Mary Jane Feigenbutz

Oh, hello! It’s nice to meet you.

I’m Mary Jane, a creative living, learning, and making in Chicago. I’ve spent my career in Product Management focused on emerging software and innovation, managing the 0-1 full lifecycle of several digital solutions at companies ranging from 5 employees to 50,000. I’m a tech enthusiast and an active member of the non-profit Chicago startup hub 1871 where I’m always happy to be surrounded by so many other entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial minds.

Outside of the tech world, you can typically find me baking absurdly tiny cakes, making art, and volunteering with like-minded arts organizations such as A.B.L.E.

Speaking snapshots

Women in Product

“Using Research to Drive Product Decisions”

I was honored to accept Women In Product’s invitation to be a Panelist on one of my all-time favorite topics: Product Research. I shared research approach suggestions for various scenarios, learnings from conducting in-depth discovery for multiple emerging products, and tactical advice on how to involve team members of all disciplines in the product research journey. The topics covered were to help current product managers become more effective at employing research throughout the product development cycle.

Data-Driven Chicago

“Machine Learning: Messaging Automation”

As a co-presenter alongside Sprout’s Director of Data Science, I spoke to an audience of Data Scientists about Sprout Social’s data-driven product strategy and product development approaches. I explained how and why my development team was using machine learning to power functionality within one of our private messaging products: Bot Builder. I shared ideas for future applications of machine learning we were considering as well as a few concerns.

Grow@Sprout

“How to Think like a Product Manager”

In this panel I spoke to an audience of individuals in non-product roles about how to approach problems through a product management lens. We discussed how to formulate strategies, earn stakeholder buy-in, and tackle difficult prioritization decisions. I shared my personal views and tricks for a variety of product management topics including how to effectively motivate teams, when to use intuition in decision-making, and ways to properly facilitate collaborative ideation.