May 3rd, 2021
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Venture Lane's world-class mentor network is our key to helping Boston's best founders in B2B tech nail their go-to-market and ensure their next round of funding. Our mentors range from serial entrepreneurs, to senior operators at Boston's leading tech companies, to the ecosystem's most founder friendly angels & VCs.
At the heart of our mentor community lie our Mentors-in-Residence, who lead the charge on delivering Venture Lane's cross domain impact in product, marketing, sales, and other key disciplines for growth. These are the folks who have mastered their domain and know how to get founders and their teams operating like a primetime business.
We are thrilled to have Jackie Paulino, Chief Product Officer at Pixability, as our Product Mentor-in-Residence at Venture Lane helping founders write their product management playbooks and deliver maximum customer ROI. More about Jackie below!
About Jackie Paulino, Product MiR at Venture Lane...
Jackie is currently the Chief Product Office at Pixability. Pixability is a leading advertising technology company focussed on YouTube and Connected TV. In her role, Jackie focuses on long term product strategy; and she manages Pixability's product management, product design, and customer insights teams. Check out our Q&A with Jackie!
Q: What's one initiative your team at Pixability has in the works that you're really excited about?
A: We have built technology that helps advertisers and brands with YouTube advertising and over the last year we have moved to expand our offering into connected TV with Roku and Amazon advertising. My vision is that we will have access to more ads on connected TV screens than anyone else, and I find that…very exciting.
Q: What do you enjoy most about mentoring early stage startups?
A: Ideas and passion. I love hearing how entrepreneurs found a problem and built something to solve that problem. Being an early stage entrepreneur is really difficult, so to be successful they typically have two things - a great idea and a lot of passion about their idea. I always find that passion contagious!
Q: What's your greatest superpower in helping early stage startups survive and thrive?
A: Process. Typically early stage entrepreneurs are so passionate that they are running in a million different directions - that is what makes them entrepreneurs! As a mentor and outsider, it is a bit easier to say, “Let’s slow down and think about how this will work when you scale?” Or “How should this change if you had twice the amount of customers?”
Q: What emerging trend or 'next big thing' in product management for B2B software should founders keep an eye on?
A: Within the B2B software space, I have seen an acceleration toward ‘product led growth’ happening over the last few years. This shift puts less focus on a sales team to sell the product, and instead the focus becomes making it easy to buy the software within the product. For example, think about how you upgraded your Zoom license this past year - you probably did not interact with a sales person. This means the product manager not only has to think about how they get their customers to love using their products, but how they get customers to buy/upsell their products.
Q: What's one style/fashion trend you rocked growing up that would turn some heads in 2021 :)
A: Love this question. I will go with Jnco Jeans (you may have to Google it if you are under 30). I know skinny jeans are no longer cool (thanks to TikTok for telling me), but these were the other extreme 🙂
Want to engage with more of Boston's best mentors in B2B tech like Jackie? Apply to join our live beta of Venture Lane | Connex, our newest virtual offering for supercharging your B2B network!
