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Alex Valaitis

Founder
W3T Inc.

Marketing, Advertising & Sales, Business, Start-Ups & Entrepreneurship

"Essentially that's what a good product manager should be trying to do, clearing obstacles for the really smart people on their team and letting them go and do what they do."

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison logo University of Wisconsin-Madison

B.A., Computer Science

University of Wisconsin-Madison logo University of Wisconsin-Madison

B.A., Economics

Podcasts

47:29
898: What a LinkedIn Product Manager Does With Alex Valaitis, LinkedIn [Main T4C Episode]

Alex Valaitis is a product manager* and product lead of Elevate, one of LinkedIn’s enterprise product lines -- with 12 dedicated engineers. When Alex graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in December 2016 with a double major in Economics and Computer Science, he had a sub-3.0 GPA.  And yet,..

Career Path

Interview Highlights

“A lot of really successful CEOs have had products in their past and I think the reason why they started  product was if you can learn to lead through influence rather than authority, I think you appreciate it a lot more.”

Best Career Advice

“You should look at a career as an infinite horizon. The problem is a lot of people, they look at their career as being the set point of time … you have to actively seek out these experiences that you don’t like so that you can learn what you do like, and over time you continually start to build a career in the life you want while recognizing it’s never going to be perfect. So I’m very happy where I am now, but that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly trying to acquire new skills constantly exploring.”

Career Challenge

“I actually suffered a pretty serious injury back in February when I was snowboarding … I lost the use of my hand for a couple of weeks and it was unclear if I would get the use of my hand back … But that was really challenging because if you think about writing a book or should I say typing a book out, it’s kind of hard to do that when you don’t have one of your hands. And so for me, it was kind of this low point where I was under all this stress … I was literally using speech dictation tools on Google. Instead of me typing out, I would speak the words and Google always got it wrong. So with one hand, I go back and go through. And I think it was a struggle because it just felt never-ending.”

Skills

Product Management, Pitching Ideas, Entrepreneurship

Professional Interests

Consulting, Product Design, Management

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