Episode 170: Unlocking the Future with the Power of Alignment with Margaret Jastrebski, SVP of Product at Tegus

Product Thinking

In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, host Melissa Perri is joined by Margaret Jastrebski, the SVP of Product at Tegus. Join them as they explore what it means to be a leader today. They discuss Margaret’s role at Tegus, the power of alignment within an organization, understanding sales and marketing, and the importance of a vision for execution.

Margaret (MJ) Jastrebski joined Tegus, the Company Intelligence platform for key decision makers, in December 2023. Before this, MJ was the CPO at Stylitics. She has a strong background in multiple product roles at TXI, Caribou, Prodify, and ShopRunner, as well as roles in sales and marketing that deepened her 360 knowledge of product. She is also the co-founder of Walkshop, a multi-day hiking and design thinking conference for leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs.

MJ earned her MBA in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2012, and speaks at numerous events and educational institutions sharing her skills, insights, and practical solutions in the world of Product Design.

You’ll hear them talk about:

• 00:51 - Investors need to know as much information about their investment before they actually invest. They need the information about the company that isn’t on Google. The old way was to call around and ask what others know about the company. This is where Tegus comes in. Tegus identified this friction between investors and their investment and put all these conversations and information into one place, smoothing out the process and making it easier for investors to say yes or no. Tegus is a successful product that has been expanding for 6 years.
  
• 08:17 - There’s no silver bullet to figure out what needs to be done when starting at an organization, but there is always work to be done. MJ shares her approach of spending time with the executive team and CEOs, to really learn where they see the business growing, and then working to shape the business to fit that future vision. In the case of Tegus, the biggest opportunity for growth is alignment between teams. There’s always misalignment somewhere but MJ’s approach fleshes out the frictions and smooths them out. When the product team, market team, customer service, sales, and success teams aren’t quite aligned, it’s important for you to make the other teams care.
  
• 38:17 - When coming into a new product leadership role, MJ encourages leaders to make decisions and communicate the reasoning behind them, externalizing the process to show leadership. It creates an open dialogue: The more you externalize the process, the clearer your teams will be on your decisions, and the more comfortable they will be to challenge or discuss your decisions.
  

Episode Resources:

• Margaret Jastrebski
• Tegus

If you enjoyed this episode, please visit:

• Angel Squad
• Productinstitute.com

Previous guests include: Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services
Check out our Top 3 episodes:

• Episode 177: The Evolution of User Research: A Conversation with Steve Portigal, Author of Interviewing Users
• Tackling Product Research with C. Todd Lombardo
• Episode 128: Scaling Product Operations with Blake Samic, Former Global Head of Product Operations at Stripe and Uber

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