A Journey Through Product Mgmt - A 40 Year Career Retrospective with Bill Scott

Our September 24th presenter is our group’s co-founder (Circa 2002), Bill Scott.

Having spent 40+ years in tech, most of them in the role of Product Management right here in the Waterloo Region, Bill will be giving us a retrospective overview of Product Management over the years.

He will be showing just how far we have come since the early ‘80s and how engrained the PM role has become within an organization over the years. A lot has changed with respect to the role itself and with respect to the importance put upon the role within an organization, whether it’s a Startup, Small/Mid-Size or even Enterprise size.

However, Bill will also highlight how much the core PM principles and disciplines have remained the same.

Bill will also talk about how a career in Product Management gives you an amazing springboard to advance your career into a number of different opportunities (e.g. other roles within an organization, start your own company etc.).

Bill will share his thoughts and insights through stories and examples from his own career…the good, the bad and the ugly.

Bill’s Bio:

Bill is a semi-retired tech executive whose career was focused on external facing roles such as Sales, Product Management and Operations.

He has worked for large multi-national organizations such as NCR, Christie Digital and BlackBerry and for smaller companies, such as CheckFree, Navtech, Nuance, TrustPoint and The Achievement Centre. His last full time role was with Communitech as an Enterprise Account Manager (2014 – 2016).

Bill graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University in Honours Business, majoring in Industrial Marketing.

He has spent his entire professional career working very closely with customers, sales, Customer Service and development organizations. His major focus has been on understanding market and product requirements and managing the development and launch of end-to-end solutions that meet the needs of worldwide markets.

His Product Management mantra is “Let’s develop what we can sell. Not sell what we can develop!”

Bill semi-retired 5 years ago. He spends his “semi time” as a Mentor and Industry Specialist with Innovation Guelph where he provides Product Management and Business consulting services to local tech and non-tech companies within the local ecosystem. He is also an Executive Career Solutions Consultant providing executive transition coaching services with Lee Hacht Harrison (LHH). Lastly, he provides independent Product Management consulting for small firms.

Bill spends his “retirement time” focused on family, cycling, golfing and fishing.