MARGARET HOLLENDONER
About Margaret
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Margaret is a Product Leader, Strategist and Coach with 20+ years of experience in Product Leadership and Executive Roles in the US and the UK.​
She led cross-functional product teams of over 100 people, across industries from consumer health to internal platforms to advertising. ​
She was a site leader in the Google London office, ensuring the tech culture thrived.
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She has mentored and advised dozens of other tech leaders and Product Managers from startups to large organizations, setting up resource groups including Managers of Product Managers to Women PMs in Europe. ​​​
And now, she is now fully committed to coaching leaders on the principles and anti-patterns that make up the Product-Operating model, to help them find their own way to empower technology teams across functions.
"Margaret is a terrific example of a strong, experienced product leadership coach. She spent nearly 20 years learning and developing her product skills in product management, product leadership, and more generally people leadership, mostly at Google. Now she applies what she has learned by working with product leaders across a wide range of industries to help them move to the product model. If you are looking for help in learning the product model and leading your organization through the necessary changes, Margaret would be a terrific partner."
- Marty Cagan, Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group
Born and raised in the UK, Margaret moved to California at age 18. She graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and then worked as an Applications Engineer in robotics before starting her second career in Product at Google.
Margaret learned Product during her nearly 20 years at Google in California and the UK, growing from an individual Product Manager into a Product Leader of increasingly larger teams - and facing all the challenges that transition brings.
She led teams of 100+ PMs, designers, engineers, clinicians, marketers and more, to conceive, develop, iterate, launch and land successful products across industries, covering B2B, B2C and Internal Products and Platforms. Her roles included successful product suites such as AdSense and Publisher Products, YouTube Video Measurement, and Google Fit (then Fitbit), as well as more obscure discovery and iteration projects such as bricks and mortar store offers, terrestrial TV measurement, medication management and more. She led teams at every stage - building new teams from scratch, inheriting and uplevelling dysfunctional teams as well as integrating acquired teams - always prioritizing the people and culture to ensure they built products that had an impact.
Margaret is passionate about the people, and as a leader of the Google London office, she also provided site wide mentorship and coaching, one-to-one with individuals across the tech organization, and through sponsoring and founding peer resource groups for Women Product Managers in Europe, as well as for Managers of Product Managers. She engaged in hiring strategy and decisions, apprenticeship programs, as well as diversity and inclusion efforts, always focussed on ensuring tech teams and individuals could innovate and thrive.
In 2023, Margaret decided to focus entirely on Product Leadership coaching - the part of her work she most enjoyed. Now, she’s a full time Product Leadership Coach, working with individual Product Leaders as well as whole teams and organizations, in start-ups, scale-ups and large companies, helping them adapt to scale and changing market dynamics or just to find their own product/market fit.
Margaret is based in the UK, just outside of London, where she lives with her husband, 2 teenage sons and her dog.
Margaret was featured as a model Product Leadership and Transformation coach in Marty Cagan’s latest book Transformed.
Read more about the Product Operating model and how Product Leadership coaches can help in TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model.​
"Written by best-selling author Marty Cagan and his partners at the Silicon Valley Product Group, TRANSFORMED is filled with real-world examples and proven, practical advice from their decades of experience helping companies move to the product operating model."