Key takeaways: Define when you should look to formalize the product role Look for a bottleneck in the decision-making process Creating an opportunity for people on the team to grow into new roles Look to internal staff to promote people into product positions Growing into a new role means owning the decisions and learning opportunities Meet:  Chris White is currently the Chief Technology Officer of Prefect, overseeing the design and implementation of the next generation of data workflow automation systems. Chris began his journey into data tooling while getting his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researched optimization guarantees for highly non-convex data-driven problems. Throughout his career, Chris has gained experience in a diverse number of roles - teacher, researcher, data scientist, software engineer, sales engineer, and security officer to name a few. In his spare time, he is an avid runner and loves spending time in the ocean. If you have any questions for Chris, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitecdw https://twitter.com/markov_gainz I hope you enjoyed the episode, the best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you would like me to cover certain topics with future guests.