Susan Stavitzski

Customer-Driven Product Person

Product Leader with experience working in the software industry for start-ups, smb and enterprise companies. Passionate about e-commerce, subscription, marketplace and retention focused products. 

I have a passion for taking manual, bulky processes and turning them into powerful, automated, scalable solutions to empower teams 💪

Message me to talk about a tough customer problem, hosting a customer discovery workshop or to brainstorm a wacky product idea 💡 

Skilled in Product Management, Product Design, User Interviews & Testing, Prototyping, Data Analytics, Product Marketing,  Ecommerce, Self Service, Advertising, Sales, Event Management, Market Research, and Account Management.

Follow me on Medium - https://medium.com/@susan_ski

Senior Product Manager

CarMax is the way car buying should be. Whether in-person or online, creating the best omni channel experience for our customers.

As a Senior Product Manager, I focus on creating the best in-person car selling experience for customers and associates through expanding self-service platforms and improving communication with tailored notifications.

Active:
• PM career coach (January 2025 - present)
• Fractional PM at Series A fintech startup (Sep 2024 - present)
• Maven course instructor (July 2024 - present): Teaching "PM Interview Bootcamp with AI Copilot: Product Sense & Analytical Thinking", a top-rated Product course on Maven (selected by Lenny Rachitsky for Lenny's List).

Concluded:
• User research project to interview 20+ customers for seed-stage AI startup (Dec 2024 - March 2025)
• Product Advisor to pre-seed women's health startup (June - August 2024)
• Interim Head of Product & Design at stealth seed-stage AI company (March - July 2024)
• Fractional PM at seed stage fintech startup (March - April 2024)

Portfolio Career

Supra

Supra is an invite-only network focused on connecting, supporting, and growing high-caliber Product leaders. I co-host the Supra Insider podcast with Marc Baselga, the founder of Supra. Check out the podcast here: https://suprainsider.substack.com/

Member & Podcast Host

Continuum

Continuum is a premium executive talent marketplace matching venture-backed companies w/ vetted execs for consulting, advising, interim, and full-time opportunities.

Continuum raised its seed round from Uncork (Jeff Clavier) and secured a Series A from Pelion Venture Partners. I joined shortly after the Series A as the first full-time product hire.

Head of Product & Design

Attentive

Led high-visibility product initiatives to expand TAM and deliver more value for customers. 

Managed team of 2 Senior PMs solving problems around SMS and Email deliverability.
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Attentive is the most comprehensive text message marketing solution, driving 18.5% of total online revenue for businesses by creating thoughtful SMS experiences. Over 5k leading businesses like CB2, Pura Vida, Urban Outfitters, Rebecca Minkoff, Steve Madden, and more rely on Attentive and see strong performance, like 30%+ click-through rates and 25x+ ROI. 

Attentive is backed by Sequoia, Coatue, Bain Capital, IVP, and other leading venture firms.

Lead Product Manager

Facebook

Led a team focused on helping millions of small business advertisers succeed through personalized guidance. Drove $300MM+ in incremental annualized revenue for FB (statsig).

Product Manager

Abstract

I joined Abstract as the first product manager. As the Collaboration team PM, I defined our product roadmap for collaborative workflows in the product, including features for design review, presentation and delivery/handoff.

At the time I joined Abstract, it was a Series B company with 60 employees.

Abstract is an enterprise SaaS collaboration tool for mature design teams. The company counts Disney, Hulu, Microsoft and many other Fortune 500 companies in their customer list.

Breathe

Breathe was a simple iPhone app that allowed users to set reminders to take deep breaths throughout the day. I built Breathe as a side project while at Life360 and launched our app a full year before Apple launched their own Breathe app for the Apple Watch.

Before sunsetting, Breathe earned 65k downloads and 4.9/5.0 stars w/ hundreds of reviews.

Creator

Canvas

As lead PM for the Canvas shopping and checkout experience, I worked with a cross-functional team of engineers and designers to build an entirely new customer-facing experience from scratch. We then iterated over the following two years to optimize conversion (primarily focused on driving new reservations). 

Canvas was launched as a subsidiary of Ford post-acquisition of Breeze and was later acquired by Fair.com in the summer of 2019. 

