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Product Manager / Product Owner

Emily Ruth

Privacy and security software, from discovery to release.

I have 11+ years of experience owning product roadmaps and backlogs in Agile teams, from first concept through release. I lead cross-functional teams, run scrum ceremonies, and keep delivery on track and stakeholders aligned. I use AI tools in my daily product work, including prototyping ideas before they reach development.

See my project Get in touch
11+years in product management and ownership
25,000+B2B customers on products I owned at PDQ.com
60%increase in MSP profits at Malwarebytes
80%less technical debt across my PDQ.com portfolio
About

Product work for IT and security teams

My career has been in software that IT and security teams depend on. At PDQ.com I was the first Product Owner, owning desktop tools for software deployment and inventory. At Malwarebytes I owned SaaS security products for SMB and MSP customers. Today I work on digital executive protection software at BlackCloak.

In every role I have prioritized the backlog by business value with stakeholders, written the requirements, user stories and acceptance criteria, and run user acceptance testing before release. I have always supported more than one cross-functional team at a time, and I make sure engineers are heard before decisions get made.

Advanced CSPO CSPO Certified Scrum Master

What I bring

Product strategy and roadmaps Backlog prioritization User stories and acceptance criteria Stakeholder management Discovery and UX research Competitive research Go-to-market and launch AI-assisted prototyping Jira and Confluence
Featured project

A working prototype, built with AI

I build working prototypes with AI tools to test requirements before they go to development. This one grew into a complete application.

Job Tracker

A spreadsheet-style tracker for managing a job search pipeline. It moves each job through Jobs, Applied, Interviewing and Rejected stages, keeps contacts, and rolls everything up by company. I designed it and built it iteratively with Claude Code, publishing after every change.

Built with Claude Code Single HTML file About 90 commits
Live demo Case study Code and README
  • Automatic stage changes. Entering an applied or rejected date, or marking a job as interviewing, moves it to the right tab.
  • Follow-up reminders. A due date is set 7 days after the latest activity and changes color as it goes overdue.
  • Companies built for you. Companies are created from job and contact names, and can be renamed or merged.
  • One-click capture. A bookmarklet copies a posting's title, company and link into the tracker.
  • Your data, portable. Everything exports to JSON for backup.
Work stories

How I work

PDQ.com · First Product Owner

Building the first backlog and sprint process

The situation
PDQ.com ran on waterfall. There was no backlog, just a long list of bugs and requested features with nothing prioritized. Work was only added when someone decided to build a feature.
What I did
As the company's first Product Owner, I moved us to Jira and created a real backlog. I set up two-week sprints with the full set of Scrum ceremonies for two teams, and prioritized the backlog using RICE. I also went through the old list and removed every ticket that was no longer relevant.
The result
With a prioritized backlog driving each sprint, release cadence sped up by 133%.
Experience

Where I've worked

BlackCloak

Product Manager · April 2025 to present
  • Product Manager for digital executive protection software on iOS and Android.

Malwarebytes

Product Owner · October 2021 to October 2024
  • Wrote PRDs and owned execution for SaaS security products serving SMB and MSP customers, leading six major and 27 minor releases across two product lines.
  • Drove a 60% increase in MSP profits through requirements and release strategy.
  • Aligned priorities across development, QA, sales, marketing, support and UX.

PDQ.com

Product Manager / Product Owner · April 2015 to May 2021
  • First Product Owner at the company. Owned two flagship desktop products serving 25,000+ B2B customers across 35 major and 45 minor releases, delivered by three cross-functional teams.
  • Reduced portfolio technical debt by 80% while speeding up release cadence by 133%.
  • Wrote 40% of the external user guide and 19 blog posts, and ran product training for 50+ staff.
Contact

Let's talk product

Email is the best way to reach me. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

emily@emilyruth.me LinkedIn