Modern Web Podcast S11E11- What is a Product Manager? with Andrea Griffiths of GitHub

On this episode of Modern Web Podcast, Rob Ocel interviews Andrea Griffiths, a Senior Product Manager at GitHub. Andrea shares her story of transitioning into tech and product management from a nontraditional path, and how paid internships and open source contributions helped her along the way. They discuss the role of product manager, what they do, and how product managers need to have empathy and bridge the gap between stakeholders, users, and engineering teams. They also talk about how to build truly global tech communities and reach out to developers across the world who speak every language.

[00:00:00] Tech career journey: GitHub via Latin America
[00:03:56] Non-traditional career success through open source.
[00:08:59] Gain experience, open source, support dreams.
[00:13:15] Innovate, share, learn 
[00:18:01] Product management: Global expansion, execution, feedback, accessibility, localization, KPI.
[00:21:33] Product managers bridge teams, stakeholders, users.  
[00:26:21] Product manager: glue, communicate, empathize.
[00:31:06] Empower global tech communities 
[00:35:56] Global expansion for all developers.
[00:40:39] Grow global developer communities: GitHub’s mission.

Sponsored by This Dot Labs.

Episode source