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Design at the Strategy Table
About This Talk
A large part of how I earned my promotion from Sr. Product Designer to Principal Product Manager was that I’d been doing “product-like” things even as a designer. I’ve worked with four product managers at Ada, from Associate PM to Group/Principal PM — and was able to influence every single roadmap and requirements doc that my PM partners wrote. This talk will break down how I did this, and offer actionable ways that other Senior/Staff/Principal Designers can effectively influence the product vision/roadmap to improve product quality, meet user needs, collaborate better with PMs/GTM stakeholders, and drive better product outcomes.
Speaker
Maggie Chen
Principal Product Manager · Ada
A designer-recently-turned-PM, Maggie doesn’t believe that great design has to fit within a box—or single job description. She has spent her entire career at the edge of tech-driven disruption: designing tech to help nonprofits expand their impact, to help educators standardize learning across teachers/schools, and now, to help customer service teams scale their services.
She thrives in the messy middle: that’s how she wound up designing her way into a Growth PM role. After designing Ada’s first LLM-powered features, she started leading its first-ever Growth team — quadrupling inbound win rates within her first year. Now, she bridges design and product to optimize Ada’s growth funnel, making a sales-led org more product/design-led, one win at a time.