Productside x Chicago: The Executive Table

Principal Consultant & Trainer at Productside
At Productside, Dean is a senior instructor, advisor, and engaging speaker helping product people navigate AI, ML, IIoT, and modern delivery practices. With 30+ years across healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and beyond, he helps enterprises and startups fix what fouls up teams: rewarding outputs over outcomes, delinquent governance, and decisions optimizing busy over better.

Director of Product Management at Johnson Controls
At Johnson Controls, Michael leads product management with over a decade of tenure and a global, results-driven approach to complex technology challenges. With deep expertise spanning AI, software development, cybersecurity, market intelligence, and predictive analytics, Michael drives product strategy that bridges emerging technology with real-world enterprise needs across Johnson Controls' global portfolio.

Director of Product Management at PayPal
At PayPal, Tej leads Product Strategy for Personalization & Decisioning spanning consumer and merchant segments, as well as leading MarTech product for the Merchant Segment driving agentic transformation across Data, Decisioning and Omni-channel Orchestration, re-imagining an entire Marketing workflow. Before PayPal, he spent 17 years in consulting, culminating as Assistant Vice President leading delivery and solutions for Marketing Technology and Advanced Analytics in banking and financial services — driving B2C and B2B transformation for more than a dozen global clients through product strategy, rapid prototyping, and agile execution.

Senior Director, Payments Products at Capital One
At Capital One, Ashish leads Payments Products as Senior Director, overseeing a portfolio spanning network tokens, agentic commerce, card-on-file experiences, and digital wallets — serving issuers, networks, acquirers, merchants, and tech enablers globally. With 20 years of product leadership at Discover and PwC, he brings deep expertise in emerging payment technologies, tokenization platform modernization, and AI-assisted product management.

Director, Business Relationship Management & Innovation at CNA Insurance
At CNA, Joe leads the Product Manager and Product Owner Community of Practice while partnering with business and technology leaders to drive innovation, align strategy, and solve complex business problems. With more than 20 years of experience, he has worked with Fortune 100 and 500 organizations across insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and travel to strengthen product capabilities, coach leaders, and build collaborative, customer-centered teams. Joe is passionate about helping people solve the right problems, develop practical product management skills, and build product cultures that deliver meaningful outcomes. He is also the co-host of The Product Porch podcast, where he shares practical insights and real-world conversations with product professionals.

Director Product Management, Digital Business Banking at FIS
At FIS, Mac leads the product management team for Digital Business Banking. FIS provides digital banking solutions to over 300 financial institutions that offer business and commercial banking to their business and treasury management customers. Mac brings deep expertise in digital applications in the financial industry. He is an experienced product leader with a career built on driving innovation in technology.

Vice President of Product Management, Global Banking Platform at JPMorganChase
At JPMorgan Chase, Divya leads product strategy and platform modernization as Vice President of Product Management for the Global Banking Platform. Previously as Senior Product Manager of Digital Communications, she drove the migration of legacy APIs and cloud transformation initiatives serving 80M+ customers and 4.4B+ data records. Divya brings deep expertise in AI, cloud modernization, and scalable customer experience platforms.

Vice President of Product Management at Optimizely
At Optimizely, Cory leads the $87M Platform and Commerce portfolios across a global team that includes login and authentication, user management, data platform, reporting, and integrations. A transformational leader known for cross-functional collaboration, outcome-based execution, and building high-performing teams, Cory drives AI-first innovation across her product suite and in the day-to-day product management operations of her team.

VP of Product Management at Collibra
At Collibra, Chandra leads product management for Collibra Catalog and Collibra Lineage, driving strategy for enterprise data intelligence across global organizations. Drawing on prior leadership roles at Northern Trust and IBM, he brings deep expertise in data governance, AI-ready analytics, and trusted data platforms. Chandra champions full data transparency — enabling technical and business teams to confidently power AI workloads and compliance initiatives.

Sr. Director, Product Strategy & Planning at Aprimo
At Aprimo, Mark leads product strategy and planning for elements of the company's content operations and digital asset management platform, shaping product vision and roadmap direction for enterprise marketing organizations. With over 20 years at Aprimo and its predecessor, Teradata Marketing Applications, Mark has progressed from technical architecture and deployment to driving the strategic direction of Aprimo's Plan & Spend product portfolio.

Director of Enterprise at Productside
At Productside, McKenzie partners with global Product organizations to define what success looks like in their transformation journey and shape the roadmap to achieve it. She helps teams upskill, reskill, and align their capabilities to drive long-term behavior change and measurable business outcomes. McKenzie has supported transformation efforts across industries including financial services, manufacturing, retail, and technology.