My story.

Botanik is a one person practice, on purpose. I've spent over 20 years in product management, at companies ranging from early stage software businesses to The Home Depot. I have done the job at nearly every level of it, from writing the requirements and user stories myself to being accountable for whether an entire portfolio was worth the investment.

I spent close to eight years at The Home Depot. I led a multi-year modernization of the in-store quoting and selling application used by professional customers, coordinating 15 product teams to a 40% improvement in transaction velocity across more than 2,000 Home Depot store Pro Desks. I later directed the teams scaling a primary in-store selling system through a stretch when that business grew from $1.7B to $3B.

The work I'm proudest of there was less visible. I learned the craft under Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group. As Senior Manager in the Product Management Center of Excellence, I partnered with executives across Product, Engineering, UX, and the Organizational Effectiveness team to design and facilitate a multi-year move to a high-maturity product operating model, serving over 600 product managers. I co-led a functional audit with our Organization Development team that surfaced title-to-task misalignment across the organization, and we corrected seniority against the work people were actually doing. I also built the case study we used to interview product managers, which raised the bar enough that the candidate pass rate fell from 80% to 60%. That is the measurable version of a culture change. We got harder to get into, on purpose.

I started Botanik because of something I kept noticing as AI moved into every part of how software gets built. The tools changed. The fundamentals didn't. We can build faster than ever, and the steps of product management have genuinely gotten quicker, but none of that removes the hard part: staying close enough to your customers to know what is worth building, and holding that against what the business needs. That judgment does not offload.

I also coach through Product Protégé, which ranges from building fundamentals with product managers early in their careers, to working with managers of product managers, to sitting down with the business stakeholders who need to understand how to work with a product team rather than around it.

When you work with Botanik, you work with me, from the first call to the final handover. There are no account managers and no bench of juniors.