Gayle Laakmann McDowell

​Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the founder / CEO of CareerCup.com, a site dedicated to preparing for tech jobs.

She has performed hundreds of interviews as an employee at Google, coached numerous software engineering and product manager candidates, and helped many startups through their acquisition interviews with top tech companies.

Prior to CareerCup, she worked for Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Most recently, Gayle spent three years at Google as a software engineer, where she was one of the company’s lead interviewers and served on Google’s hiring committee. 

This is Gayle’s third book. Her first book, Cracking the Coding Interview, is a deep dive into coding interviews and is Amazon’s best-selling interview book. Her second book, Cracking the Tech Career,  is a comprehensive book offering advice on how anyone can prepare for a role at a top tech company. Gayle and Jackie's latest book is Cracking the PM Career.

Gayle holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School.

Jackie Bavaro

Jackie Bavaro is a product manager at Asana, a leading startup that builds the modern productivity software for teamwork without email used by companies such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber, Foursquare, and Pinterest. She joined as the company’s first product manager and she lead the team through their public launch, the launch of their premium product, and the launch of their product for larger teams. 

With over eight years of experience in product management, she has also worked as a product manager at Google and as a program manager at Microsoft. At Google, she joined as part of the elite Associate Product Manager (APM) program and worked on Google Search, where notably she launched Place Search - the first product to group web results around objects in the real world. At Microsoft, she worked in the Office group on Windows SharePoint Server where she launched blogs and wikis on the SharePoint platform.

Jackie has interviewed over 100 PM candidates in both phone screens and on-site interviews, reviewed many resumes, and sourced numerous candidates. She has advised many candidates on applying to become product managers and finding the right company, which was part of the inspiration for writing this book. 

More of Jackie’s writing about product management can be found on The Art of Product Management where she delves into topics like communication, building relationships with the team, and making data-driven decisions. 

Jackie graduated from Cornell University with a double major in Computer Science and Economics.