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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 PRD Spec 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 case studies

How I work

Malwarebytes · Product Owner

Pushing back on a free-by-default plan

The situation
The proposal was turning on a new feature automatically for all MSPs (managed service providers that handle IT services for their own small business customers) without their consent. The feature would be free to MSPs but still cost us to provide, and the intent was to garner upsells of a complementary feature.
What I did
I gathered MSP feedback directly and pulled usage data from Pendo, which pointed to two problems: MSPs want control of what their customers have, and the ROI for the company was not there. The feature flagged Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), which are known security weaknesses in software. Many of those flags weren't actionable. Some weaknesses had no fix yet, some never would because the software was no longer supported, and some were fixed by the MSP's other tools soon after we flagged them. Most MSPs only provide statistics on their customers' security posture without context for those numbers, so this could have alarmed their customers unnecessarily. Many MSPs' customers already had dedicated tools for this very use case and would not purchase the complementary feature anyway. The Pendo data showed that even if half of our MSPs purchased the upsell, it would not recoup the costs of providing the free feature. I presented my findings to VPs and Directors and recommended offering the feature as an optional add-on, so MSPs kept control.
The result
Leadership changed course. The feature launched for MSPs as an optional add-on rather than a forced default. Very few MSPs chose to add it, which confirmed the demand wasn't there.
Malwarebytes · Product Owner

Getting a stalled bundling decision unstuck

The situation
Our features had always been sold à la carte. It was pitched that we should sell in bundles, as we had done with our SMB customers, to grow deal size and set our own pricing. The concept for MSPs had been stalled in long brainstorming sessions for many months. There were too many options, and everyone wanted them structured differently.
What I did
I went back to what MSPs had already told us: they didn't want bundles defined for them. They had already established their own bundles of our products to sell to their customers. Creating bundles for them would have required major UI work and forced them into bundles with products they would never sell to their customers. That risked frustrating MSPs enough that we could lose their business. I recommended starting with new customers instead of causing so much rework for existing ones. New customers had no bundles of their own to disrupt, so we would get the revenue upside without the downside, and we could use them as a case study. I made that case to a VP and a C-level leader.
The result
Leadership approved the approach, and we quickly closed our first bundle sale to a new customer. At $500k, it was larger than our usual deals, and the VP credited it to me.
BlackCloak · Product Manager

Shipping the version that helped the most clients first

The situation
Clients were anxious to have their personal information removed quickly to drastically reduce their online footprint. However, permanent removal means getting clients' information taken down from data broker sites, the companies that collect and sell personal information. We request the removals, but each data broker has its own timeline to act on those requests. When clients searched their own names during this wait, they continued to see their information and assumed our services weren't working. I owned the feature to close that gap by hiding search results.
What I did
Supporting every search engine would have delayed launch. I scoped the first release to Google, the most widely used engine, which covered the majority of use cases without too much compromise. I chose to move Bing to a later release because of the timeline and technical challenges, even though a larger than average share of our clients use it.
The result
Clients could see the difference right away, which helped retention. The feature also became a selling point. Sales could demonstrate how quickly information could be hidden, building trust that prospects' data would be protected soon after purchase.
PDQ.com · First Product Owner

Building the first backlog and sprint process

The situation
PDQ.com ran on the waterfall model, a linear approach where each phase must be completely finished before the next one begins. This meant work was disjointed because departments did not collaborate and we didn't have any cross-functional teams. 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. Releases happened whenever something was finished, with no set cadence.
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, which were now cross-functional. I prioritized the backlog using the RICE and MoSCoW prioritization frameworks with input from all departments, and removed tickets that were no longer relevant.
The result
With a prioritized backlog for cross-functional teams driving each sprint, we were able to dedicate time to tech debt and create a true release cadence. Releases sped up by 133%, and tech debt was reduced by 80%. Feature decisions were now driven by data, and all departments felt heard.
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