Podcast
June 12, 2024
Self-employed, Helping builders
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What lessons can product leaders learn from scaling multiple product businesses? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Sid Shaik, Temporal Technologies Fmr. COO Charles Zedlewski speaks on his career in product management and lessons learned from scaling multiple product businesses. Charles shares insights on becoming a successful PM without a technical background, emphasizing the importance of building technical depth over time. He discusses philosophies for collaborating closely with engineering teams and getting the “soul of the product” to live in their hearts. Charles also talks about his experience scaling Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and lessons from launching new features. Overall, the discussion provides perspectives on product growth strategies, frameworks for conceptualizing customer journeys, and approaches to partnerships between organizations.
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Charles is a business and product leader with 20 years of experience building, advising and investing in category-defining platform companies.
Most recently Charles served as Chief Operating Officer at Temporal Technologies, the leader in durable execution systems where he built and led all the company’s go-to-market and product functions while creating the category and launching the commercial product. In less than 3 years Temporal grew its users, customers, revenues and value by 20-100 times.
Prior to Temporal Technologies, Charles spent nearly 10 years building Cloudera first as the product leader and subsequently as general manager for Cloudera’s 3 high growth business units. As the longest serving member of the leadership team, Charles helped Cloudera grow from a pre-product startup with less than $10 million in funding to a multi-product public company with $800 million in ARR.
Charles has advised or invested in other notable platform companies and investors including Airbyte, Baseten, Huggingface, Streamsets and Y Combinator.
Charles has an undergraduate degree from Carleton College and a master’s from MIT and lives in San Francisco with his wife, two children and their Mexican street dog Miso.
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Sid is a seasoned Product Leader in the Data Platforms domain. At present, he runs Product at Cloudera for its fastest growing product line, Private Cloud Data Services. Prior to Cloudera, he co-founded a Silicon Valley startup– Performance Sherpa; his company built performance engineering workflow automation for databases and middleware. Prior to those roles, he worked at Yahoo!, Qubole, Asterdata and Oracle in various Product and Engineering roles.
As a Product Manager, Sid loves the creative process of discovering, defining and solving meaningful technology problems in large markets and enjoys scaling product businesses. In his down time, he enjoys taking his kids to soccer practice, he practices yoga, and advises startups.
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