For the full year prior to Breeze's acquisition by Ford, I was the first and only product manager, leading a team of four engineers and one designer to build Carmada, our flagship fleet management product. When I joined Breeze, it was a Series A company with 50 employees.

Life360

While at Life360, I supported our product managers and built processes for communication between our customer support center in Las Vegas and the QA + Product teams in SF. I also designed from the ground-up an improved tool for our customer support agents to resolve issues. 

I joined Life360 when it was a Series B startup with 30 employees. 

www.life360.com 
IPO in Australia in 2019 (ASX: 360) followed by IPO in the US in 2024 (NASDAQ: LIF)

Project Manager

​Shwrüm

When I was a young and dumb 22 year old, I founded a company with the vision of building “Resy for clothing stores”. Learned a ton and discovered a passion for customer research and product development (despite being bad at both).

Co-Founder & CEO

I've been a founder, joined three different startups as their first PM, and held senior PM roles at Meta and Attentive. After leading product & design at Continuum, a marketplace for fractional executives, I now partner with early stage founders as an advisor and coach PMs to help them land their dream roles.

My experience spans many different models: B2B SaaS (Abstract), martech (Attentive), ads (Facebook), consumer (Life360, Breathe, Canvas), automotive fintech (Breeze -> Canvas), marketplace (Continuum).

I've also worked across the entire spectrum of funding cycles: founder, Series A (Breeze, Continuum), Series B (Life360, Abstract), Series C (Life360, Abstract), Series E (Attentive), and post-IPO (Facebook).

Ben Erez

My course has generated over $100k in earnings but I almost didn't launch it at all. The push came from Maven's instructor whisperer:

When I first talked to Claire Chen at Maven about teaching a course, I was torn between two potential topics: (1) user research or (2) interview prep.

Claire has worked with hundreds of operators launching courses on the platform and has seen the full spectrum. She's seen the breakout successes and the ones that never get off the ground. 

Claire's pattern recognition is world-class because her entire job is to identify instructors who are likely to succeed on the platform and help them identify the right starting point.

When I mentioned interview prep to Claire, she was skeptical: “That’s a tough topic. It’s incredibly time-sensitive. You have to catch people at the exact right moment when they’re actively interviewing.”

But then she added something every great advisor and coach does: “You know your market best. If you think there's something here, I think you should go for it.”

This is one of the most counterintuitive things Claire and the Maven team broadly have learned from watching thousands of courses run. 

No matter how much data Maven has about student behavior and interest, the instructor is always closer to their market.

And in this case, I was way closer to my market than Claire and the Maven team.

I was talking to candidates every day. I had been doing paid mocks and coaching for 2-3 years. I could feel the gap in the market in a way that wasn’t obvious to those on the outside.

So instead of telling me “yes” or “no,” Claire pushed me to validate it myself.

Here’s how I tested demand:

1) I polled the Supra community about interest in attending a live talk about product sense & analytical thinking interview advice
2) I ran the session with 30+ people and the response was strong
3) I hosted a lightning lesson on Maven that brought in 700+ signups
4) I filled my first cohort with 10 students and iterated from there

Fast forward to today: I've run 10 cohorts over the last 1.5 years and earned over $100k on Maven. While it's not $1mm, it's been a meaningful contribution to my income in this solopreneur chapter.

I also would have never built my Copilot if the course didn't force me to wrestle with an insane amount of questions from students. The Copilot was born from an effort to answer student questions at scale and has also become a real portion of my income.

And none of the above would’ve happened if Claire hadn’t pushed me to launch.

If you’re considering launching a course, our latest episode of the Supra Insider podcast with Claire is packed with advice, lessons, and what she’s seen work for new instructors.

It’s exactly the kind of conversation I wish I had heard before I started.

🎙️ Episode links:

Spotify: http://bit.ly/3Kn2g4E
Apple: https://bit.ly/4prGA69
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eER6HxTy
Substack: https://lnkd.in/e3h9wss2

I help PMs ace interviews at Meta, OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash + | Ex-Meta | 3x first PM | Advisor

One year, Sachin Rekhi decided to ride his bike while listening to Billboard’s "Top 100 Albums of All Time". Every single album.

Start to finish. No skips. From Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift.

He didn't do it because he was bored. He did it because he treats "Taste" as a discipline, not a gift.

