Hello listeners. Welcome back as we are dropping another episode in our series sponsored by our good friends at Railsware.

Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses, services and products. They have created amazing products like MailTrap, Cuppler, and Titan apps, while also partnering with teams like Callandley and Brightbytes. They deliver amazing products and have

happy customers to prove it. In this series, we are digging into the company's methods

around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to

not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are chatting with Julia Staran, product director at Railsware with over 17

years of experience in product management, business process, automation, and optimization.

Julia will share her insights into where an MBA helps you manage a product team and where it doesn't.

Julia, thank you for being on Code Story today.

Excited to jump into our topic today around, does an MBA help you manage a product team?

I'm an MBA myself.

Super excited to hear from the product director at Railsware.

You have 17 years of experience and product management and building awesome

products. So really excited to have you on the show today. Thank you, Noah. And great to hear that

this is something that you are also interested in. I just recently graduated. Five days ago, I just got

my diploma. It's all fresh, let's say, and maybe we can compare our experience. Absolutely. Congratulations. I know it's a lot of work to get an MBA. It was a lot of work for me as well and really got a lot of value out of it, but I'm really curious to dive into the overlap and the drive in product management.

Before your MBA, which you got five days ago, you just mentioned, what was your story before that? And what motivated you to pursue it?

For the past five years, which means three years before I started MBA, I was managing products

here in Rollsford, and Rollsworth is a flat structure company, meaning that all of the teams

are responsible, you don't need to babysit,

but you need to wear many hats. For example, I was overseeing not only product development

and leadership of the engineering team, but also, of course, marketing, sales, like monetization

...