Ben Erez
PM Interview Coach | Startup Advisor | 3x first PM | Ex-Meta
🗽 Live in Brooklyn with my wife, daughter and Golden Retriever.📚 Maven Course
🗞️ Substack
🎙️ Podcast
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 enjoyed my time at Continuum and learned a ton about fractional work by building for our customers. I led product through our pivot to FairComp after which I handed the product reins back to the founder/CEO and struck out on my own to explore solopreneurship.These days I'm teaching a top-rated course on Maven for product sense and analytical thinking interviews and working with early stage startups on a fractional basis.
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 📊