On this week’s episode of Supra Insider, Sachin (ex-LinkedIn, ex-Microsoft) gave us the simplest, most useful definition of Taste I’ve ever heard:

"Taste is simply the ability to recognize high-quality work when you see it."

And taste has never been more important, especially for PMs.

It’s not just about pretty pixels. It is the ability to look at a Strategy Doc, a growth metric, or a user flow and instantly discern if it is winning work, or low quality slop.

But you can't recognize quality if you haven't studied what quality looks like.

Drawing from Rick Rubin, Sachin argues that Taste is a muscle built through two specific, repeatable habits.

𝟭. 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝗻𝗼𝗻 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸) 
This is why Sachin listened to those 100 albums. He was building his baseline for recognition.

For Product Managers, Sachin suggests building your own "Canon." His personal list includes:

♟️The Strategy Canon: Every shareholder letter Jeff Bezos has ever written.

🎨 The Design Canon: The history of Apple Design Award winners (studying why they won).

🧠 The Thinking Canon: The collected essays of operators like Scott Belsky and Paul Graham.

𝟮. 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝘀) 
Most of us sleepwalk through the products we use. To build taste, you have to turn on the "active critique." We actually did this live on the episode.

I was frustrated that I couldn't control individual guest volumes on our recording platform, Riverside. 

But instead of just complaining, we paused to deconstruct the trade-off the PM likely made: centralized consistency (Admin control) vs. localized chaos (Guest control).

That mental pause (switching from "annoyed user" to "curious builder") is the exact kind of activity that builds taste.

If you feel like your product sense is stagnating, stop waiting for inspiration.

Go do your homework and get some reps.

P.S. What's one resource in your personal "Product Canon" that you think every PM should read/consume because it's so good?

Episode links:
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dbvrvTEY
Apple: https://lnkd.in/dgGGa4Dy
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/div45WXq
Substack: https://lnkd.in/dq_Jp2Xu

I just discovered a new twist on Product Sense interviews that caught a candidate (and me) off guard.

One of my students recently interviewed at a growing tech company. The recruiter said to "download [prototyping tool] ahead of time because they'll be expected to prototype live."

The interview was titled "Product Sense." My student expected the usual flow: motivation, segmentation, problem selection, solution design. 

Instead, the interviewer shared some revenue data and asked them to start by modeling retention recurring revenue, then to diagnose an issue in the data worth solving.

So my student built a model live, on Zoom, while screen-sharing. No code, no design prompts. Just rows of data and a blank spreadsheet.

Then, with ten minutes left, the interviewer said: "Now open [prototyping tool]. Here's a PDF of our current flow. Prototype how you'd fix conversion."

My student uploaded the PDF, mocked up a page with a major improvement, and talked through the UX. 

Needless to say, it was all messy.

This "Product Sense" interview felt more like a hybrid business case + live prototyping test.

What's interesting to me as a coach is that the same PS interview fundamentals were still being evaluated, just in a different way:
✅ Demonstrating business literacy
✅ Narrowing in on a specific audience
✅ Diagnosing root causes preventing growth
✅ Exploring creative solutions to a problem

My advice for candidates prepping for "Product Sense" interviews: don't assume every company follows the same script. Get clarity about the tools you'll use, what's being evaluated, and how time will be spent.

The more you understand the expectations, the better you'll perform.

But you'll never have perfect information.

So... expect the unexpected.

And do your best.

All year long I bombard the Maven team with (hopefully) constructive feedback about what could be better so in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to recognize 10 aspects of Maven I'm grateful for as an instructor:

This is not in any order but here we go:

1) Their “send test email” flow is instantaneous and super helpful because I can test different subjects to see which land in the Promotions tab and which land in Primary.

2) Duplicating a cohort is super easy and the dates all update automagically based on the new cohort start date in Settings.

3) Promo code generation for individual students on an ad-hoc basis works perfectly.

4) Lightning lessons have been a major unlock that allowed me to grow my list to ~12k emails.

5) Being able to get human feedback on landing pages from Rachel Kennedy, Claire Chen , Chelsea Wilson, Rishin Banker, Runqiu (Rachel) Cai, etc boosts my confidence with changes.

6) The Canva templates for LLs and social images save a ton of time with marketing assets.

