post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Career

Breaking into product management: A practical guide for aspiring product professionals

Leadership

Leading with Fear, Vision, and Taste: Our lessons from the Mind the Product Leadership Forum

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

How to craft a product vision: Ebi Atawodi at #mtpcon London 2025 (Director of Product, YouTube)

What we learned at #mtpcon London 2025

Are you struggling with SQL? AI can give you analytics superpowers

Claude in the Google Cloud while OpenAI tops 400m users: AI news roundup

The best resources for product managers in 2025

Louron serves as the Editor at Mind the Product, bringing nearly a decade of experience in editorial positions across business and technology publications. For any editorial inquiries, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Louron Pratt

<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/robpadilla/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Robin Padilla</a> is Director of Product Management at Springer Nature. He has been working in product for 7 years. Here&#8217;s how he got into product.</p>
<h3>How did you find out about your current job and why did the role appeal to you?</h3>
<p>I was an internal hire. After working as a product manager for a few years and really enjoying it, I felt the time was right to go further and move up to the next level. As a product director, I now have a much broader view of how the product work fits into the wider strategy of my department and company.</p>
<h3>What professional experience did you have prior to this role?</h3>
<p>I&#8217;m a chemist by training (Ph.D.) and began my career as a lab researcher (staff scientist). I worked in the areas of catalysis and polymer science, specifically working to develop new/improved food packaging materials. Though I enjoyed lab work, I was also open to other non-researcher scientific roles and transitioned from Research and Development (R&amp;D) into publishing. I worked as an Editor in the chemistry and materials science space before transitioning to my current company. I joined as a product manager for a materials science product before moving into my current product director role in the life science space. There are definitely strong parallels between being a researcher in a chemistry lab and working in product. Things like experimentation, decision trees, and not falling in love with your ideas may be mind-blowing insights for some but these things are part of basic pro-science nerd training!</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/a-guide-to-breaking-into-product-management/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Read this guide on breaking into product management. </a></p>
<h3>What are your key roles and responsibilities?</h3>
<p>My team is globally dispersed. The bulk of my colleagues are in India and Germany, some are UK-based, and I&#8217;m in New York. A typical day starts early to maximize the working hours overlap with Asia and Europe &#8211; my direct reports are in India and Germany. Afternoons typically focus on working with colleagues in The Americas. Owning both product and business strategy, I spend a lot of time on projects related to both areas. On the product side, my team is heavily involved with mapping user needs based on solid research and testing. Connecting the solutions we build to our wider business development strategy is critical. This is because our users are in a technical (scientific) space. My product management colleagues and I also often act as subject matter experts to support the sales and marketing process.</p>
<p>The product team originally evolved from a sales engineering group and we still retain some of that DNA. The creative side of product work might be what I love most about it—discovering insights on users&#8217; pain points, which they themselves might not fully understand, as well as developing solutions that can address their needs. Our users are R&amp;D scientists, so the more we can make their work more efficient, the faster we can see things like new drugs and therapies that can benefit everyone. That wider impact is also quite satisfying. A big challenge is adapting to the fast changes in technology and the ever-increasing pace of scientific information. These two points are changing the profile of how our users do their work, what their goals are, and what they see as valuable. From a solutions and product standpoint, the space is very much a moving target.</p>
<h3>How is your team structured and where does that sit within the larger organisation?</h3>
<p>My team is organized by function. However, in practice, we operate very cross-functionally, with product, engineering, data science, and UX having strong and open relationships. The team sits within a wider department called &#8216;Data and Analytics Solutions&#8217;. This department is a bit special because of our strong digital product focus despite being part of a seemingly traditional publishing company.</p>
<h3>What are your key tips on landing a role in product?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Be curious: an open mindset willing to explore anything and everything.</li>
<li>Product management is a team sport: you don&#8217;t need to be &#8220;BFFs&#8221; with all your colleagues but you absolutely need strong working relationships to do great work.</li>
<li>&#8220;Your network is your net worth&#8221;: build up those connections both within and beyond your space. You never know when you could assist someone or vice versa.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Discover how others have forged their product paths in our <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/tag/how-i-got-my-job/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">How I got my job content series.</a></b></p>

core/freeform

A year with ChatGPT and product innovation: Navigating the AI landscape

Mastering perspective – zoom in, zoom out as a product leader by Navya Rehani Gupta

Modern-day leadership by Janice Fraser

Master the art of leading through influence by Shyvee Shi

Is your innovation project on track? by Tendayi Viki

Finding your frosting as a product leader by Jeff Birkeland

Learnings from London: The secret sauce to hiring great product people by Kate Leto

Incomplete by design – Matt LeMay at MTP Engage Hamburg 2022

Learnings from London: Going from Meh to Awesome by Shiva Rajaraman

The art of product management with Ken Norton

How I got my job in product – Robin Padilla

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Buenos Aires

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Hyderabad

ProductTank Chandigarh

ProductTank Köln

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Santiago

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank Cluj-Napoca

ProductTank Heidelberg

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank London

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Jacksonville

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Brisbane

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Exeter

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Porto

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Phoenix

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Prague

ProductTank Bratislava

ProductTank New York

ProductTank Kansas City

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Leeds

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Bogotá

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Madison

ProductTank Singapore

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Canberra

How I got my job in product – Robin Padilla

Louron Pratt

Read more

Comments