Michele Nieberding

I've been in tech for almost 15 years now, but it's been tech for different industries - retail, hotels, restaurants - different flavors of the same ice cream, as I like to say. I currently lead product marketing at Optiversal, a startup of almost 40 people in the search space for e-commerce. We help brands like shoe company Hibbit get found by shoppers by making content that makes them searchable. My journey started at a tech company called Cvent, where I was technically selling ad space to hotels, which was kind of in that hospitality space but more ad tech. I just fell in love with what tech can do and have been at a lot of different companies and industries ever since. I've been in leadership for about 2 years total, including my time at MetaRouter about 3 years ago, then at the director level at a larger company, and back into leadership about 2 months ago at Optiversal. What I'm most proud of is building teams and helping people blossom in their careers. At Iterable, I took over a team of 5 product marketers, and there was one person leadership wanted to put on a PIP. I worked with him on executive presence and making sure his work was known, and he ended up crushing it and doing really great things for the organization. That proud mom moment really captures what I love most - helping people succeed and be the best version of themselves.