My name is Todd Meyer — this is what I achieve at Aha!

What is the best way to accelerate your career? Work at a high-growth company that challenges you and puts learning first. An unwavering motivation to continue improving and achieving is also key. The highest performers constantly pursue new ideas and seek to understand the experiences and motivations of the people around them. We can learn a lot from them.

Curiosity fuels growth — which is why we want to bring you personal stories of achievement from talented people. Our hope is that some of their ideas are useful (and maybe even inspirational) as you work to become your best.

Meet Todd Meyer, a senior product manager on the Aha! PM/UX team who manages the internal tools that the Aha! team uses. He enjoys securing feedback to build and continuously improve this internal software. Helping team members do their jobs successfully is part of what drives him.

Todd lives in Chandler, Arizona, with his wife and two young children. He spends his spare time swimming, exploring nature with his family, and making all kinds of 3D-printed creations (including customized Aha! scorpions that he gifted teammates at the last company onsite in Phoenix — a fun welcome to his home state and its desert locale).

Read on to learn more about how he finds meaning and joy in his work, in his own words. Todd shares his thoughts in the following responses:

What energizes you about being a product manager?

I have always enjoyed solving problems. I like understanding why things work the way they do and thinking about how to improve them. This innate curiosity and drive to improve things is what led me to become a product manager — and what continues to energize me.

When I ship improvements to an in-house tool, the announcement post on Slack is often immediately flooded with positive comments and emojis. It is a great feeling to deliver something people really appreciate (and will enjoy using).

What is something that makes your role at Aha! unique?

I am the sole product manager on the Aha! team focused on our internal tools. So the unique thing about this role (compared to other PM roles at Aha!) is that I work on these internal tools rather than our product suite. Among others, my "customers" include the Customer Success and marketing teams at Aha! That means I have unlimited access to everyone who uses the software I maintain — so I can collaborate with customers directly. Whenever I need some product feedback, for example, all I need to do is send a chat message or hop on a quick video call with a teammate.

What is a recent accomplishment at Aha! that you are proud of?

I am very proud of some recent updates to an internal tool our Customer Success team relies on to manage customer communication and plans.

We wanted to streamline the way team members interacted with this tool so they could access and edit information seamlessly. We introduced a space-saving navigation menu and redesigned Aha! customer records to modernize their look and improve their layout. And we also added record drawers with inline field editing to enable folks to view and update records without leaving the page. I am grateful to have such talented UX and engineering teammates to work with on these updates.

It is important that internal teams enjoy using the software they need for their jobs. Being able to deliver updates like these is one of the joys of my role.

What has been the most rewarding thing about joining the Aha! team?

Aha! is a collection of talented people. But more importantly, we're good humans who want to work well together and make a difference. In the more than seven years I've been here, that has not changed — we continue to hire consistently great teammates who embody ambition, team spirit, and a willingness to grow. There's no company I'd rather be part of!

How do you keep learning and building knowledge in your role?

One of the best ways to keep learning and growing as a product manager is to continually talk to stakeholders and customers.

After spending a few years in a PM role, it can be tempting to convince yourself that you know your customers well enough — but they will surprise you.

I recently worked with some UX designers and engineers on another project for our Customer Success team: a page that houses those teammates' work at a glance. They can use it to see their active records (upcoming meetings, outstanding tasks, etc.) and quickly make updates.

We thought our early exploratory designs accounted for all the necessary use cases. After showing the team these designs, though, folks shared a few new considerations. Their insights allowed us to quickly iterate the design to a better, more lovable solution.

What advice do you have for an aspiring or early-career product manager?

Prioritizing features never stops, and you must constantly balance customer requests with business goals.

Always make sure you can clearly articulate the "why" behind each feature. If you can't, it probably isn't something you should be working on.

I like using product value scorecards in Aha! software for this. They make me think about the impact of potential features in a consistent way — helping to reduce potential bias during scoring and prioritization.

The What I achieve series spotlights the exceptional people on the Aha! team. For insights into how we got here, read our Why I joined posts.

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