Ben Erez
🗽 Early stage product builder & advisor based in Brooklyn🎨 Ben & Bloom Design Studio🗞️ Substack🎙️ Supra Insider Podcast Co-Host
Story 📈
I grew up between the US and Israel and started my career in tech investment banking in San Francisco, working in a cubicle for 80 hours a week.I quickly realized I'd rather be out in the world solving problems. So I left to start my own company.Our vision was to build an OpenTable for clothing stores, allowing people to pre-browse inventory and populate fitting rooms at a scheduled time.Like most first-time founders, I made a lot of mistakes and <2 years later I threw in the towel and joined a small startup called Life360 where I first got exposed to product management.After building a lot of processes (mostly on the customer support side), I left Life360 to become the first product manager of an early stage startup called Breeze.At Breeze, I led our 0->1 fleet management initiative and a year later, Breeze was acqi-hired by Ford for our talent and tech.We launched and scaled Canvas under the Ford umbrella as a flexible alternative to car ownership. I led product for our shopping and checkout experiences.A couple years post-ace, Canvas scaled up to thousands of customers and I decided to join a startup called Abstract as their first product manager. Canvas was an early customer of Abstract and I was a power user; I jumped on the opportunity to PM a product I loved as a customer.At Abstract, I led the collaboration team, which focused on improving the presentation, curation and feedback process for designers and their teammates.At Abstract, we painfully watched as the Sketch market share dissolved; Figma became the dominant player in the design tooling space. Since Abstract was only compatible with Sketch, we were bleeding customers many of my colleagues (me included) were let go.After Abstracted I joined Facebook to lead a team focused on making small business advertisers successful through personalized guidance. I loved my time at FB and drove a massive $300M+ revenue lift. Biggest measurable win of my career.When my wife and I decided to move to NYC, I joined a local startup called Attentive to lead new product experimentation. My first few months at Attentive were some of the best in my career. After the NPE team got disbanded due to the company doubling down on the core business, I was shuffled to a new team every few months which made it hard to make a meaningful impact. So I decided to leave.After a few months of exploring, I was offered the opportunity to join a Series A company called Continuum as the head of product. I loved the team and wanted to work on a marketplace business so it was a great fit. I loved my time at Continuum and learned a ton about fractional work by building for our customers.I recently left to explore new opportunities, mainly in early stage consulting and advising.
Writing ✏️
The best way to improve as a writer is to write and publish as much as possible.Translating thoughts into written words is challenging and extremely gratifying (when successful).I have a newsletter if you want to be notified of future writing ✨and here are some of the pieces I've published:---
Why Marty Cagan's advice to feature factory PMs can be dangerous ☠️Self-serve onboarding flows should be overly opinionated and get smarter over time 🧠Why feature factories might be optimal for some companies 🏭The biggest monkey trap in early stage product is building a solution in search of a problem 🐒Why product executives should have IC PM experience 🎩Mutual admiration is a key attribute of successful co-founder relationships 🤩Why founders shouldn't hire product managers before they have PMF 🔥You can't A/B test your way to product market fit 🧪Why founders don't talk to customers enough 🔬How to use minimal necessary force to influence others 💪How W2 is worse than 1099 👷Reflections on my first year as a dad 👨👩👦The Evolving Role of Product Managers 🚀Viral post about the PM role @ FB 🧨Strategy at a glance ♜Picking a top line metric 📈Don't wait for 1:1s ⏰Start with problems ✅50 Principles, Values and Observations 🤓How to influence people 🎯Should startup PMs focus on internal tools? 🛠Turning 31 🎂How I built trust with my team as a new PM 🤝Virtual onsite 2.0: beyond the day-long interview 💡The Hedgehog Method of feedback 🦔P1E12: A new model for remote work 🏠🛩Early Thoughts on Distributed Work 💻Thoughts on Therapy 🔍Context, Constraints and Conviction — The Three Cons For Shaping Product 🔥How I landed my first startup job through a roadtrip 🛣22 Mistakes I Made as a First Time Founder 🙅Onboarding, Retention, And The Elusive “Bottom of the Funnel” Metric 📊
Advising 🚀
I love helping early stage teams figure out customer discovery, problem and solution validation and translating all of these insights into delightful products that people want.I think it's a huge mistake for founders to hire a PM before they have product-market fit so finding the right advisor can be a major unlock.Here's how we can work together:
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1) Ben & Bloom Design Studio2) 1:1 Product Advisory/Coaching
• For coachable founders with a growth mindset who don’t have a product/UX background and want to develop critical skills around talking to customers and building the feedback loops that allow them to translate what they learn into high-conviction product decisions.
