Bringing Positivity, Joy, and Support to Product Ownership
Name: Caleb
Title: Senior Manager Product Owner
Pronouns: He/Him
Location: Chicago
My personal brand
As a product manager, I wear many hats to be successful, and I’ve always thrived in dynamic roles where I get to think about novel solutions to different problems. I have a passion for tinkering, and the love of new challenges allows me to bring a degree of positivity and excitement into every aspect of my work.
How I work and my current role
I’m a firm believer in the best ideas coming from a cross-functional collective, and not an individual. We perform best when we master the art of listening and leaning on one another’s strengths and perspectives. In product, this manifests through our product mindset. We are the bridge between business and technology, between vision and execution, and our success comes from the understanding that we don’t have the answers, but we have the people that can help us find them.
My favorite part about my current role is empowering and supporting my team. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more satisfaction from my work than the times when I’ve been able to provide the guidance, resources, and safety that allow my team to shine.
In product, almost all barriers are caused by miscommunication or misalignment. Solving for these requires getting the right folks together and providing the clarity and vision needed to re-center the group. Once everyone understands their role and their objectives, everything else begins to click in place.
Learning moments and showing up
The first step in personal growth is the one outside of your comfort zone. Ten years ago, I worked in a call center and was convinced that it’d be too hard and too expensive to finish my degree while working full time and pivot to something else. If I had stayed in my comfort zone, I’d still be in that call center. That first step of signing up for school and deciding I wanted more was the hardest, but making that step set a fire beneath me that has made every step since then easier.
We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time. In all the things we do, both in work and our personal lives, it’s so important to bring positivity and joy into anything you can. As easy as it is to fall into negative feelings and thoughts, the small effort we can make to be positive compounds exponentially. I notice this with my team every day. Both positivity and negativity are infectious, and you decide what energy you bring to each interaction. Why not make it light? Why not make it fun?
The biggest thing holding you back is you. If I could talk with my younger self, the advice I’d give is to take chances and fight back against that voice in your head that gives you a million reasons not to go for it.
Things important to me in a company are recognition and the feeling of being valued. One of the things I regularly tout about Discover is that its leaders do an excellent job of raising their people up and acknowledging the hard work people put in every day.
Behind the product persona
I enjoy the little things. My favorite things to do in my spare time are simple; scenic walks around the city with my wife, goofing around with my nephews, exploring new places, trying new foods, etc. If I get to spend time with my loved ones and try new things, I’m happy.
I grew up on a small hobby farm in Wisconsin, and every summer we’d all tend to and eventually harvest all the vegetables from the family garden and make a big batch of salsa. It’d be a day-long activity of prepping, cooking, and canning. I feel like this activity as a family really shaped my values. It was teamwork, a fun time together, the culmination of a summer of hard work, and the reward for our labor. It’s hard to describe how good that salsa was, something about the journey to it made it so much better. I think this is why I like product work so much. It’s a journey filled with challenges and hard work, but we go on that journey as a team and celebrate our wins together.