TPH Spotlight: Christina Bourne
how a marketing past can create a bright future in product management.
Christina Bourne is currently the Director of Product Led Growth at CallRail, where she has held various roles over the last 5 years. I met Christina as a customer a few years ago and I’d like to say we’ve become ‘professional friends’ at this point, seeing each other at conferences, syncing for advice and catchups and cheering each other on as our careers progress.
Christina leans into her marketing background to grow her future in product and it struck me that many would want to hear her story. This may be especially true for those who are looking to make the leap into product from marketing.
It’s not only her marketing skills and background people need to learn about. She has learned the art of leaning into her values at work to drive better outcomes - something many people are afraid to do.
Let’s dive in with Christina!
Education & Professional Highlights
Originally from: A small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia called Flowery Branch. When detailing this town, Christina mentioned she always craved more being from this quaint setting. From learning through different perspectives, leaning into diversity, and creating more options throughout life, living in this small town is what’s led her to move closer to Atlanta in the metro area.
University: Georgia State University
Degree: BBA, Marketing - she chose this as it was very versatile as a degree.
Preference, company stage: early to mid-stage
Preference, work environment: Remote or hybrid
We’ll read about experience and learnings in these roles:
Store Manager
Various roles at weather.com
Product Manager, The Weather Channel
Lead Product Manager of Growth at CallRail
Is higher education worth it?
For those of you reading this who are in college, Christina’s story will hopefully help ease unsettling from those comments you hear about not putting that degree to use once you graduate.
Christina thought for a while that her degree was useless. But the further along she got in her career, she realized how invaluable certain programs were to her growth and perspective. She recalls the marketing program at GSU really drilling into her that the keys to unlocking education, awareness, and action are “right time, right place, right message”. And that if one of those is off, the marketing won’t resonate. She leaned into those words, especially as a product manager and now a leader in growth.
“Looking at Product through the lens of Marketing has helped drive my success because I was able to build empathy through the lens of what action I want the customer to take. Products and features should also consider ‘right time, right place, right message’ in order to gain traction.”
She also notes another thing she’s leaned on from her university days is her marketing research and statistics class which helped her recognize and fight bias in how she might approach research and find ways to measure success. I absolutely love this callout. As PMs we experience bias all the time, so understanding how to face and combat it early is powerful for our career growth.
Overall as she grew in her career, she realized that her marketing and advertising background was what set her apart from other PMs in a great way. It ignited a completely different perspective to build from.
In her words: Core Values
Trust and Transparency: “Without trust and transparency, conversations can turn covert and political.”
Empathy: “Life is hard, work is hard, relationships are hard. I always try to consider how someone’s else viewpoint might be influencing their interactions. Empathy plays a big role in product building, but not just in having empathy for our customers and users. Empathy for our stakeholders and our engineering and design partners is also critical in delivering the best product to the user. When there is contention between engineering, product, and design, the product will show it and the user will feel it. Creating and fostering an empathetic environment within our own teams opens up trust, which opens dialogue, which helps us get to the root of the problems within our products.”
Kindness: “I place a lot of value in kindness because it helps set the stage for assuming the good in people instead of the bad. When someone is kind, even when they make a mistake, it helps me to focus on the action of what went wrong and how we can fix it, rather than on the imperfectness of the human themselves.”
When those core values hit:
Christina shared that her core values were always obvious in her in her personal life, but wishes she arrived at the conclusion that she should also bring them into her professional life earlier. This is an important lesson for everyone.
She shared a story about when she received feedback from a manager about a relationship with a stakeholder that was sour while she was a PM. She felt in that role she was incredibly good at releasing product and meeting business goals, but the success she had was overshadowed by this contentious relationship. Being vulnerable here, Christina notes that she realized from this experience she could have, and should have brought kindness, empathy, trust and transparency into the picture while this situation occurred.
Throughout our careers as in life, we will encounter relationships that throw us for a loop. As product people our success depends not only on what we do, but at times more how we do it. This role is so cross-functional we need to play well in order to achieve great results together. So the next time she experienced a hiccup, she knew in order to avoid negative spaces and overshadowing of her accomplishments, she needed to bring those core values into the picture.
Highlights & learnings along her professional path
Store Manager while she worked her way through college:
She was in retail management post grad as the recession hit in 2008. Christina proudly built a team, managed a construction project for the store and the opening, and managed financials. She worked a 24-hour shift ensuring the opening went well, only to be met with a ‘Great’ when she answered how she got it all done from her manager.
