Stuff has today confirmed another strategic move to support where the business is headed with the realignment of its product management team – and the roles are dominated by females.
Stuff’s new product management team has seen the promotion of eight members into senior leadership roles, six of which are female – a unique move according to the latest MYOB Women in Tech report, which shows only 23% of the local tech sector is female, and that numbers are declining.
“We made a conscious decision to focus on talent within our organisation,” says Head of Product Management Mitchell Mak.
“Often businesses feel the need to look externally to diversify thinking and ideas, but we already had a lot of smart people who, despite being committed to their work, were in roles that didn’t allow them to maximise their capabilities.
“This realignment gave us the opportunity to consolidate several dispersed business functions into one product management function, enabling us to manage the lifecycle of our products from conception through to end of life, and setting us up to deliver on the business’ strategic objectives by 2021.”
Stuff’s product management function is now responsible for commercial and advertising products, user-facing audience/content products, and editorial/newsroom products and tools.
The newly-refined team defies the industry odds, with an overall 70% female presence.
“Foremost it was about capability, and it simply worked out that the best candidates were highly capable women.”
“When hiring for the roles, it was first and foremost about capability, and it simply worked out that the best candidates were highly capable women,” Mak said.
“It then came down to ensuring that there was flexibility to cater for balance between work and home obligations, and at Stuff, flexible working is a real benefit we promote and encourage.
“Within the team today, we have three new mums in various product management roles, with two of them having recently returned from maternity leave.”
He says the new team appointments are nicely timed with Stuff having just announced changes to its parental leave policy, offering an extra eight weeks’ paid leave for the primary caregiver, flexible working and more for new parents.
“To be successful in our business we need to evolve, not just in our offerings to advertisers and audiences but also in the way our organisation works,” Mak said.
“It is more important now than ever that we embrace diversity and flexibility; what matters is that we find the best possible set of skills and capabilities to match the needs of our organisation – everything else is subjective and negotiable.”
The new appointments:
- Jane Nevin, Product Design Lead
- Fillip Quick, Senior Product Manager – Content & Editorial Platforms
- Jesica Mackinnon, Senior Product Manager – Engagement
- Justine Kotkin, Senior Product Manager – Experience
- Pouria Asghari, Capability Manager – Sales
- Sophie Melchior, Senior Product Manager – Audience Network
- Stacey Perillo, Senior Product Manager – Revenue
- Christine Jones, Product Operations Manager
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