Essentials of Product Management

Nick is Brainmates' lead Product Management training facilitator and has trained over 2000 Product Management professionals.

He brings to life the Brainmates Product Management Framework by sharing his personal experiences developing and managing product for over 20 years.

Nick has worked in Product Management in various roles, since 1997, staring his career with Telstra, Optus, Westpac and eBay, before co-founding Brainmates in 2004. His superpower is his ability to see connections between otherwise disparate or complex systems or ways of thinking; Nick loves the magical way that complex systems develop emergent properties that the individual components cannot possess alone. Nick likens this to the Product Management profession because of its unique need for an operational understanding of so many different disciplines and how they might work together.

For Nick, Product Management is the engine room of innovation, where curiosity into technology, human behaviour, economics, past and future trends all comes together into one job‚ to create products that change people's lives.

Nick loves to take course participants through a practical method that enables people to empathise more effectively with customers while expressing the customer challenges more clearly to business stakeholders‚ meaning less wasted effort and more effective outcomes for both the customer and the business.

Phil's specialty is education technology, especially for adult and lifelong learning. He has worked with brands including the University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, University of NSW, Melbourne University, Deloitte, Westpac, the Smith Family, the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade and various state governments. Philipp has spent nearly a decade in Product Management at Practera and in his own small companies.

Phil particularly enjoyed working with the University of Sydney business school careers team to increase the employability outcomes of their international students. He helped redesign the learning journey and deployed the Practera learning platform to enable the effective delivery of the 'Job Smart' program at scale. Job Smart has since been regularly presented at leading industry conferences as industry best-practice‚ to date, it has helped thousands of international students to develop their employability skills, find work placements, and volunteer for more than 20,000 hours in not-for-profit organizations.

Phil is especially passionate about tackling high-value challenges of today's society. He wants to change the world by letting bright minds do the right thing more often.

Kent is our Chief Product Officer, tasked with guiding and executing the Brainmates product strategy.

He is a leader with 15+ years experience bringing technology products to market. He founded a tech startup in the USA and led the company as Chief Executive Officer for 14 years before an exit.

Kent is passionate about product management. He loves thinking about where a product should be in the future and then working out how to turn that product vision into a product roadmap that delivers real business value. He is motivated by scaling growth stage companies.

When he’s not talking about, working in, or training people on all things Product, he is a keen sailor. After exiting his tech startup he loaded his family aboard his yacht and then captained it 9,337 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean to Australia, with stops in 41 ports and 9 different countries.

Laura has been part of the extended Brainmates family for over 7 years, and is currently working freelance Head of Product and helping businesses shape their product strategy, and lift their product management and delivery capabilities.

With over 18 years' experience in leadership and technology, Laura has led large (200+) innovative teams of product managers, product marketers and engineers to build and launch software used and loved by customers all over the world – Most recently building and leading Xero's product development functionality in Australia.

Laura is passionate about growing leaders and building cultures in the product and tech world and believes that amazing things happen when you align different types of people to a common purpose. She wants to live in a world where vulnerability is celebrated and is passionate about building cultures and environments that encourage everybody to bring their whole-selves to the table.

With Laura's zest, creativity and curiosity, we are very excited to have her as part of the growing Brainmates Product Management Training team.