Vera Volk

Digital Platform Product Manager · From Brief to Build · Solving for Business, Building for People. At Scale.

About Me

Over a decade in product, and I've seen it all. Strategy, discovery, development, delivery. Mobile, web, large-scale, high-stakes.

I take what users need and what the business wants, and turn it into something engineers can actually build. I shape the vision, get everyone on the same page (business, marketing, engineering), and let data and real user feedback drive the calls.

I care about good design, I work well with others, and I ship things that actually work.

I live in the Seattle area and work at Starbucks as a Senior Product Manager on the Menu / Product / Customizations Platform for the Starbucks app. I love sci-fi, nature, and music.

My career journey

My slice of the product universe

My PM world: the impact I drive, the responsibilities I carry, the stakeholders I navigate, and the daily routine that holds it all together.

My career evolution with AI

How my work has shifted year by year as AI reshaped what engineers are expected to build, and the hands-on ways I've kept pace with it.

My skillset

Roadmaps that actually land

A look at how I structure and tailor roadmaps for different stakeholders, covering product vision and strategy for leadership, feature detail for neighboring teams, and project plans for teams that depend on my delivery.

My OKR playbook: how I picked the right metrics for different kinds of products

My take on why the same OKR approach breaks across different products, and a deep dive into the three frameworks I use

Selling platform work to leadership - the pitch nobody taught you

How I learned to stop pitching engineering work and start selling business outcomes.

Workshops are an art, User Interviews are a science

What I have learned facilitating workshops and running user interviews, in my own words

My vibe-coded full-stack web app on the cloud

My first vibe coding project, start to finish. Here's the what, the why, and my honest POV on building a real, cloud-backed app entirely on my own terms.

How I handle deployments

How I plan, de-risk, and ship deployments, from routine pushes to national rollouts in waves. My POV on doing it without drama.

My approach to data governance, security, legal, and architectural best practices

A walk through how I approach the mandatory procedures most engineers dread