I stepped into Movie Magic Budgeting Product Lead at Entertainment Partners without the headcount typically required. Reset the operating cadence across the production management portfolio. The next 21 months produced 21 major releases across MMB and MMS — a step-change from the prior baseline. Studios began naming EP product management as a partner-quality reference in their own roadmap meetings.
The Movie Magic Budgeting Product Lead role needed to be filled. There wasn't headcount to hire one. The standard executive move would have been to escalate, wait for budget, or split the work across the existing PM bench in a way that would have diluted both. I took the role on directly while keeping the portfolio-level VP responsibilities — not to prove a point, but because that's how the work got done in a quarter that mattered.
The "VP who builds" positioning isn't a slogan. It's what gets done when the org is short on people and the deadline doesn't move.
The CSAT decline I inherited was multi-year. Studios — the kind whose names you'd recognize on the credits of films you've seen this year — had stopped treating EP's production management products as software they wanted, and started treating them as software they had to use. The reversal didn't come from a single feature. It came from shipping consistently, communicating roadmap visibility, and naming the operational tradeoffs honestly when something couldn't move fast enough. By the end of the period, those same studios were referencing EP product management in their own roadmap conversations as a partner-quality benchmark.
SmartID is the kind of work that doesn't put points on the board the way a customer-facing release does, but breaks the entire platform if it isn't right. I led the architectural and product strategy for the enterprise SSO and identity layer that spans every EP product. The criterion for success here is invisibility — most users never see it; most enterprises depend on it.
Three things from EP that I'd carry forward into the next role:
One. Cadence is a strategic asset, not a delivery metric. Studios trusted EP differently after 21 months of rhythm than they did after the equivalent number of features shipped on an irregular tempo. Cadence reads as competence at the org level in a way no individual feature can.
Two. AI integration is an operating-model question first, a tools question second. The Claude Enterprise rollout worked because the org's operating model could absorb new tools — the JPD migration had cleared the underbrush. The same rollout in a fragmented PM org wouldn't have stuck. This is the thread I'm pulling on in the dissertation.
Three. The player-coach pattern compounds. Stepping into the MMB Product Lead role wasn't a one-off — it was the same instinct that drove the Claude rollout, the JPD evaluation, the SmartID architecture work. Stay close enough to the work to see what's actually breaking; senior enough to redirect what should change. The two halves don't compete; they sharpen each other.