Lisi Gardiner is Director of Product Management at Singular, a marketing intelligence platform used by growth teams at companies like Uber, DraftKings, and Nike to unify data, apply attribution, and surface insights. She joined Singular in 2018 as a Senior Product Manager after roles in product at ironSource and media buying at Supersonic in Tel Aviv, and now helps lead Singular’s product, overseeing roadmap strategy. Lisi launched a self-serve platform for the company’s mid-market segment and helped develop additional AI tools for measuring marketing.
In this conversation, Lisi talks about what it really takes for a smaller company to compete against dominant players — not by copying them, but by staying closer to customers, moving faster, and knowing when to say no to a feature request. She discusses the discipline behind Singular’s product decisions, the self-serve platform that helped drive 70% year-over-year growth in the mid-market, and how the company decided to invest ahead of Apple’s IDFA changes. Along the way, she reflects on what separates a good product manager from a mediocre one.
The David and Goliath advantage
What kinds of advantages can a smaller company realistically create through product strategy, rather than trying to out-build larger competitors?
This is a really fun question because it’s something we internally debate all the time. If you take a business class, they’ll tell you that if there’s a dominant player in the industry that owns anywhere between 60 to 80% of the market, that’s a total blocker — don’t go into the market. But you see throughout history over and over again examples where these disruptors come in and go from being the small player to being the dominant player. I think there’s a bit of a middle path where you can leverage your strengths to become a significant enough player within that market space. What’s really important is being very creative about your strategy and having a clear understanding of what your strengths are.
You can’t tackle things effectively by being a copycat company. If you’re going to continuously chase after that larger company, you will not succeed. You have to figure out what niche you’re going for and hack your way into that. But you have to have that disruptive mentality and really understand what the added value is, and what your unique take on the problem space is. If not, you’re always just going to be just chasing after the larger competitor and you’ll never be able to catch up because you won’t have the same resources that the larger competitor has.
Do you have explicit decision criteria that help keep roadmap decisions from becoming overly competitor-driven?
There’s theory and then there’s reality. It’s always funny because I hear all these product interviews and they’re like, “Yes, we have this framework and this is how we work.” But, to really be strategic about the product choices you make, you have to be able to pivot, which is the worst thing any product manager ever wants to hear because we do like to have that stability. The biggest strength you have as the smaller incumbent is that you can pivot and be more agile. So you do need to have a balance. If a new customer comes in and they’re willing to pay for whatever it is that you’ve figured out, you build that.
I know a lot of product managers will tell you that’s the wrong thing to do, that you don’t want to constantly be swapping out tasks and initiatives and having distractions as you go along. But I think it can also work to your advantage, because if you stick too much to a framework, it makes you too static. It doesn’t give you the flexibility you need to move fast. Especially in the marketing world, where the industry is changing a lot. Being agile is one of the really great things we’ve been able to leverage — working with our partners to understand what’s coming and being proactive about the changes we need to make.
So it’s not necessarily that we have an explicit framework, but it’s more about making sure we’re on top of all the changes coming through so we have a good position in the marketplace and we’re ready for it.
If a competitor makes a change, how do you decide whether it deserves a response or is just a distraction?
This is really what comes to the core of our product theory. Our biggest focus as a product team at Singular right now is that no matter what, we’re always obsessed with our customers. That’s originally an Amazon quote, and I really love it, because it means we are constantly prioritizing customer calls, joining whatever QBRs or sales calls we need to go to, and really listening to our customers.
This does two things. One, it’s understanding when there’s a feature out there that we need to determine if we also need to have it versus it’s just noise. Is it actually being adopted? Is it actually providing value to customers? You will not know until you talk to a thousand of those customers to understand if there’s really value there.
Having a competitor build something out first also gives you the ability to really analyze what they did well and what they didn’t do well, and then you can iterate and come out with a better solution. It’s not that you’re just being a copycat for whatever’s coming out — you understand the problem that was solved and then figure out how to do it better. Sometimes it’s better to be second to market and have a better product for it.
Saying no to the loudest requests
Can you give an example of a time you intentionally chose not to build a feature customers were requesting, because it would have diluted your product’s positioning?
