Tom Meese · Product Leadership

Product Leader. Zero-to-one builds for enterprise and developers.

I love building products. I’ve also spent twenty years running them, so I know what it takes to keep them working once customers depend on them.

5
Zero-to-one products launched
$18M→$75M+
ARR growth the product helped drive
Where I’ve built products
Aerospike · Janrain · Axian · Equilibrium
// How I Build Products
“Start with the customer. Stay there.”
Tom Meese

I gather signals from every place customers interact with us, along with market research and input from the sales and support teams who talk to customers every day. I set up measurement early so those signals become data, and that data drives our product strategy and decisions.

For Aerospike Cloud Managed Service, our three launch customers and the market research I did with sales pointed to large workloads: 10+ TB of data and over 1M transactions per second. We standardized instance types and built pricing and packaging around that. The next ten customers in the sales pipeline had workloads under 1 TB and 10k transactions per second. Based on that data, we pivoted our instance types, pricing, and packaging to fit this cohort.

When I took over Aerospike’s stalled DBaaS project, mapping our customers’ application lifecycle showed the bottleneck was getting developers a sandbox to build and test in. We refocused the product on developers and launched first with a control panel, which gave us time to get the public API right before anyone depended on it.

I define products with whatever process fits the problem we are trying to solve, from Agile to Amazon’s Working Backwards, which puts the customer first by writing the press release and FAQ before anything gets built. I’ve owned the short- and long-range roadmaps, worked with sales to line up the first customers, and partnered with product marketing on messaging and pricing.

// Product Stories

Zero-to-one builds, rebuilds, turnarounds.

Select any story for the full detail.

// How I Lead Product Teams

As Head of Product at Janrain, I led three Directors of Product covering ecosystem integrations, the customer dashboard, and APIs. At Aerospike, I led two Director-level product managers for the managed service and DBaaS product lines. In both roles I grew and developed product managers while orchestrating dependencies from their roadmaps into a single platform view. A few of the principles I lead by:

Keep the customer in the room.
Customer KPIs get published where the whole team can see them, so every priority traces back to what customers actually measure us on.
Mission alignment before roadmap.
Before a roadmap gets discussed, the team needs to understand why the work matters. Every roadmap item should trace back to the product’s purpose and the customer it serves.
Curiosity before intervention.
When something’s off, the first move is a question, not a correction. Most performance problems are context problems, and you only find that out by asking.
See all of my leadership principles →
// What People Say
“I watched Tom turn around a demoralized team, I watched him turn burn out to purpose, I watched him replace failure with efficiency, and I watched him turn frustrated clients into committed partners.”
Micah Carrick
Engineering Leader · Reported to Tom at Janrain and Aerospike
“Some of the projects we had were small, some quite large and critical to our business. Tom is someone I could always count on, someone who drove results through his teams and responded to our every need.”
Corey J. Lederer
Former Chief Product Officer · Client while at Nike
“Characteristics that stand out to me are strategic thinking/execution and organizational (and personal) development… He launched a new practice, was not afraid to address a faltering one…”
Pete MacKay
Product Security & Engineering Architect · Colleague at Axian
// Current Work

Independent since 2024: building production AI systems using Spec-Driven Development, developing AI adoption roadmaps for organizations figuring out where to start, and taking on fractional product leadership engagements.

// Beyond Work
Tom Meese racing at Real West Gravel 2026

Competing at the masters level in cycling and triathlon.

Structured training, deliberate recovery, and long-range goal setting keep me competitive at the masters level. The same planning and consistency that goes into work goes into the training.

If we’ve already talked, this is the context behind the conversation. If we haven’t, let’s fix that.
Tom Meese
tom@meeses.com linkedin.com/in/tommeese Resume (PDF)