July Lunch and Learn - PM with a Product and Value Mindset
Tuesday July 28th, 2026 @ 12:00PM
Abstract
Most products don't fail because the team executed badly. They fail because no one needed what got built. For project managers, that raises an uncomfortable question: are we managing the work well, or managing the right work at all?
This talk makes the case that project management, R&D, and process discipline earn their keep only when they serve product effect and the business case. Drawing on work at three stages of getting a product to the people who want it, a diagnostics startup, a research lab at Illumina, and manufacturing at scale at Tesla, Alex Moroz-Smietana traces where value gets created and where it quietly evaporates. Each stage closes with a tool you can apply to your own projects, from strategic positioning and customer discovery to the House of Quality, benefits realization, and impact mapping.
You will also leave with something more useful than a method: a way to earn a seat in the product conversation without waiting for the authority to be handed to you. Whatever your approach, predictive, agile, or hybrid, the filter is the same. What value does this create, and for whom?
About Your Speaker
Alex Moroz-Smietana is a systems engineering leader whose career traces the full path of getting a product to the people who want it, from an early-stage diagnostics startup, through research and development at Illumina, to manufacturing at scale at Tesla's Gigafactory. Across those stages his focus has held steady: keeping engineering, quality, and program decisions anchored to the value they are meant to create. He is known for leading cross-functional change through influence rather than formal authority, whether restarting a stalled field-failure program, turning around a production line, or reshaping how a research group defined a finished product.
He holds the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, is an INCOSE Certified Systems Engineering Professional and a Six Sigma Black Belt, and is completing a Master of Engineering in Systems Engineering at Cornell, with recent strategic management coursework at Harvard Business School. He serves as VP of Professional Development for the PMI Northern Nevada chapter.
Use the following to join the meeting on July 28th!
