Who is Gabrielle Bufrem?

Gabrielle Bufrem is a product management leader, currently employed at VMware in San Francisco. She also provides product training and workshops — including the Product Management Foundations Training Workshop — at Mind the Product.

Originally from Brazil, Gabrielle has lived in a total of 13 cities and 10 countries. Since graduating from Brown University back in 2015, her career in product has gone from strength to strength. Gabrielle has worked across eight distinct industries and with product teams in Europe, North America and Asia.

Throughout her career, Gabrielle has dedicated herself to building products that drive impact. She loves advising startups and coaching product teams. She’s also a respected speaker at product conferences around the world. Maybe you’ve heard her in person?

Pursuing her interest in the intersection between product management and design, Gabrielle is currently conducting research with Brown University PHD students on how to improve collaboration in design.

Gabrielle is driven to improve the effectiveness of product teams and their process.

What is Gabrielle Bufrem known for?

Gabrielle is a manager of product managers. She gives them the tools and insight they need to be better at what they do.  

She’s written articles covering everything from audience empathy and product discovery to feature requests and the art of saying “no”. However, her upcoming talks and training are based around one of the two following topics:

Digital transformation

Gabrielle currently works at VMware — a Californian software company with 24,000+ employees. Here she supports product managers to deliver technical innovations for clients. She previously worked in a similar role at Pivotal Labs until it was acquired by VMware in 2019.

Gabrielle’s take on the digital landscape is that every company is now a tech company. And that every company needs to approach digital transformation in the right way if they are to reap its rewards.

Gabrielle teaches teams how to transform by questioning ingrained behaviors and accepting that the process takes time.

Teams need to commit to digital transformation and feel comfortable experimenting. They also have to move beyond buzzwords if they’re to create digital channels that really work for companies and their users.

IMPACT prioritization

In association with Mind the Product, Gabrielle runs a workshop on IMPACT prioritization.

Prioritization is hard, she says. And it becomes even harder as companies evolve, grow and perhaps even develop more than one product team. Nevertheless, prioritization is the central task of a product manager.

We couldn’t agree more, here at airfocus.

Gabrielle has developed a prioritization framework that product managers can systematically apply across their teams and organizations. Making decisions that maximize IMPACT involves the following:

• I – Identify reach

• M – Measure customer and business impact

• P – Predict opportunity cost

• A – Assess confidence

• C – Calculate effort

• T – Total the impact score

Gabrielle will soon be releasing a book focused on the same topic.

What is Mind the Product?

Mind the Product offers conferences, content and training for product professionals. It’s the world’s largest product community — run by product people for product people.

Starting from a small-scale meetup in a London pub, Mind the Product now has a product community of over 150,000 members. They run annual Mind the Product conferences in Hamburg, London, Manchester, San Francisco and Singapore as well as digital conferences available to members all over the world.

They also offer world-class product training and workshops, provided by industry leaders like Gabrielle.

Where can you learn more about Gabrielle Bufrem?

Interested in hearing more of Gabrielle’s product management insights for yourself? Take a look at her upcoming events. These are the workshops she’ll be hosting, and the conferences she’ll be speaking at, over the next few months.

You can also keep up to date with Gabrielle over on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as well as reading her product management articles on Medium.