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Learn how the team is empowered to adopt a leadership mindset to bring innovative products to life.
As part of our ongoing series of conversations with team members, we're excited to introduce you to Joe Manavalan. Catch up on past conversations with Engineering Manager, Sarah Vargas, and Senior Software Engineer, John Larmie.
Our team is dedicated to understanding our customers’ needs and crafting sustainable and extraordinary solutions. So it makes sense that we hire pretty extraordinary people to tackle these challenges, right? Today we’re thrilled to introduce you to Joe Manavalan, as he shares why his role at Attentive has been a Product Manager’s dream and why it’s such an exciting time to join the team.
Can you start by sharing a bit about your background?
I’ve always gravitated toward cross-disciplinary interests and functions. In undergrad, I double-majored in Economics and Computer Science. I chose to pursue a role in technology consulting that enabled me to continue fostering a cross-functional skillset. I spent a few years specializing in CRM SaaS technologies and working on large digital transformation projects for Fortune 500 companies. Consulting provided me with a fundamental business and customer-facing skillset.
However, I wanted to be more hands-on with technology and contribute to a product ecosystem. I joined a late-stage SaaS startup that later went public. I worked in various customer-facing roles, from customer success to technical account management and solutions architecture. After wearing so many hats, it was only a matter of time before I landed in Product Management, leading a unified platform strategy.
What inspired you to join Attentive?
Having spent six years at my previous company and seeing so many phases of growth, I wanted to go back to the startup world and run it back in a Product role from the get-go. An Attentive recruiter contacted me about an open role on the Platform team. After some quick research, I was impressed by how many of the world’s most recognized brands partner with Attentive and how quickly the company had grown in the marketing tech landscape.
The Product Management team I met during the interview process sold me on Attentive. While I’ve always had an affinity for being technical with products, I was looking for a role focused on core PM skills in analytics, execution, and product sense. It was clear to me that this was precisely the framework that Attentive’s Product leaders used to coach their PMs.
Finally, I wanted to join a company that was all-in on the AI revolution. That was clear with how fast Attentive’s AI products have come to market and the company's investments to accelerate that development.
Tell us about your team and what excites you about your current projects.
I work in the data platform domain and focus on acquiring data that powers our AI messaging to create truly personalized experiences. As pioneers in AI-driven marketing, we’re making significant investments to enhance our existing data and unlock new data sets to turbo-charge our ability to create bespoke shopping experiences.
I love being in a platform role where I get to interact with many of the AI teams. I have daily conversations with engineers, designers, customers, and other PMs, discussing new ways to experiment with data to maximize marketing performance. These discussions inspire me to think big about next-generation platform features that will delight our customers.
One investment area I’ve championed is using AI to capture behavioral and merchant intelligence at scale. Creating the ability to capture high-quality data sets with minimal human intervention enables us to scale our AI products' growth and use cases even faster. Some of the initial prototypes our engineers have built in these areas amaze me. I’m motivated to continue pushing the envelope with my talented teammates.
What does a typical day look like for you?
As any product manager will tell you, there's no such thing as a typical day. However, I try to tackle each day in four phases.
6am: Taking some “me time”
I’m a morning person. My six-year-old dog conditioned me to rise at the crack of dawn like a rooster. We usually go outside for a walk for roughly an hour. After my dog dad duties are done, I go to the gym, meditate, read a book, or listen to a podcast to get my body and mind ready for the day. Mornings are my protected time, so no checking Slack or email!
9:30am: Developing a game plan for the day
I’ll get online around 9:30 to game-plan my day and the days ahead. When game-planning, I typically ask myself the following questions.
- Am I prepared for the meetings that I’m driving today?
- Am I prepared for meetings I’m driving in the next five days?
- Finally, are the things I’m doing driving towards top-line goals I’ve set for myself for that month?
From there, I’ll do things like create agendas, review usage dashboards for ongoing projects, and update roadmap artifacts to reflect changing priorities.
11am: Collaborating with my team
By now, the entire US-based team is online, and it’s time to sync up. I’ll attend various meetings, including daily engineering standups, cross-functional PM team meetings, customer-facing discussions/interviews, and initiative-focused meetings.
During this part of the day, I’m focused on three things:
- What blockers have engineers or other PMs identified that I can help unblock to make progress?
- Do others have the input and clarity they need from me to make decisions or execute their work?
- What new input or information do I need to know that influences what I prioritize or need to create clarity around?
In between meetings, I’ll also respond to Slack messages and knock out low-mental-lift tasks.
3pm: Focusing up
After the rush of collaboration time, I have a daily block where I take my dog out for a 30-minute walk and use that time to reflect on new information obtained from the day. When I get back, I’m at peak mental capacity and can focus my time on knocking out a singular item that requires uninterrupted deep work. I turn off Slack during this time so I can concentrate.
Deep work activities include crafting a product spec, conducting competitive research, putting together product review content, or writing notes to use down the road. I live by the mantra of “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Writing helps bring clarity and create organization in a constantly changing world that introduces curve-balls.
Final thoughts: ultimately, every day is different.
Sometimes, you may have a half-day meeting, like a monthly product review or quarterly roadmap planning. You may also have urgent meetings pop up on your calendar. While these aspects of your schedule are out of your control, as PMs, we’re empowered to take control of our schedule when needed. Usually, once or twice a month, I’ll block off my calendar for an entire day and move non-urgent meetings to dedicate focus time to a high-impact artifact. I don’t let my calendar distract me from working on driving the outcomes my team is counting on me to deliver.
Finally, what makes you feel like you’re thriving at Attentive?
I hope I don’t sound disingenuous when I say this, but my time at Attentive has been a dream PM role. In PM textbooks and public discourse, people talk about how the PM role should ideally be equal parts discovery and execution. This doesn’t always translate in the real-world industry. At Attentive, it does.
Being a Product Manager at Attentive is ultimately about being a change agent. We're empowered to evangelize those changes swiftly. For example, I had a big crazy idea, created a pitch, and the very next day I was on calls with executives to discuss the proposal. Fast-forward to the end of the day, and I had gotten the green light to move forward with the project. By the end of the week, the project had been staffed with engineers to conduct technical explorations, which have turned into promising prototypes.
Two weeks later, I found myself presenting to the entire C-suite about the opportunity to add value to our customers. The positive momentum that came out of this meeting created a cross-functional flywheel effect, which propelled my idea to our company's top priorities.
In line with our value, "Act Like an Owner," adopting a leadership mindset will get you far. It doesn't matter what your title is. If you have a great idea that will drive performance for our customers, we'll move quickly to experiment with those ideas. And if some of those experiments deliver compelling value for our customers, we’ll move with high velocity to get those features in our customers’ hands as soon as possible.
Ready to be a part of a team where you can dream big and make an impact? We’re always on the lookout for talented and passionate individuals to join us. Explore our open roles.
