Elena Zanette de Gravisi

"As a product manager, I need to be curious and ask loads of questions to make sure we think about all the things that we know, and about all the things we do not know or we might not have thought about. I also often find myself in a situation where I don't have the authority to influence some decisions, and I have to campaign to get my colleagues to join in and work together."

"I see myself as a bridge between our customers and our internal engineers and data teams. On a daily basis, I work to make sure that everything we do has a positive impact on the users of our product. For example, I could be looking at deciding if it's more impactful for one of our team members to work on improving a process for a user based in Asia as opposed to a user based in Europe. Or I could be working with one of our analysts to decide which numbers to look at to represent our success. What I enjoy the most about this job is that every day is different, and I get to work on a lot of fun problems with smart people. I get to disagree with them, and learn through the process of listening to them. I also get to build things with them and look at how happy our clients are when we present them to them."

"I started in my career as a business analyst, which is a role where you look at numbers a lot, and you try to explain how the business is doing through analyzing these numbers. Through this job I also picked up some more technical skills and learned how to use databases with SQL. This helped me get my next job, where I was supporting clients in a bigger organization to acquire very large quantities of data, and to link them together.I had fun in that role, but I was always helping clients integrate data that I had very little power to change. This inspired me to apply for a product manager role, where I had a say in the direction of the product, while still interacting with the numbers and with the clients"

"While at work I can be more analytical, in my spare time I like to be more creative and much less organized. I like painting, trying new things, eating, baking and cooking. Recently I've knitted a very long blanket that looks more like a scarf for giants. It really helped me relax, as the repetitive movement of knitting is a lot like meditation and helps me disconnect after a long day at work."

"I spend most of my working days in meetings. A lot of them are 1-to-1 meetings where I catch up with people and go through our list of to-dos. I also have many meetings with the engineering and the data teams, where we updated each other on progress and make decisions about what is best to do next. During the morning I have usually fewer meetings, that's when i can put my thinking hat on, and write more in depth emails or documents about our strategy. During this time I also dig into the data a bit deeper to try to support my decisions."

"I studied for a bachelors degree in business in Italy, and I have a master in business from a French university"