer conversations, collect qualitative and quantitative user feedback in consistent feedback loops and keep a pulse on competitive markets. I'm good at facilitating decision-making with stakeholders and collaborators in design and engineering. I have a lot of diverse product experience, and I'd like to influence and streamline product ops and processes to find better ways to work.

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I'm open to

advising companies,

speaking at events,

guest lecturing,

giving resume feedback,

partnering on side projects,

content creation,

freelance roles,

part time roles,

co-founding a company,

beta testing new products,

participating in user research,

talking to journalists,

new client inquiries,

joining company boards,

and speaking on podcasts.

Contact Me

Resume

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Sep 2022 - Present

Principal Product Coach, Kaiser Permanente

Mar 2022 - Jul 2022

Senior Product Manager, Gatsby

Jul 2020 - Mar 2022

Senior Product Manager, Zendesk

Oct 2020 - Jun 2021

Product Strategy Consultant, B Lab

Portfolio

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48in48 - Volunteered as a project manager In their inaugural event hosted at Ponce City Market's General Assembly in Atlanta 2015, 48in48 delivered over $1,200,000 of value to Atlanta Nonprofits wi...

Awarded Swift Practitioner certification badge through Badgr & Swiftbird. Cool news! I got the Swift Method Practitioner badge for participating in and co-facilitating successful Swift Method proje...

My first-ever payment for Product Consulting :) using Honeybook

Completed the BrainTrust Scrum Master Certification course in Tampa, Florida.

Product & Design Mentorship

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Technovation Girls Atlanta - Product Strategy volunteer I helped consult a team of girls (Go ClassFive SafetyPin!) aged 10-18 on their idea for a mobile application that gives young women resources...

[In-Progress Draft] Freelance Product Strategy & Hiring I coached B Lab’s Technology & Program leaders to refresh & re-energize the way the non-profit thinks about software product strategy & devel...

product strategy: simplified support agent task workflow users: support agents who have 10s to 100s of new and in-progress conversations with end-users across multiple channels (real-time calls or ...

Black Girls Code mentorship program with Zendesk I partnered with an engineer from Zendesk Copenhagen to mentor a group of 3 Black girls in high school interested in breaking into tech. We met twic...

Things I’ve built

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[In-progress draft] Product Strategy: Custom Objects in Zendesk users: honestly, nearly the entire Zendesk ecosystem -- • Zendesk admins • Zendesk agents • Zendesk users who write articles • Zendes...

customer context for support agents users: customer support agents who have conversations with end-users in support tickets, and the admins that configure the software that the agents use the probl...

mindfulness therapy native mobile app users: patients with a specific type of chronic pain the problem: existing prescriptive drug treatment options for patients with chronic pain can often cause m...

modernizing ticket marketplace pricing domain architecture users (in this case, humans who care about the effort): development teams and business stakeholders, with end users being ticket buyers an...

Speaking engagements

Spoke at Penn State's Launchbox Summer Founders program The Summer Founders program selected five teams from a pool of applicants spanning eight different Penn State campuses, four academic college...

Conferences & Events

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Attended MindTheProduct Con in San Francisco, CA Here's my instagram post about it. I also live-tweeted it from my ProductBits account here. Notable talks that stuck with me: • notes coming soon Ps...

Volunteered at Shorty Awards 2017 in NYC My dear friend Nik Aliye produced a fantastic Awards Show and I was able to participate by checking guests at the door. Shortys website here.

Attended Web Afternoon, UX Edition For today, you’re the user. And the product is great conversations with people like you who want to design a better web. Let’s talk UX. We designed this event wit...

Attended ALMChicago with the Scrum Masters (or "Dev Team Coordinators" of 352 Inc. Here's our writeup of the event: Change, Trust, and Being Truly Agile My section copied below (and attached) Chang...