This happens a lot with features that are buzzwords. Specifically in the marketing industry, we’ve been hearing the word “incrementality” for several years now. How do you measure incrementality? What’s your incrementality report? But when you start having conversations with customers to really try to tackle it and break it down — “What does incrementality mean to you?” — you realize it’s not one thing. It’s the same with AI: what does AI mean, or AI analysis? We can say it because it’s part of the hype, but if you’re not really breaking it down to the core of what you’re trying to solve, then it’s just a buzzword.
It’s more than just listening to what people are talking about — it’s also being able to really synthesize the information you’re hearing from all these calls with different customers to come up with a product that’s going to serve them best. A lot of times, the issue with customer calls is you can’t take the feedback at face value. You have to understand what’s underneath it. That’s really the difference between a good product manager and a mediocre product manager — especially in this AI world. OK, you take amazing notes and really listen to what they have to say, but what are they actually saying?
How do you validate whether something is worth building — probing questions, or watching users in action?
Ideally, it would be great to validate that by putting out a prototype or some sort of beta and having customers actually use it. That’s the real key: you know a product works if people come back and use it over and over again. But a lot of times, you may not have enough time to validate things as much as you’d like. That’s where I’m a big believer in being able to break things fast — launching with smaller MVPs and seeing if that small version is good enough, then iterating from there, because it doesn’t make sense to work on something huge and then find out nobody wants it.
Is moving fast ever a detriment?
For sure. Internally, sometimes we become sort of myopic. I hear this feedback a lot: “We’re putting out a lot of betas but then we don’t finish fully going to market with a complete feature.” I don’t actually see that as necessarily a bad thing, because you’re trying things out and seeing what works, and that’s what it means to be agile.
The downside is making sure that, internally, you’re keeping the right motivation, because working like this can sometimes feel chaotic. You need to be clear about what the objectives are, what you’re moving toward, and what the logic is behind some of the decisions you’re making. Sometimes you pivot in a way that isn’t so classic and it feels a bit random, but I think that really marks the strength of being able to think outside the box.
Building a culture that can pivot
Is it easier to push new tools through in an earlier-stage company?
It’s definitely that startup mentality where it’s an organized chaos. You give everybody the freedom to do whatever it is they need to do to get it done — we don’t necessarily have an organized process. We have certain values we know are important to us as an organization, but you have to give people the freedom to explore, try things out, and get things done on their own, as long as they’re accountable for the outcomes of their actions. And it works.
A lot of what I’m saying might be going against the classic way of doing product, but I feel like it’s really critical to be able to see the long-term — to understand the problem you’re trying to solve and not focus so much on the day-to-day task, the feature you’re working on at hand. To do that, you need to be a little bit more disruptive in how you think things through. Sometimes it’s having uncomfortable conversations, because people get very attached, in a good way, to what they’re building, and it hurts to have to pivot to something completely different.
Is it harder for product people with a background at a more traditional, enterprise company to move into an experimental environment, or the other way around?
Yes, definitely. I suffered that at first when I started working at Singular. I came from a much larger, enterprise-style company and I didn’t understand the chaos. Now I’ve fully embraced the chaos.
Sometimes we get too caught up in the process and it’s not an efficient use of our time. Sometimes it is, and you have to be able to make a decision and understand: is this providing value or not? But if you can’t back it up, you can’t articulate the value of it, and nobody else agrees with you, then you should toss it out.
Winning the mid-market
You launched a self-serve platform that helped drive roughly 70% year-over-year growth in the mid-market. How different is the product strategy when you’re trying to win customers who could very easily choose a much larger vendor?
It’s two completely different personas. Especially in the B2B space, if you’re working with very large enterprises, the decision-making they do — “I need to find a new vendor; how do I choose a new vendor?” — they’re never going to get criticized for choosing the industry standard, the go-to for everyone. But people from smaller-scale, more mid-market companies that are just starting out, especially in the mobile world, are looking for value for free or value for very little money. They don’t want the same features, they don’t want the same pricing, they don’t want the same plans. You have to understand what they want to be able to serve them differently.
Did that experience change how you think about different customer segments?
