John Lane
VP of Product & Technology
I've spent my career trying to understand how things work — and then figuring out how to make them work better for people. That started with a history degree from Purdue, which taught me less about dates and more about systems: how institutions form, how decisions compound, how context shapes outcomes. It's a lens I still use every day.
I came to product management through business analysis, and eventually into the VP seat I hold today at Membershine in Indianapolis. Along the way I picked up an MBA from Butler University's Lacy School of Business, which sharpened the business side of a brain that had always been more curious than calculating.
What I actually do now: I lead product and technology at Membershine, where we're building tools for a space that's been underserved by modern software. My job is to keep the roadmap honest — grounded in what users actually experience, not what the org chart finds convenient. I believe company culture is the strategy, that the best engineering teams want a PM who respects their craft, and that a well-run backlog is a form of respect for everyone's time.
Work History
Vice President of Product and Technology
Membershine
- Own product strategy and technology roadmap for a SaaS platform serving a historically underserved market, aligning development priorities with business objectives across the full organization
- Partner directly with engineering leadership to maintain a healthy, well-structured backlog — balancing near-term delivery with longer-horizon platform investments
- Drive cross-functional stakeholder alignment between product, engineering, sales, and customer success, ensuring the voice of the user stays at the center of prioritization decisions
- Established and continue to evolve product management practices and agile ceremonies that support sustainable delivery velocity
Vice President of Product Development
HOA Start
- Led product development for a software platform targeting homeowner association management, a domain with deep operational complexity and a fragmented incumbent landscape
- Managed roadmap prioritization across competing stakeholder demands, translating community and administrative needs into a coherent build sequence
- Built and maintained feedback loops with customers and internal teams to surface real friction points rather than assumed ones
- Guided the organization through early-stage product maturation, helping establish repeatable delivery processes as the team scaled
Senior Product Manager
Advertising Specialty Institute
- Owned and maintained product backlog and roadmap for a platform serving the promotional products industry, ensuring business objectives were reflected in prioritization decisions
- Maintained structured feedback loops with internal business stakeholders, translating operational insights into product requirements
- Collaborated with design and engineering to refine features through iterative delivery cycles, keeping teams aligned on scope and intent
- Applied customer and stakeholder input systematically to reduce misalignment between product direction and actual user needs
Senior Product Manager
Ren
- Prioritized product backlog and roadmap to ensure delivery was tightly coupled to business objectives, reducing waste from misaligned or underspecified work
- Maintained continuous feedback loops with internal stakeholders to surface evolving needs and translate them into actionable product decisions
- Used SQL-based data analysis to inform prioritization, investigate user behavior, and validate product assumptions with evidence rather than intuition
- Collaborated with Design and Engineering across agile ceremonies — planning, refinement, review — to maintain a shared understanding of scope and success criteria
Product Manager
Ren
- Led cross-functional discussions with Design and Engineering to refine the product backlog, ensuring requirements were clear and technically grounded before work began
- Ran agile ceremonies — sprint reviews, planning sessions, and backlog refinement — keeping teams aligned and delivery moving at a sustainable pace
- Applied user-centered design principles to ensure product decisions reflected actual user workflows, not internal assumptions
- Built foundational PM practices within the organization, establishing consistent rituals for feedback gathering and delivery accountability