Episode #26: Ebony Shears on Product Leadership at Forbes

Ebony Shears entered product management after a career that crossed banking, marketing, public relations, television production, video strategy, and independent consulting. Her first close exposure to a product team came while developing a video content strategy at a startup. That experience revealed a profession she wanted to understand more deeply, but she also recognized a gap between seeing product work from the outside and knowing how it actually operated.

In this conversation with Dwayne Samuels, Ebony explains why she completed an eight-week Product School program, accepted a project manager role at Forbes, and progressed to Vice President of Product. She also describes the operating cadence behind product leadership in a media company that has to keep adapting its audience, advertising, and consumer revenue models.

What you'll learn

• How adjacent experience can reveal a path into product without pretending the transition is automatic

• Why taking an apparent step back can create room for a larger career move

• How Forbes combined contributor scale, branded content, advertising, and consumer revenue initiatives

• What recurring leadership touchpoints give teams useful company context

• Why investing in strengths can produce a better return than trying to eliminate every weakness

Make a deliberate transition into product

Ebony's first product collaboration gave her enough information to be intrigued, not enough to assume she understood the role. Product School helped fill those gaps and connected her with Forbes. The open job was in project management, which initially felt different from the product direction she had expected. She also had not considered Forbes primarily as a digital company.

The interview process changed that view. Ebony saw a company already focused on innovation and digital transformation. She also accepted that changing disciplines might require a step back in title or trajectory before she could move forward. Joining as a project manager gave her an entry point, and she later advanced through the organization to lead the product team.

Her broader career principle is to identify both what she does well and what she enjoys, then use that understanding to choose the next move. The transition was not presented as a clean conversion of previous titles into a product title. It was a sequence of exposure, structured learning, honest recalibration, and internal growth.

Understand the business model around the product

Ebony sees media as a business that cannot stop reinventing itself. Publishers have to respond to what audiences want to consume and what advertisers want to buy. Forbes' long digital evolution included two consequential moves made before she arrived.

First, the company established a contributor network alongside its newsroom. Thousands of contributors gave Forbes the scale to cover many subject areas and bring in specialists who were not necessarily traditional journalists. Second, Forbes developed BrandVoice, a platform through which brand partners could publish content on the site.

Those foundations did not remove the need for ongoing product choices. The organization continued adjusting its contributor model, redesigning the site, improving user experience, and balancing programmatic advertising with directly sold, sponsored, and branded content. It later introduced a metered paywall, creating a major consumer revenue initiative alongside the print magazine.

That shift changed product thinking. An ad-supported publisher had historically been strongly sales-led, though not in the same way as a software company. Consumer growth required more marketing-led and product-led work. Product leadership therefore had to understand not just interface decisions, but how revenue sources and customer relationships were changing.

Create context through a leadership cadence

Ebony describes a team divided into four groups, each led by a director. Weekly one-on-ones with those directors, a biweekly directors meeting, a monthly full-team meeting, and quarterly skip-level conversations give her several views into the organization. Skip-level meetings can cover project challenges, stakeholder relationships, professional development, or the work of managing others.

Alignment across Forbes relies on similar consistency. Ebony maintains one-on-ones with stakeholders at weekly, biweekly, or monthly intervals. These conversations help her understand their priorities and upcoming work. She can then give her team context that individual product managers may not encounter in daily execution. Open communication with the chief product officer adds another source of company-level perspective.

The schedule involves many meetings, but the point is not ceremony. Each touchpoint reduces the distance between decisions, stakeholder needs, and the people doing the work.

Ebony closes with a distinctive view of weaknesses. Rather than spending heavily to turn every weakness into a strength, she prefers to play to what she does well and hire people who are strong where she is not. For leaders, that turns self-awareness into team design instead of an endless self-improvement project.

Listen to Episode #26 for Ebony's full account of career change, media product strategy, and leadership communication.