Amanda Miller
Senior Product IC, Indianapolis
My two older sisters insisted because of a Barry Manilow song. If you know, you know.
All my life, I’ve said, “Hi, I’m Amanda but you can call me Mandy.” And there’s the story.
I’ve led product.
I’m back to discovery and building.
On purpose.
My background spans financial services and life insurance, workflow and document-intelligence products, and consumer marketplace and internal tools at Angie’s List. I’ve worked across startup, growth and public-company scale.
I do my best work close to the problem, in discovery, research, time with customers and deciding what gets built and why. The messy, tangled problems are my favorite to solve with teams. These have the greatest impact on people with real money on the line.
Through CMM Labs, I’m bringing that practice to AI. My first love is product. My drive to build with LLMs is aimed at growing my AI fluency, which will make me a better leader and partner. Take a look around CMM Labs by clicking on View my current work.
15 years in product & technology · B2B SaaS · Marketplace · Enterprise Operations · Regulated workflows
The right place for me measures value by whether people’s experiences got better, not just by the bottom line. Teams align and attack problems together. Theater is the exception, not the rule.
The job as I do it
The product is more than the software.
I start from where we’re trying to end up, because knowing the destination makes each day’s decisions better. The destination moves, and it should. If you can fully arrive at a vision, it was too small. Getting there is never only the software. People, process, technology, in that order.
The full product experience
A product isn’t done when the software works. Compliance, customer comms, support training, what sales can actually say about it. Those run alongside the build, not after it.
The source
A product problem shows up in more than one way. Symptoms are where I start, not where I stop. The real work is diagnosis. What’s the symptom and what’s the disease? That answer rarely comes from the data alone.
The common thread
Requests and signals arrive from every direction, often all at once. Spotting what they share is the easy part. The judgment is in what that shared thing actually is, and whether it justifies building one thing instead of four.
The people around the work
I make the call and give the reasoning behind it, because a team that knows why can carry the decision without me in the room. I learn as much from a PM two years in as from anyone senior, since newer people still see what the rest of us stopped noticing. None of that requires a reporting line.