Shaun Clowes

I've spent my career building products, and it taught me the work isn't really about the product. It's about understanding the problem. Show people their problem has a better answer, and the product sells itself.I'm General Manager, Confluent and Data at IBM, leading the next generation of data products across both. Confluent, the data streaming platform, is relied on by more than 6,500 enterprises to power real-time operations. Before Confluent I was CPO at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company, where I led a team of over 250 product, design, content and data specialists behind a platform for integration, automation and API management doing over $1.6B in annual revenue. Earlier I was CPO at Metromile, an insurtech disrupting auto insurance. And I spent six years at Atlassian, where I ran product for Jira Agile, now Jira Software, then built the industry's first B2B Growth team into a 60-person department. I've followed my nose through all of it, chasing the questions I didn't understand yet and wanted to.Beyond those roles, I advise and invest across seed to later-stage companies, and co-created two Reforge programs, one on retention and one on data for product managers.I believe product thinking is a superpower. Point it at almost any problem and it works, not just the ones with software attached. Once you start thinking this way, you can't really turn it off, and it pays off in places you'd never expect.