About Us - Product Aotearoa

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About Product Aotearoa

Product Aotearoa is a community passionate about the product and people. We are looking to bridge the gap between practitioners and businesses through events, activities, and forums. We cater for different experience levels across most of the NZ regions.

Started in 2015 as a registered charitable society, we are New Zealand’s first incorporated society dedicated to influencing the success of product businesses by nurturing, connecting and increasing the impact of product professionals throughout the country.

Our Team

Meet our dedicated volunteer committee members, who are also supported by many other volunteers contributing and organising through events subcommittees and conversations.

From our team to our community, we have an organisational governance committee, subcommittees, members, conference attendees, local meetup organisers, slack community and local meetup attendees, wider Aotearoa New Zealand product enthusiasts.

Andrew Tokeley

Andrew is New Zealand’s only full time, independent, Product Leadership Coach. Since founding his business in late 2017 he has coached more than 30 senior product leaders and worked with senior leadership across over 50 companies across the country. Andrew also founded New Zealand’s first ProductTank Meetup, one of Wellington’s most active meetups, boasting over 2300 members from product leaders to the product curious.

Anthony Marter

Anthony Marter is a product and delivery coach, and is currently coaching at Harmoney, Foodstuffs North Island and other organisations to become sustainably product led, while growing happy empowered teams. He also specialises in creating sustainable scaleups, helping organisations to understand the structures needed to navigate the transition from startup to scale.

Anthony has been involved in the product community for over 7 years, firstly as an organiser for the Product Management/ProductTank Auckland meetup group and 2 years ago founded Product Aotearoa to connect the broader NZ community together. He is on a mission to help New Zealand product people find their tribe and grow their skills, and by doing this help the New Zealand tech sector to grow and thrive.

Chardi Taylor

Chardi Taylor is VP of product at Roller where she loves building products that people actually want, and teams who love their work.

Chardi is also settling into her new views, lifestyle, and home office in rural New Zealand.

Chelsea Hillier

Chelsea is a Senior Product Manager and Digital Transformation Manager at Contact Energy and is passionate about strategy and discovery-driven product management to solve hard problems in ways that customers love and drive business value.

David “DJ” Jeames

David Jeames is Head of Product at Medworld where he is fostering a product culture that empowers Product Team to make informed decisions on what to build to achieve our business outcomes.

Medworld is an early-stage startup whose purpose is to enable a shift of the medicine culture by providing doctors a safe space for collaborating, supporting each other and advancing the health of medicine.

DJ can be found hiking and biking the beautiful landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand or playing tabletop role-playing games with friends when he is not supporting a more virtuous approach to developing products.

David Stokes

David is an innovation and delivery coach, helping organisations scale their product and delivery practices. He has 25 years experience working with a wide range of organisations, with a speciality in best practices and systems to support physical product development, ie: not ‘just software’ products.

David is a serial networker and is passionate about connecting product people and organisations in New Zealand. He helped establish and lead a number of groups, including ProductTank and Product Aotearoa, to support the product development community in New Zealand.

Outside of work, he loves supporting his kids becoming the next generation of engineers and tech entrepreneurs – watch this space!

Jeremy Lawson

Jeremy is a Snr Consultant at Double-O where he is guiding organisations to evolve how they work to focus more on customers and outcomes.

DoubleO specialises in Lean and Agile business methods which help you deliver more of what your customers want. Helping you win by defining success, strengthening your teams, empowering your leaders, supporting you to be better, and to keep getting better.

Jeremy spends his weekends out walking and playing with his dog, his 1yo daughter, or both; and tinkering with his lawn irrigation systems

Petrina Harper

Petrina Harper is a Product Manager at Roam Digital, where she helps clients build products that solve customer problems, while achieving strategic business goals.

Roam is a full-service digital consultancy, with 150+ people across Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand, who work with enterprise to create digital experiences that drive business value and improve people’s lives.

Outside of product, Petrina is a bit of a foodie who enjoys relaxing with good friends, and family – including her young son, and silly dog. She also doesn’t mind a good pun.

Suhel Mangera

Suhel is General Manager Product at Xero, looking after Manage Sales portfolio. This includes Invoicing and Projects products. He is responsible for Product strategy, budgets, hiring and improving the product management practice to help Xero achieve its 2030 ambitions.

Xero’s online accounting software connects small business owners with their numbers, their bank, and advisors anytime.Our solutions are used by over 3 million customers worldwide. Our ambition is to become the small business platform for SMBs around the world.

Outside of regular work, Suhel cofounded Next Level Product Coaching with his long time friend Tim Nunn. We provide coaching, mentoring and consulting services to individuals, teams and businesses looking to level up their product management practices. Otherwise, you will find Suhel out and about with his family, cheering his children at cricket and football or walking in the bush.

Tasneem Gould

Tas is a

Tas is passionate about championing and deepening the product discipline, and has co-founded GSD Alliance with Ashley Bass. They work with software businesses shifting to a product led growth culture or growing their product teams to provide training and coaching to their teams, build impactful, valuable products, and align across standard frameworks, best practices and tools, and product vocabulary. They have run over 30 public training and over a dozen bespoke corporate training cohorts – and counting. They also run a quarterly PM bootcamp with the University of Canterbury for a fast, furious and fun level-up opportunity.

Thommy Jerneskog

Thommy Jerneskog is a senior product manager leading Tait Communications broadband product offering. A strategic technologist with over 20 years across multiple industries in both public and private, he has led organisations digital transformations, product revolutions and complex projects. As a senior consulting manager with a big four, he led innovation engagements in public and private sector organisations across the world.

With Tait, Thommy is driving the converged future portfolio forward, focusing on interworking and interoperability to solve real and existing problems in critical communications in markets around the world.

Christchurch based, Tait Communications has over 50 years’ experience in Unified Critical Communications, and we are passionate about the future with our global partners and customers.

Thommy is a big sport-fan, spending weekdays and weekends on the side-lines coaching and supporting his young kids.