Kathy Lake
As the Senior Director of Product and Experience Design for our platform group at Autodesk, I help set product and design strategy for our platform capabilities; these are capabilities shared by all our product teams. We build them once and everyone re-uses them, which not only saves redundant effort but also ensures our users have a consistent and cohesive experience.
Think about the power of simple, repeatable functions – like “Control-C/V” to copy and paste – and how frustrating it is when it doesn’t work just like you’d expect across all your experiences. My team and I help decide where to invest in those shared capabilities for our products as well as making sure they are simple and predictable. I’m located in the Bay Area and primarily work from home and our office in San Francisco. I have the pleasure of commuting by 30-minute ferry to the office; one of my weekly pleasures is grabbing a coffee, catching up on Slack, and thinking about my day’s priorities, while also enjoying astounding Bay Area sites like Angel Island, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Empowering women in tech – including myself
Beyond my day-to-day role, I’m also part of Autodesk’s Product Management Guild (PMG), a volunteer group representing product management (PM) professionals and employees working with or interested in becoming product managers. While I was deeply involved in the PMG a few years ago, I’ve since taken on more of steering committee role in addition to leading a product management practice organization within my specific division. In this way, I am helping to scale how we elevate our product management practice as a whole across Autodesk. Some things need to be done locally, while others are more effective across Autodesk, and a matrixed structure – where we have smaller guilds reporting into the larger ones – is something I hope we can continue to build out.
As part of my involvement in the PMG, I’ve had the opportunity to attend several Women In Product (WIP) conferences and have loved the lessons learned about how we can support one another as women in tech. Most recently, I had the honor of facilitating a panel discussion with Diana Colella, Autodesk’s Executive Vice President of Entertainment & Media Solutions.
I’m always nervous presenting and speaking to a broad group, but this was a lot easier and more fun than I expected! I tend to think I need to over-prepare. I seem to have to continuously re-learn this lesson, which is a little bit of my imposter syndrome at play. I’ve been working on embracing imperfection for authenticity and saying “yes” to the things that test me. While I had never met Diana one-on-one prior to our WIP chat, I had the fortune of sitting with her at breakfast at a conference the week prior. Getting to know her over breakfast and learning more about the techniques she uses when navigating public speaking really boosted my own confidence.
My favorite part about the conversation with Diana was when she shared with us her unique career path, which actually started in finance. It’s interesting to think about how many career paths can lead into product management, and the expertise you can accumulate along the way (whether it’s in finance, sales, etc.) that will only help empower you to be a better decision-maker.
Our community is our strength
Product management is a special role that draws from all sorts of backgrounds; coupled with Autodesk culture of embracing and encouraging lateral moves, we see PMs who come from engineering, teaching, finance, sales, military, consulting … the list goes on. This makes for a really rich set of expertise and unique perspectives.
I’m always amazed at the breadth of expertise the collective product management community at Autodesk holds. Our Product Management Guild provides a network for product managers across the company to lean on each other – not just for practice-related skills, but also around subject-matter expertise of the products we tend to.
Interested in a product management role at Autodesk? Check out our current openings!