My Name is Mark Crowe — This Is What I Achieve at Aha!

What is the best way to accelerate your career? Work in a high-growth company that challenges you and puts learning first. An unwavering motivation to continue improving and achieving is also key. The highest performers constantly pursue new ideas and seek to understand the experiences and motivations of the people around them. We can learn a lot from them.

Curiosity fuels growth — which is why we want to bring you personal stories of achievement from talented people. Our hope is that some of their ideas are useful and maybe even inspirational as you work to become your best.

Meet Mark Crowe — a Sr. Product Success Manager on the Aha! Customer Success team. Mark is passionate about sharing his product building expertise to help our customers achieve their best. He has been with Aha! for more than five years, building on two decades of prior product management and consulting experience. Mark lives in Maui, Hawai‘i with his family.

Read on to learn more about how Mark finds meaning and joy in his work — in his own words.

What energizes you about being a product success manager?

"I love working with customers. It brings me joy to help someone realize their vision, work through a challenge that was stumping them, or see new possibilities that they had not yet envisioned. In my role, I get to use my years of product building experience to guide a large swath of product managers through all manner of challenges, large and small. Providing this knowledge alongside such a great product tends to result in very happy customers."

"It is energizing to see the positive impact that even a brief, helpful interaction can have on others."

Which recent accomplishment at Aha! are you most proud of?

"I am leading an upcoming live tutorial for our customers on reporting in Aha! Roadmaps. Members of the Aha! team host these tutorials to do deep dives on product management topics and best practices using our software. The live events are really popular and tend to generate positive interactions from both sides — customers have a chance to ask questions live, and we get to hear about their challenges firsthand.

Developing and reviewing the tutorial content has been a change from my daily work — it has been great to collaborate with the team and let the ideas flow. Preparation is a lot of effort, but I am proud to be part of a high-achieving team where everyone wants to help each other rise. I am looking forward to sharing the product tips that I find particularly valuable with a larger audience."

What has been the most rewarding thing about being on the Aha! team?

"There are so many aspects of company building, team culture, and collaboration that Aha! has simply gotten right."

"Since the beginning, Aha! was built from the ground up for SaaS and remote work. I love being able to work from my home office — and not have that be an exception or a decision that may be reversed one day through some new management decree. The ability to choose my environment helps me be my best. And we are an amazingly close-knit group for having team members that are spread around the globe."

What is the most surprising but useful career advice someone has given you?

"Back in my consulting days, a mentor of mine told me this: Consider the colleagues who stand out most, think about what really makes them special, and try to work a little piece of that into your own work. I found that looking for real-life examples of innovativeness, grit, confidence, and compassion made those qualities much more tangible than reading about them in a book.

For example, I worked with a software architect early in my career as a product manager. I was amazed by his ability to separate himself from the product he had built. He took criticism in stride. Back then, I would often take criticism personally and saw it as a failing. But this architect saw that feedback was objectively about the product — with the understanding and confidence that he had made good decisions based on the information available at the time.

I really took that to heart. I worked on following this approach and found it to be a critical skill — I needed to be able to hear feedback from all kinds of sources to inform next steps and keep the product evolving in the right direction.

I continue to emulate those around me. This helps me both to appreciate my colleagues' expertise and improve myself in the process."

How should someone keep learning and increasing their knowledge in a similar role?

"I played a lot of sports growing up. One thing I learned was that I always improved the quickest when I faced the greatest challenges. Pushing myself to try out for the most advanced team or play against older competitors made me work harder and learn faster than taking the easy road. I feel it is the same in business. You learn best when there is a goal and a need to stretch for results."

"Go after the ambitious roles, dig into the challenging problems, take on those tough assignments. Embrace the hard work. It makes you better through experience. The rest will take care of itself."

The What I Achieve series spotlights the achievements and contributions of the Aha! team. For insights into how we got here, read our Why I Joined posts.

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