Sam Duong Woloszynski

“Product managers are often tasked with maximizing feature output. However, I see the role as an interdisciplinary team facilitator for research, development, and maintenance of software-mediated services. This emphasizes leveraging the team’s collective knowledge, the importance of research and maintenance, and providing excellent service to customers.”

What do you do professionally?

I consider myself a champion of collaborative problem solving and building engaging team cultures. For the last five years, I’ve worked as a product manager for SaaS products, and I’m about to move into a role as an Innovation Strategist at Autodesk, helping many product teams build product-led growth practices.

Tell me about your path to get where you are today. How did you get into that type of work?

I started as a software engineer and constantly found myself asking, “Why are we building this and not that?” I also loved working closely with content and design teams to co-create solutions, and I had a lot of curiosity about our end users. Looking back, it’s no surprise that I eventually moved into product management, where I could learn deeply about users’ needs and shape the big-picture strategic direction of what we were building.

I’ve learned a lot in the five years since I pivoted to product management. Despite cautionary tales of endless meetings, I’ve found meeting design to be one of my most powerful tools in driving change. I constantly experiment with creative prompts, collaborative whiteboarding, and other tactics to make meetings productive as well as fun. 

Last year, my career took an unexpected turn when a car accident forced me to take some time off. After recovering, I used the break to pursue my interest in leading group dynamics and strategic thinking by taking certification courses. This learning sabbatical was an incredible opportunity to invest in my professional skills, and it led me to my new role as an Innovation Strategist.

What is your professional superpower? 

My professional superpower is facilitation: aligning groups around common goals, harnessing their collective expertise, and moving groups toward taking action.

How has that superpower contributed to your professional success? 

Facilitation makes me attuned to group dynamics and intentional about how to support others in discovering insights, applying new skills, and making decisions. 

It’s a subtle skill, but there’s a lot of intention behind how I show up and how I weave facilitation practices into my work. For example, the first five minutes of a meeting set the tone and expectations for participation. You’d be surprised at how asking for simple input early on (e.g., “On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident are you that you understand the problem we’re trying to solve?”) will drive engagement from folks that would otherwise spend the meeting multitasking. Other times, it’s more obvious that I’m in “facilitation mode,” such as when I use a Miro template to drive a brainstorm session. 

If I were to ask your colleagues what it’s like to work with you, what would they say?

I think folks would say that working with me is collaborative and thought-provoking. I try to create a safe environment where we can explore different perspectives and challenge each other as thought partners. I also build relationships where we empower each other; it feels like a win when colleagues ask for help customizing one of my workshop templates for their upcoming meetings, for example.

What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?

Leading a team through a morale turn-around is something that I’m particularly proud of. I joined an organization with many disengaged, frustrated teammates who had been through a lot of turnover and difficult projects. Managers were equally frustrated and increasingly concerned about the team’s work output. I spent the first few months diving into the team’s internal and inter-department dynamics to understand and support them in solving ongoing issues - everything from putting more structured processes in place, adding new ways to communicate, and unpacking old baggage from past projects to clear the air. Some of my peer feedback at my next performance review highlighted my role in this team transformation, and a few folks even shared that they had been on the brink of quitting when I joined, but were no longer actively looking for new jobs. These changes led the team to deliver on several impactful projects, including some record-setting metrics-movers. However, the change in team dynamics and the peer feedback was most rewarding to me. 

Describe the business impact you’ve driven for your organization. 

One example is a project I led while working on a platform for UX researchers to manage participants. In order for the company to expand from consumer to enterprise markets, it needed to address product gaps that would make or break deals with enterprise clients. My team worked on one of the major gaps: the ability to sync participant data with other sources of customer data. We partnered with clients’ technical teams to jointly build our first customer-facing API and their first data integrations with our product. Our beta program closed deals with three key enterprise clients, and the public release opened up a new strategic advantage in winning the enterprise market.

What person or organization do you most admire professionally and why?

I admire Khan Academy for their willingness to reimagine the classroom and challenge orthodoxies in the notoriously challenging education space. In their early years, they leveraged YouTube to show that a flipped classroom model could be successful. Now, they’re exploring ways to use AI to not only support teachers, but also to tackle The Two Sigma Problem, or the challenge of providing one-on-one tutoring to every student. 

What tips do you have for organizations to best set their people (employees) up for success?

Investing in the “intangibles” in the workplace can have a massive impact because it becomes the substrate in which organizational efforts occur. I’m a huge advocate for supporting employees to continuously train their skills in communication, social and emotional awareness, conflict resolution, giving and receiving feedback, and people management. Investing in these types of skills yield compounding returns over time. 

Is there anything we didn’t ask that you wish we would have? Or anything else you’d like to add?

I have a hot take: I dislike the title “product manager,” because I think it obscures what the role is (or could be). PMs are sometimes seen as mini-CEOs making decisions about software development to maximize feature output. However, I see the role as an interdisciplinary team facilitator for research, development, and maintenance of software-mediated services. This view puts more emphasis on leveraging the collective knowledge of the team, the importance of research and maintenance, and providing excellent service to customers. But it’s a bit more of a mouthful than simply saying “product manager,” so I guess we’re stuck with that title for now!

Contact Sam

LinkedIn Email: contact (dot) samdw (at) gmail (dot) com
Email contact (at) hellotrove (dot) io or contact us for an introduction.