7) The constant flow of marketing opportunities are a helpful mechanism that forces me to make decisions faster than I would without the deadlines - the Fast Track promo going right now has driven a wave of enrollments for me!

8) Attribution is notoriously challenging but I can see the Maven team making an honest best effort to provide real attribution for revenue, spot-checking samples of enrollments and back-tracing individual journeys to develop a qualitative sense of the accuracy of attribution.

9) I'm genuinely rooting for other instructors (even if their courses are slightly competitive with mine) because it feels like we're growing the pie together. Rising tides raise all ships, etc - Maven's team actively reminds instructors of this dynamic and encourages collaboration b/w what could be seen as competing instructors.

10) The instructor town halls offer an insanely transparent look into the team's thought process, priorities, etc. I'm never wondering what's top of mind for Gagan Biyani and the company.

Maven has been an incredible partner in this phase of my career as I've completed 10 live cohorts helping 200+ students prepare for their PM interviews. 

Their team has been an excellent sounding board along the way as I've iterated on the structure, packaging, messaging, and pricing of the course over the last 1.5 years.
 
Last but not least, I attribute a lot of my course growth in 2025 to Maven's collaboration with Lenny Rachitsky. Being featured on Lenny's List as a "top leadership and career course" has allowed me to get discovered by students who wouldn't find me otherwise.

Thank you for everything you've done to help me grow, Maven team! It means a lot 🙏

If you’re a founder with capital and real distribution leverage, take a note from Brian Balfour about your M&A strategy for 0->1 bets.

The most interesting acquisitions might not be the ones with hockey-stick dashboards.

They might be the tiny teams with incredible product instincts, some traction, and obvious GTM friction.

Brian Balfour recently joined us on the Supra Insider podcast to go into Reforge's multi-product strategy, and it completely reframed how I think about mixing 0 to 1 bets with M&A.

Reforge built 5 AI products in 9 months. With only 25 people!

That headline is impressive but the details are the best part.

They didn’t buy teams because they had crazy ARR growth.

They bought teams because their product had outpaced their distribution.

Here’s how Brian described the ideal target:
✅ fewer than 10 people (ideally closer to 5)
✅ founders who know how to build, prototype, and ship quickly
✅ a working product with real users, not just a proof of concept
✅ clear technical depth in the team
✅ signs of traction, but also signs of GTM struggle
✅ zero founder burnout
✅ a product that Reforge could plug directly into its distribution engine

One example he gave was a team of six builders who had created a powerful workflow tool. The product was genuinely good. Validated users, clear pain relief, strong feedback loops. But their distribution channels were inconsistent, and the founders were spending most of their time trying to unblock GTM.

Reforge didn’t see that as a red flag. They saw it as an opportunity.

Brian’s point was simple: if your company already has distribution, you shouldn’t buy distribution. You should buy teams whose product is better than the size of the audience they reached.

When you give those founders a bigger distribution platform, you can unlock value almost immediately.

And if the founders are energized, not exhausted, you get a fully formed 0 to 1 tiger team ready to rock.

This is how Reforge spun up four new product lines shipping in under a year. They paired startup DNA with Reforge’s audience, brand, and GTM channels.

The value that was bottled up inside those teams finally had room to cook.

I left the convo with Brian inspired by the elegance of this strategy.

It’s not M&A for the sake of M&A.

And it’s not “innovation theater”.

It’s a practical way to combine three things that rarely sit together:
	1.	0 to 1 speed
	2.	distribution leverage
	3.	founders who want to keep building

This approach won’t fit every company, but if you have capital and a strong audience and/or GTM engine, it might be a more interesting path than chasing the hot startups everyone else is bidding on.

Sometimes the most undervalued teams are the ones whose product deserves a much bigger stage than the one they’re standing on. Especially if you have that stage.

Episode links in comments 👇

I help PMs ace product sense & analytical interviews | Ex-Meta | 3x first PM | Advisor

If you approach Stripe interviews the same way you tackle a typical PM loop, you’re going to bomb it.

Marc & I recently debriefed with someone who purchased our Insider Loops guide for Stripe and landed the offer. 

He told us he thought he had "a solid plan" before buying the guide, but once he saw how intense the expectations are for the process, he realized his prep wasn't close to Stripe's bar.