Yeah, definitely. This is a common B2B dilemma: What do you focus on to win an account over? If someone’s waving money in your face, you’re like, “Yes, let’s do it.” But if it’s a feature request where only one enterprise customer is going to be using it, it doesn’t make so much sense to build it out. It really depends — you have to weigh the decision. But, generally speaking, if we get a product feature request from one customer, we do our best to validate it with other customers. If it’s useful for them as well, we try to determine if we can build something that serves more than just one customer. That really helped us change our mindset, because we realized we needed to stop overly customizing the product specifically for enterprise and build something that has more value for different segments.
When you focus on it as segments, you’re not customizing to fit one customer — you’re building out a product that serves more than just one.
Reading industry shifts
Attribution, privacy regulations, AI, and platform policies are constantly reshaping the mobile marketing landscape. How do you distinguish between changes that warrant a strategic pivot and short-term disruptions that simply create noise?
Sometimes it’s really hard to tell. That’s where being small also helps because the communication isn’t as diluted in a small company. If there’s going to be a big change in the industry, we try to figure out how it’s going to affect partners and potential customers. We can go to the different teams and get feedback right away.
For example, when Apple initially released the changes where they removed the IDFA, the device model ID used for attribution, everyone was panicking. We knew it was coming and we invested quite a bit. A year or two after that, things changed again, but I don’t think it was a waste of our time, because it put us in a position where we were considered an industry leader, because we were ahead of the curve.
Sometimes you invest in things that don’t catch on, but having the right marketing around it still puts you in a good position in the market — it’s kind of like making lemonade out of your lemons. Sometimes you take a gamble and it doesn’t necessarily work out, but if you can spin it and use it to your advantage, show the market that you’re prepared, that still wins you a lot more credit than you realize.
Are there specific signals that give you confidence that an emerging trend is worth paying attention to, versus just buzz or hype?
We do regular check-ins both with our customers and with our partners, including an annual NPS. That’s been really important for us, because a lot of times you get feedback from customers, but you can’t put a number to it. Doing an NPS has been incredibly valuable for us to put numbers around things and make decisions based on what’s most important to our customers.
In the marketing space, you have very dominant partners — if Facebook, Google, TikTok, Apple care about something, then it’s important to us. Sometimes they make mistakes and gamble on things that don’t work out, but it warrants paying attention if it’s something they’re validating as well.
Finding white space
Product leaders often talk about finding white space, but in mature software categories those empty markets are rare. What techniques have you found most effective for identifying opportunities that larger competitors overlook?
It’s going back to being obsessed with your customers. A lot of times the big aha ideas come from these conversations you’ve been having over and over and you hadn’t realized it. That’s really hard to do — you need to be a little bit obsessive about certain subjects. For us, our ideal persona is either a VP of marketing or the head of BI, so I put myself in their shoes and actually go through the exercise of running the reports they need, looking for the data they need. That’s when I feel like I get a better understanding of that white space.
I also think there’s an idealized notion of what white space is. The marketing industry is changing all the time, so you have to constantly be reflecting and digesting all the changes that are happening for new opportunities to come up. That’s really what’s interesting and keeps us relevant — being able to stay on trend more than necessarily a magical white space. It’s about figuring out how the industry has changed and finding an opportunity that didn’t exist before.
Do your biggest wins come from solving entirely new problems, or from looking at a familiar problem through a different lens?
I think it’s from looking at the existing problem through a different lens.
Sometimes our CEO will get on a call with the randomest BI person from one of our customers, just because he liked the guy when he met him at a trade show or something. Then they start talking, and he’ll come up with this genius idea for something, a new way of tackling the same problem. And we take it and run with it.
There’s so much value in that, even though you’re rehashing and having the same conversation — and sometimes it’s very frustrating. But doing your best to have these conversations in a healthy way, one-on-one with people, getting their opinions on things and breaking thor input down over and over again, sometimes leads to really great ideas. You need to be patient.
When we hire for product, we look for people who have that mentality of how to tackle a problem, and then how to have a conversation around it, and how do you explain themself around it. That’s the skillset of a really good product manager — being able to not only define the problem, but also to have a dialogue and debate around it.
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