Dave Feldman

I'm a versatile, people-first product leader with 25y experience across Engineering, Product, and Design. 2x founder and alumnus of Google, Facebook, Heap, Yahoo. Based in Berlin; originally from the USA.

Versatile: I wear a lot of hats. PM, designer, executive, founder, researcher, engineer. It's natural, fluid, and fun for me to combine these lenses.

People-first: Business is psychology. An organization's success rests on its people and their relationships. People and culture matter most; without them, vision, strategy, execution fall apart.

Product: I love creating products—learning, hypothesizing, designing, building, and learning all over again. It's fun to bring something to life that people can use.

Leader: I don't want to wear all those hats by myself! I love when I can guide the success of others. Leadership is difficult and emotional; I've stayed with it because it's so rewarding for me.

Experience

Product Leadership Consulting

2022-present

Product Coach & Consultant

I advise, coach, and consult with startups, scale-ups, and individuals to provide career and project-level coaching, fractional product leadership, and hands-on product & design services. Current & past clients include Stytch, Craft, and Tiptap.

Tiptap

2025-present

Product Consultant

Tiptap develops the most popular open-source document-editing framework for the web. Primarily I'm working with them to validate and prototype Flex: a prospective product focused on helping writers make better, more realistic use of AI. This includes qualitative user and customer research; product strategy & definition; product design & UX; full-stack AI-assisted engineering; and team coordination and prioritization. Learn more on my blog.

Outgoing

2024-2025

Founding Product, Design, Engineering

Outgoing's mission is to get people out into the world, interacting with their communities. They're building a mobile app to help people do that. Outgoing was pre-product and very early stage so my day-to-day varied, encompassing product strategy, advising the founder, UX & design, and full-stack engineering.

Prisma

Berlin

2023-2024

VP Product

Prisma simplifies working with databases, offering the #1 object-relational mapping tool for the TypeScript ecosystem.

Miter, Inc.

San Francisco

2020-2022

CEO & Founder

We built a SaaS product to improve business meetings via behavioral science—because everybody wants better meetings, but most attempts to improve them fail for predictable reasons. We raised pre-seed funding in 2021, built a robust product and a team of four, and published a smash-hit Harvard Business Review article along the way. Ultimately we disproved our core hypothesis.

Envelope Finance

San Francisco

2020-2023

Advisor

Envelope helps people reduce their credit-card debt. I met weekly with the founder to provide guidance on product, UX, engineering, and hiring.

Heap, Inc.

San Francisco

2018-2020

VP Design, Interim VP Product

Heap provides behavioral analytics to product teams. I served as first VP Design and interim VP Product. I joined when we had neither a PM nor a design team, and worked with fellow executives to create a lean, agile, collaborative product-development process.

Facebook, Inc.

Menlo Park, CA

2016-2017

Product Design Manager, Messenger Developer Platform

The opportunity: invent a new type of digital experience rooted in chat, via opinionated developer experience. My team and I sat down with platform developers to understand their needs, wrote developer docs, and created open-source templates for common bot flows. My postmortem on the 2016-17 chatbot bubble has over 30k views.

Google, Inc.

Mountain View, CA

2014-2016

Product Manager & Product Design Leader

Product Design Manager for Gmail & Inbox by Gmail. Managed 10-15 designers and researchers in Mountain View and Zurich and drove product strategy for Inbox following its initial launch. Product Manager for an AI project in Search.

Emu Messenger

Palo Alto, CA

2012-2014

Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer

Messaging + AI startup funded by Kleiner Perkins, Triplepoint, DFJ, and Menlo Ventures. Acquired by Google in 2014. As co-founder and CPO I served as product lead, designer, and front-end engineer. Also I made the coffee sometimes.

CrunchFund

San Francisco

2012

Entrepreneur in Residence

Served as CrunchFund's first EIR. Helped evaluate potential investments. Served as interim product lead for a portfolio company.

AOL

Palo Alto, CA

2010-2012

Senior Director, Product Management

Worked across AOL to improve overall product quality. Managed the 2011 relaunch of TechCrunch.com, nearly doubling page-views per visitor.

Yahoo! Inc.

Sunnyvale, CA

2007-2010

Director, User Experience Design (2007-2010)

Led the design team for Yahoo! Messenger—then the largest instant messaging service in the US. As member of the Emerging Markets team, participated in strategy and global ethnographic research. Designed and PMed Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone, which became the #1 free social networking app on iTunes and was featured by Apple.

Freelance

Cambridge, USA

2000-2007

Product Design & Strategy Consultant

Performed freelance UX, visual design, product strategy, and front-end development for a variety of clients spanning RFID middleware, academic book-purchasing, personal finance, political fundraising, and digital asset management.

TextWise, LLC

Syracuse, NY

1997

Internship - Design & Engineering

Designed and built front-ends for information-retrieval and visualization systems.

Microsoft Corporation

Redmond, WA

1996

Internship - Engineering

Education

Harvard University

1994-1998

AB, Computer Science

Relevant Coursework: Cognitive, Behavioral, and Abnormal Psychology; Computer Graphics; Face Perception; Artificial Intelligence; Abnormal Psychology; Data Structures and Algorithms; Music Theory; Intellectual History

Extracurricular Activities: Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players: Board of Directors, Set Designer, Technical Director, Stage Manager. Harvard Din & Tonics.

University of Maryland

College Park, MD

1998-1999

Faculty Research Assistant, Human-Computer Interaction Lab

Academic internship. Data-visualization research & prototyping.

Cornell University

Ithaca, NY

1998

Research Associate, Human-Computer Interaction Group

Academic internship. Designed educational and collabgoration tools. Conducted user research.

Ithaca High School

1991-1994

High School Degree