A few weeks later, I saw this note in my inbox:

"I have cleared the loop at Stripe and am going through team matching now. The recruiter said all interviewers were strongly inclined. In Product Sense specifically, she said my performance was outstanding. Thanks for the Insider Loops guide, it was very helpful. Since you stressed that the interviews were very rigorous, I doubled down on my prep by taking time off from work."

I love stories like this because they highlight something a lot of candidates don't want to admit:

𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗽𝗲'𝘀 𝗯𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝘁.

This candidate didn't get lucky. He understood the level of difficulty he was about to face, he respected it, and adjusted his plans to maximize chances of success:

↳ He took a full week off work because he realized this wasn't something he could squeeze into evenings and weekends.

↳ He followed our advice on leveraging the Stripe recruiter to extract more signal about what they really expected to see from him in each interview.

↳ He followed our systems design study plan because it helped him realize he had blind spots he didn't even know existed.

^ This is why he cleared the loop. 

The work ethic and rigor required to ace Stripe's interviews are not just interview skills. They're what it takes to thrive as a Stripe PM.

If you're aiming at Stripe in 2026, you're competing with world-class people who really want it and have zero hesitation about putting in the legwork.

You're also up against people who aren't leaving anything to chance.

They're going in equipped with insider knowledge, which I'm happy to provide.

Remove the guesswork. Get Insider Loops.

Shameless promo: my self-paced Maven course is now available at a 25% discount until Monday November 24th as part of the Maven Fast Track series (bringing the price down from $1,500 to $1,125).

The course includes 30+ hours of recordings, 1:1 access to me, and my popular AI Practice Copilot ($500 value), making this sale an awesome deal.

If you've been on the fence about enrolling, now is a great time to lock in lifetime access to the course materials. Even if you're not planning to actually go through the course until the future (e.g. Q1 2026), this is the best price you'll get for the next 12 months.

As a reminder, I've shifted to a self-paced course structure which means it will fit your busy schedules and be just as useful 2-3 months in the future as it is today.

To find the course, go to Maven and search for my name (don't want to upset the LI algogods with a link here).

Interview timelines don't map cleanly to live cohorts. So I overhauled my bootcamp to make it fit into busy student schedules.

After I announced that the 10th run of my course would be the final live version, my inbox filled up with messages from PMs:

“I have a Meta screen in two weeks. Can you help me?”
“I’m interviewing at Stripe before the holidays. Can you help me?”
“I can’t join live sessions, but I'm cramming for OpenAI. Can you help me?”

Interview timelines never map cleanly to a cohort schedule and candidates shouldn’t have to line up their prep with my calendar in an already challenging job market.

The right thing to do is help PMs prepare for interviews on their own timeline.

So I decided to restructure my Maven course from 100% live sessions on my schedule to 100% self-paced on the student's schedule.

Interview preparation just can't be tied to someone else's schedule.

In this market, if Meta, OpenAI or Stripe call, you need to be ready on *their* schedule.

My newly redesigned syllabus offers students lifetime access to:
↳ 30+ hours of session recordings available on-demand but with an opinionated timeline
↳ My AI Practice Copilot ($500 value)
↳ Direct 1:1 access to me for questions

The new package is perfect for PM candidates preparing for Meta-style interviews who need flexible, structured preparation that fits their interview timelines and busy lives.

Enrollment is now open and for the next week, you can get 25% off with Maven's annual Fast Track promotion. Code and link in comments 👇

Yesterday we hosted our first-ever live recording of the Supra Insider podcast.

150+ people showed up.
50 stayed for the full 90 minutes.
It was a blast (and won't be our last).

Marc and I sat down with Jacob Bank (founder of Relay.app, formerly Director of PM at Google) to break down how senior PMs are getting real leverage by “hiring” AI agents.

Here’s the quick version of what we covered:

🎯 PMs are sitting on some of the best agent use cases because so much of our work is structured and repeatable.

📝 The right starting question isn’t “What can AI do?” It’s “What would I hand off to a great junior person?” Then get precise about the what, when, and how.

🧩 The biggest early win comes from giving agents a small number of clear responsibilities instead of a giant catch-all job description.

🔄 Agents improve the same way teammates do. Tighten instructions, refine workflows, and iterate based on output.

If you missed it and want to watch the full session:
https://maven.com/p/7b8354

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The Battle

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