Product Management

Sara Beckman is an Earl F. Cheit Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business where she designs and delivers courses on design, innovation and product management and a Teaching Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department in the College of Engineering. Her 25 years of experience teaching design and innovation-related topics at the Haas School of Business culminated in creating a course, Problem Finding, Problem Solving, which draws from design thinking, critical thinking and systems thinking literature. That course is now offered to all business students at Haas, and prepares them both for their Applied Innovation projects as well as for their work in their own jobs.

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Her recent research focuses on the role of learning diversity on design teams, and on the pedagogy of teaching design. For the past two years, she leveraged her teaching and research experience in serving as the Chief Learning Officer of the recently founded Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation within University of California, Berkeley's College of Engineering. Sara directs the Product Management Program for the Berkeley's Center for Executive Education, serving 350 product managers from around the world each year. Before joining Berkeley-Haas, Sara worked in the Operations Management Services group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and ran the Change Management Team at Hewlett-Packard. Sara received her BS, MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management.

Steven Huff teaches marketing in the Executive MBA program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is also an Associate Professor of Marketing at Utah Valley University where he is co-creator of two novel programs: the first full digital marketing degree offered by a public university in the United States and a new MBA program that weaves the development of thinking, leadership, and interpersonal skills through every course in the curriculum.

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Steven is an expert in and regularly teaches graduate courses on marketing strategy, digital marketing, and creativity and problem solving. He has taught marketing for over fourteen years across four universities comprising over fifty courses and reaching over 2,000 students. He holds one teaching award from UC Berkeley and two university-wide teaching awards from Utah Valley.

In addition to his university teaching, he also actively engages in consulting and corporate education. His work has benefited a variety of companies from start-ups to small and medium-sized firms to multi-billion dollar businesses including 3M, Adobe, Intel, and Cisco. His current and former clients span multiple industries including medicine and healthcare, business intelligence, tax and audit, skin care, baby products, industrial equipment, servers and network equipment, mining, software, consumer services, and beverages.

Before entering the Ph.D. program at Berkeley, he worked as a computer engineer at L-3 Communications Systems-West, a major contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, and on the marketing team in the Network Equipment Division at Intel.

Awards & Honors

• 2014 UVU Wolverine Achievement Award: Faculty (Full-Time) of the Year (one award university-wide)
• 2013 UVU Alumni Association Educator of the Year (one award per school in the university)
• 2007 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, UC Berkeley
• 2006 AMA-Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow, University of Maryland

Homa Bahrami is an international educator, advisor, board member, and author, specializing in organizational flexibility, team alignment, and dynamic leadership in global, knowledge-based industries. She is a senior lecturer at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and a faculty director at the Haas Center for Executive Education, and has served on the Board of the Haas Center for Teaching Excellence.

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She is the co-author of a major textbook (with Harold Leavitt, Stanford University), ”Managerial Psychology: Managing Behavior in Organizations,” published by the University of Chicago Press, and translated into many languages. Her latest book, “Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises,” (second edition published by Springer and co-authored with Stuart Evans, Carnegie Mellon) focuses on practical approaches for strategizing, organizing, and leading knowledge workers based on their collective experience and field research in Silicon Valley during the past 30 years.

Bahrami has served on the boards of directors of three public technology companies and has been a member of all three board committees: audit, compensation, and governance. She is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors and is active in executive education and executive development in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Homa also co-creates impactful custom programs for our corporate, government, and university partners.

David Riemer is an Executive-in-Residence at the Berkeley Haas Business School. He is a former ad agency President and Internet marketing executive who now works with entrepreneurs, artists and students to focus their ideas. In short, he helps them get their story straight. He created Box Out Industries to work with entrepreneurs and Spiral Staircase to collaborate with artists. David is a regular speaker on innovation, entrepreneurship and storytelling throughout the Bay Area and internationally as well.

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David started his career as an Assistant Account Executive at J. Walter Thompson New York and eventually became President of JWT West. In 1998, he left advertising and brought his strategic and marketing leadership to two Internet start-ups – Quokka Sports and the FeedRoom. He later joined Yahoo! in 2002 as VP marketing. In various roles at Yahoo!, David led business-to-business and consumer marketing efforts across virtually all of Yahoo!’s products serving 500 million users globally. David holds an MBA from Columbia and BA from Brown University. He serves on the Board of the American Conservatory Theater and the Destiny Arts Center.

David Charron is a member of the professional faculty of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Mr. Charron has held several leadership positions at Haas, including Executive Director of the Berkeley Innovative Leadership Development Initiative (BILD) and Executive Director of the Haas School’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation program.

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At Haas, Mr. Charron teaches many MBA level courses including Business Model Innovation and Entrepreneurial Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Problem Finding Problem Solving, Case Studies in Entrepreneurship, Workshop for Startups and others. He is also active in executive education with the Venture Capital Executive Program, Bio-entrepreneurship and several innovation and leadership programs. Mr. Charron started UC Berkeley’s NSF I-Corps program as Faculty Lead and continues to teach scientists customer development skills through I-Corps.

Mr. Charron is an entrepreneur, having been a founder of Scientific Learning Corporation, the first successful neuroplasticity company. He has also started several other ventures and consults to startups, inventors and entrepreneurs. He has been an angel investor in several companies and is on the board of Impact Carbon, a non-profit developing carbon credit projects.

He has worked in and studied the field of technology commercialization and entrepreneurship for 25 years. Mr. Charron’s experience in this field has been at corporations such as Xerox PARC, academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF, and the national labs such as LBNL, LLNL and Sandia.

He has also been a principal member of the faculty team for Intel Corporation’s Global Technology Entrepreneurship Education project teaching international faculty how to teach entrepreneurship and create entrepreneurial ecosystems. With that program he has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

David Mok is the Senior Director of Pricing Strategy & Analytics at DePuy Synthes (a Johnson & Johnson company), leading the pricing function for a $1B business. He is currently working on improving price realization amidst industry health care reform in a recessionary environment.

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At Seagate, he managed the worldwide retail pricing team for Seagate's $1B branded storage solutions business. He helped turned a barely profitable situation into a strong and sustainable gross profit business within a year. During this time, the retail channel business attained the highest profit dollars and profit percentages in Seagate's branded solutions history, and sustaining near this level for his entire tenure.

Prior to Seagate, Mok was at Xilinx where he led transformational pricing efforts, deployed pricing software, architected the company's global pricing model, and developed pricing strategies across a broad spectrum of semiconductor, software, IP, products and services for a $2B business.

Mok has been speaking professionally on the subject of pricing at various conferences throughout the country. Mok began his career as a naval officer aboard a nuclear-power attack submarine where he conducted missions vital to the national security of the United States. He holds MBA, MS, and BS degrees.

Vince Law is a faculty member at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, focusing on MBA courses in Innovation & Design, with specific expertise in Product Development and Product Management. He is also an Adjunct Professor at California College of the Art's Design Strategy MBA program, with a teaching focus on Innovation.

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Vince's industry expertise include leading product teams, managing million-dollar product portfolios, and launching various enterprise and consumer products, most recently serving as the head of the Product Management team at General Assembly (acquired 2018). He has also spent years working in mobile industry, launching Apple and Android apps that achieved Top Grossing and Top Free App Store chart rankings. When Vince is not teaching, he is the Principal at his Product Strategy consultancy--as well as an Executive Coach for Product Leaders and Advisor to startups--helping a range of companies build better products across tech, media, CPG, real estate, and eCommerce industries.