Major learning: Work/life balance is a non-negotiable. KUDOS to you, Christina :)
Ad Scheduling & Ad Product Manager, weather.com
After holding an ad scheduling spot for a year, her interest was piqued in a new role: Ad Product Manager. She put herself out there to the lead, Samantha Price and let her know she’d help with anything needed. She worked through evenings and fell in love with building products. Christina led a complete overhaul of ad products to be more inclusive of mobile and worked her way up to Senior Ad Product Manager. She realized she craved innovating on consumer-facing platforms and made a move…
Major learning: The career ladder might not always be straight up.
Product Manager, weather.com
She redesigned the core weather.com experience along with Sean Rogers (Sr. PM), Jessica Gerson (UX), and Joel Foy (Eng Mgr).
She invested time and energy in pitching a new team which got funded, but she did not get the chance to lead it.
Major learnings: Teamwork in our space is essential. Also, she learned how to put up a stronger wall between feelings and work while still being authentic to her core values.
Lead PM of Growth, CallRail
Joined in 2018, attracted by the small size at the time (~150 employees). She really wanted to try B2B SaaS and loves the goals CallRail had when they hired her.
Leaned heavily on her marketing and ad background and now PM experience. I’ll let Christina’s words flow beautifully here:
“I found myself able to ask the right questions and build the right experiences to help grow customers through the product. Once again, I found myself with an idea for an investment in a team and I wanted to pitch it to leadership. This time, I didn’t just want to PM the team, I wanted to grow and manage a team. I spent over a year telling the story of this investment and slowly gained buy in and advocacy from peers and leaders. With each person I pitched the investment to, I listened to their feedback and I updated my pitch and my story telling. I built relationships with peers and leaders across the company so that I could build consensus and socialize the pitch even outside of Product. When the investment in the team and my vision became a reality, I had finally learned, at least for this moment, the art of storytelling.”
And so her hard work and skills paid off as she is now heading up the Product Led Growth team at CallRail.
Major learning: Partnership and teamwork are critical in growth for the entire company. The connections and relationships her team has facilitated have become the standard for collaboration across the company.
Some ways she’s learned along her journey:
Storytelling: she encourages people to spend a lot of time reviewing other people’s slide decks and analyze how they tell stories.
Leadership:
It’s Your Ship which helped her learn how to become a leader people want to follow.
She mentioned if you ever have the opportunity to take a leadership class, just take it. CallRail’s leadership class helped her focus inward, reflect on past failures so she could learn, understand her strengths and how to use them, recognize when weaknesses were starting to get the best of her, and overall learn about herself.
We don’t get where we are without help.
If there’s one thing I know it’s that we all have someone to thank for helping us through something along our careers. Here are the people Christina highlighted:
Krista Manolescu and Sheri Bachstein when she was at The Weather Channel. She loved watching these women with their strong points of view who were also fostering collaborative relationships across the business. She appreciated how they balanced customer and business needs and helped her see an amazing career was right at her fingertips.
Mary Pat Donnellen is someone who saw talent in Christina before she saw it in herself. She advocated for her and presented opportunities beyond what Christina could see. This individual helped her understand the difference between a mentor and an advocate. It’s an incredible moment when that hits us.
I love a good personal board of directors story. Robin Triplett is on Christina’s, as she’s someone she can go to without tip-toeing or political feels. Being in a completely different industry, Robin helps her gut check and gives advice on how to handle situations.
Last, Ryan Johnson gets credit from Christina for helping her understand the value of building a product team the way we build products (big smile here). He helped ease her insecurities about her background when she started in product by helping her understand the power of diversity in product management.
Bringing it home with Christina’s PRODUCT HEART.
With each spotlight I’ll ask the guest a few questions I hope will help both aspiring product hearts start their journey, and experienced ones think about theirs.
What is your advice for product people today? Find your unique product skills and what makes you different from your peers and lean into it!
What grounds you as a product person? Ego is the detriment of a product manager. Always validate, test, and share broadly and make sure you remember it’s not always about you being right. It’s about building the right thing.
If you had a magic wand that allowed you to sit with you at the beginning of your professional journey, what would you say to yourself? Your priorities and dreams and desires will change. Keep dreaming big, but allow yourself space for serendipity and love and life.
Speaking of life, here’s a glimpse into hers, and what drives her to be better every day:
What do you feel people coming up in our space should spend time learning about or doing? Taking a few psych courses would likely lead to healthier relationships for PMs with their stakeholders, teams, and each other.
What would you recommend those in college double down on in service of their professional future? Internships and networking! You never know who is going to end up where, and your college contacts can be a valuable asset.
Special thanks to Christina for giving me a view into her journey and her willingness to share her learnings with all of us. Feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn and cheer her on as she continues to grow her product heart.