• I can help to diagnose and solve product execution problems, having been the first PM at three different VC-backed startups.Want to work together? Email me benerez333 [at] gmail [dot] com---
What founders have to say about working with me:Connor Jacobsen Co-Founder & CTO of Broadcast
My co-founder and I had a brief but hyper-productive engagement with Ben over the course of a couple months where he helped us reach clarity on where we want to go and what’s holding us back. Ben facilitated challenging but important conversations that allows us to strengthen alignment and establish common language about our objectives and progress. Highly recommend Ben to early stage founders navigating the idea maze and seeking PMF.---Dan Widing Founder & CEO of ProdPerfect
The trick to good product development is having the right balance of boldly relying upon expertise and humbly validating assumptions with rigorous discipline. Ben has mastered that balance.---Troy Sultan, Founder & CEO of Guide
Ben looks at problems and businesses through the lens of people and systems, giving him strong intuition about where to point his curiosity. This makes him a uniquely helpful sounding board on a broad range of topics from product strategy to recruiting to management to culture. Ben is also highly responsive, probably the most underrated quality in an advisor.---Jake Rothstein, Co-Founder of Papa and Upside
We consulted with Ben as we were going through an initial pivot, post MVP. With his vast product experience and analytical approach to problem solving, Ben was able to expose some of our internal blind spots, which made us completely rethink our product, tech roadmap, and even parts of our Go-to-Market strategy. We’ve since fundamentally changed the way we think about product development and how (and when) we build and launch new technology. His insights were invaluable and we will continue to consult with him as our business grows and evolves.---Eric Anderson, Founder & CEO of Theta
Ben's ability to dive deep into conversation about the most complex issues you face when building product is something I really value. He's able to ask the tough questions that need asking and able to help surface an understanding of "What is this thing? Who is it for? Why does it matter?"
Coaching 🏋️
Looking for help preparing for interviews / job hunting?Over the last year, I've coached dozens of people through their job searches, including mocks for the Meta PM loop as well as general interview prep. It's been surprisingly fun and rewarding (and apparently I'm good at it!).I'd like to invest more time in coaching work in 2024 so if any of these sound like you, shoot me a message and I'm happy to share more info about how we might work together:• "I want to get better at telling my story in interviews (e.g. "Tell me about yourself and what you're looking for in your next role)"
• "I have an interview loop coming up with Meta and want help preparing + mocks with coaching (e.g. product sense and execution)"
• "I'm not sure which stories to tell in behavioral interviews (e.g. tell me about a time when ___)"-
Want to get in touch?
✉️ benerez333 at gmail dot com-
What people say 👇
-🙏"Thank you for all the help, patience and guidance you provided in a short time frame and agreeing to do 4 sessions within a week, running overtime in most of them.Your sessions were insightful, grounded in practicality and helped me add a lot more structure to my thinking and approach, especially around analytical rounds. Three things that stood out for me:1) your frameworks are simple and based on first principles most of the time
2) you nudged me to think about my personal experiences
3) you helped me build a structure/format that suits me, which I found really valuable especially when there are 100s of structures and frameworks out thereThe fact that you also record these sessions and share real time notes and snippets takes this guidance a notch higher than all other coaching sessions out there!Thank you again for doing what you do to help others. I'll always be grateful for your time." -
Pratyush Tallapragada, Product Manager @ Meta-🙏 "Ben cuts through the noise and ensures you know just the right level of information needed to pass the interviews. He adapts to your style and provides actionable feedback at all stages. Highly recommended to all." - Ying Guan, Sales Operations Lead @ Meta